I grew up in the era when homemakers were proud women who took care of their families needs, cooked, cleaned, and made sure their husbands had delicious coffee to drink and "no dirty rings" around their shirt collars.
I remember my mom standing in our 1970s sunkin family room with the orange, black & brown shag carpet at the ironing board, ironing clothes while watching soap operas, the Watergate Hearings, and news, which when I was kid was a lot like an episode of G.I. Joe. Vietnam was raging, and every night on the news was like the opening of M.A.S.H., with helicopters whirring and young boys in fatigues running around.
My household is very different then that. My ironing board has never been in my living room, and in fact I have one that comes out of the wall in my laundry room, but I've never really used it. I send my husband's shirts to the dry cleaners or he takes care of them himself. I used to think I was pretty good at doing laundry, but after yesterday, I've decided differently.
In one fell swoop, yesterday I ruined my youngest son's entire "wardrobe." Fortunately that consists of t-shirts, but yesterday every one of his shirts ended up looking like something those guys on TV when I was a kid were wearing. Camo.
Now, how did I do that? Halloween actually did it to me. A week or two before Halloween the kids and the neighbor kids had been up in our attic digging around. They found my husband's hunting gear, which hasn't been used in at least 17 years, and adopted a pair of camo coveralls and the camo face paint for part of their Halloween festivities.
Sadly, the coveralls were in Dill's laundry, and the face paint was in the pocket of the coveralls, and I threw the whole mess in with about a dozen of his most favorite t-shirts and some other clothes. The best example of what happened is shown in the photo above.
Now I've been known to wash money, wallets, ipods, and telephones, because my children don't know how to clean out their pockets. If I'm picking laundry up off the bathroom floor, I rarely take the time to check all the pockets. You would think I would have learned, but I tend to be a slow learner when it comes to these types of chores.
Anyway, after four washings, the color still hasn't come out of most of the shirts. I plan to buy some of that OxiClean that guy screams about on TV to see if it will help, and if not, Dill will get a new "wardrobe" at Hollister this weekend.
Sometimes I wish times were different and I could focus solely on the chores of motherhood and wifedom. Instead, I have to make money every month to help keep this relatively crazy household afloat. Since I don't have what you might call a "real job," and haven't for more than a dozen years, I have to do that basically out of thin air every single month. To say that's pressure is an understatement. The fact that I'm even trying to do laundry at the same time should score me some points. But it doesn't. The kid with the ruined t-shirts (his favorites) gives me no points at all.
My neighbor who is almost 90 speaks of raising her kids and of the "help" she had. She had a full-time housekeeper and someone to tend to her four kids. She didn't work, but her husband was in the oil business and owned a company that did quite a bit of entertaining. Her job was the entertaining. She tells me that before he got home from work all the kids were scrubbed and clean, with combed hair. She had on a nice dress, make-up and pearls. Boy, is my house different than that.
When my husband gets home I'm usually still working. If it's a particularly busy day, it's quite possible I have on sweats and a make-up free face. If the kids are home, they certainly aren't scrubbed and clean either, and if it's toward the end of the week, it's rare that there are even groceries in the house, let alone dinner in the oven or on the table. The table is where the mail gets dumped, and where school books and backpacks and purses and other junk resides. I clean it off a couple times a week and we try to sit there and eat a few times every week, but most of the time we're running around to sports events, hockey practices, or I'm playing tennis. A lot of nights it's "fend for yourself" time with regard to food, or we're handing the kids money to go to town for pizza or burgers or Subway.
I gave up a while ago trying to be the perfect homemaker. Over the years I've been through spurts of having "help," and it was the best money I think I ever spent. I had a nanny when the boys were infants, and a sitter who spent the night when they were toddlers and pre-school age, back when I was in corporate and we had evening events to attend as part of my job. I have had cleaning ladies who kept my house looking spotless. But with the changes in the economy and the added expense of a son playing hockey, declining investments, and college looming on the horizon, I cut out a lot of the "extras" that I thought I could live without.
But after ruining my son's wardrobe yesterday and looking around my house, I think I need to reconsider. I need household help. I used to feel guilty being home, sitting at the computer while the cleaning ladies were working so hard, so I would leave and go work out. That made me feel even guiltier. But as I look at my mess of a house, and the ruined laundry, and the dirty dishes, I think I need to get some help once again.
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