I've been seeing alot of articles online about how useless housewives are in the present day. According to many, housewives are portrayed as lazy, tv-watching, free-loading, frumpy women who also happen to be needy because of our never-ending boredom. Classy women wouldn't even be bothered by such nonsense, but maybe I'm not so classy. Since we all know that we are strongly influenced by the media we feed to our face everyday, and ideally we would think for ourselves, unfortunately...we are human beings and therefore more often than not, we listen to everybody else rather than determine of our own accord what is fact or fiction. The only reason I feel compelled to vent these frustrations, is that I know multiple times I myself have been compared to these standards of productivity. So to put my mind at ease about myself and all the other housewives of the world, let me spell it out very clearly what we, or atleast, what I do throughout my day.
I won't lie, much of my day is spent surfing the net, watching a movie, completing some random and non-important task, or even sitting on the couch doing absolutely nothing. But I would also like to elaborate on these things.
While net-surfing, yes I often check my email or read news articles about various things, but I also spend much time looking at other things. You will often catch me on babycenter.com where I am looking up tips on how to feed my 8 month old, or how to relieve a baby's cold, etc. You will also find me digging through recipes on the food network, constantly looking for new meals to try out on my family where we would otherwise be eating the same thing over and over or feeding on low-nutrition processed meals from the frozen food section. Facebook is an addicting thing, but if I didn't do it, our curious family and friends in the U.S. would probably have no idea how things were going for us here in Japan where our family has chosen to live for awhile. Everyday I am reading news articles not only to suffice my own curiosity but so that when my husband gets home from work, we will have something interesting to talk about other than our child or how our day was spent.
And yes, I do watch some movies for my own pleasure when the baby takes a nap, but mostly we watch Baby Einstein and children's movies. I also spend much time on the couch where I let my baby crawl all over me as we have multiple conversations about absolutely nothing. Much of my time throughout the day is sitting on the floor playing with my baby by tickling, or singing, or reading from his books and exploring his toys with him.
In the midst of taking care of the baby and meeting those what I call "Domestic Research Activities", I still find time to clean the house, make the meals, get a shower, and doing something for myself to relieve my sanity. Somehow all these things add up to a full day. So yes, if I were to summarize my day for you I would say I watched movies, played with toys, surfed the net, ate some food, took my shower and what an exhausting day of work it was.
I believe this is a typical schedule for most housewives and though we may not always accomplish all of these things in one day, these are still our assigned duties that do not end at 5 o'clock, Monday through Friday. Our work-day never ends. We are always on-call 24-7 to meet the needs of our family. If it weren't for the housewife, the husband would come home to chaos. I'm not trying to prove to people that I'm Supermom, only that housewives have a much bigger burden than people give us credit for.
If all of us "homely" women-folk had educations, maybe people would look at us differently, like we were doing the noble thing. But myself, not having an education, this job is what I am qualified for and I believe if they made motherhood a competitive field in the workforce there would be more female executives than all the Fortune 500 companies put together. We may not be paying our dues to society by certain standards, but we are paying our dues to our children and meeting their needs in ways that no other would be able to. Nobody can do our job the way we do, we are fabulous and a force to be reckoned with. Our home is our company, and we are running it like the meticulous workings of a dual core processor, fulfilling many tasks at the same time.
So to the men (or women) out there who would ridicule us, while you are out doing your job, remember.....when you get dressed in the morning and put on that clean shirt, or come home and sit on your nice clean toilet seat, or take that relaxing shower and not have to look at the mold, or eat that homemade meal, don't forget who made that possible for you.
Well put! xox
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