Skip to main content

The Paradox of Being a SAHM - Am I a Housewife or Part 1

When I was growing up, our mothers either worked outside the home or were "housewives". Regardless of what else they did with their time, the general expectation was that mothers were the main caretakers of their household and by inclusion, children while fathers played featuring roles as either chief disciplinarian just wait till your father gets home, chief maker of fun because he was driven mad by guilt for being away from his family, or that guy who hogs the TV when he is at home.

Over the years there has been growing discomfort about the term, 'housewife'. We've seen variations like home manager, homemaker, and more recently, the exceedingly annoying 'stay-at-home-mom' or SAHM. If I were your mom, I'd be your mother. It's not like these women are distributing business cards. Why bother with a designation?

As more mothers started participating in the corporate workforce hurrah for liberalisation and globalisation, suddenly, there was a monetary value attached to their corporate work. Non-remunerative housework could now be outsourced, thanks to her monetary addition to the household income. For all its flaws, one of the greatest things about living in India is that you can pay anyone to do anything for you.

In a curious turn of events, it went from, yay! it is now socially acceptable for women to add to the household income, to a dissatisfied, well, if she can afford to pay all these people to do her work for her, why isn't she contributing monetarily to the household income? 

That managing these service providers continues to be the woman's headache is something I'm still trying to understand. If I ever figure it out, I'll post it here.

Am I a Housewife?

I started thinking about this when I had to tick the box for housewife as my occupation while renewing my passport last year. I realised that I associate that word with an educated but unread woman who spends all day in a nightie, stuck at home because she happened to make babies with a man her parents picked for her to marry and who doesn't speak English.

It's okay for her to be a "housewife" but how could I possibly be one?

But it's not like these housewives don't love their families. They also cook, clean, and do the all-important job of maintaining a home life. The only thing I really do in the house is organise and stock the pantry.
My main job right now is being a mother. I do it with the same kind of passion as an ambitious office-goer who works 18-hour days so that he can become CEO 6-months earlier than his college friends. I do it because I want to be the 'best' at it whatever that means.

I wondered if the "housewife" felt this way about being a mother. She obviously loves her kids but does she yearn to be a fantastic mother? When she is responsible for the upkeep of the house, is her child just one more thing she needs ticked off her list? Cue the housewife's maternal guilt.

This then got me thinking about my desperate need to be the best mother on the block. We have people helping us out with cooking, cleaning, and laundry, so I'm more of a home manager - managing these people and keeping inventory for all the supplies these people need.
It's not like there is a tangible incentive to out-mothering everyone else. But I realised that I had to justify to myself, more than anyone else, why I wasn't working in an office and contributing monetarily to the household income.

When in doubt, I turn to Google and reading about the evolution of parenting lead me to a book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. I've only read a few chapters but in this book. the author, Jennifer Senior, attributes the reclassification of 'housewife' to 'stay-at-home-mom' to changing social priorities, from managing a house to managing your children.

Or doing both and making an art form of it. As my Pinterest boards will tell you.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dealing With Baby's First Cold

E caught her first cold on 14/09/2014. From me. I did everything I could to protect her from my illness my hands were raw from washing . Still, she woke up with a runny nose on that fateful Sunday morning. I messaged E's paediatrician who recommended that I give E half a dropperful of T-minic drops, two times a day. T-minic apparently eases symptoms such as a runny nose, stuffy nose, and sneezing !  Generally mistrustful of medical practitioners, I quickly Googled, 'T-minic.' Which was just as well, because  the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) advises parents to refrain from administering cold and cough medicine to infants below the age of 2 . The active ingredients in T-minic are chlorphenamine maleate makes a person sleepy and phenylephrine hydrochloride a decongestant , both of which are contraindicated by the USFDA for infants under the age of 2. After having conducted research on usage of such medication, the USFDA found that that reports of harm to ch...

Anthe

 I started this weblog as exactly that, a web log of E’s growth from birth. I’ve chronicled her introduction to life, sleep ( here and here ), food ( here and here ), and play ( here ) in these sites and I am grateful to have had the time to make this. There is a gap where I haven’t chronicled her toddler-hood; ages 3 onwards. I stopped for two reasons: I sounded like a sanctimonious twat (excuses for same here and here ) I didn’t think I was a good parent anymore because E’s father and I separated. Mommy blogging is sanctimonious bs. The truth is that none of know what the fuck is going on and we’re all just trying to get to the end of the day with some of our sanity intact. Some days are great, some days are awful but mostly it stays at an average mean and we wipe our brows, call it a day, and get ready for the next. Babies change as they grow into children. Toddlerhood is that in-between. E learned about divorce just as her language skills were developing. She understood our ...

The In-Arms Sleeper's Conversion To An In Bed Sleeper - Update #1

Okay. So my last post on baby sleep  happened around a week ago. Since then, I've logged E's sleep and I've also seen (with much delight) how she's "consolidating" her sleep as promised by Dr. Weissbluth. The Sleep Logs Over the last week, I've been logging her daytime sleep in the attempt to convert her from a sneaky in-arms cat napper (30 mins every 60 to 90 mins) to a big girl who takes big naps in her big bed. My husband made me a Google Spreadsheet that I could update on my phone to log sleep start and end times, and also measure the time from when she last awoke to when she went back to sleep. This helped me gauge the times when she gets really sleepy. As of now - she gets really sleepy about an hour after she wakes up (around 8 AM) and then 11:15 AM (yeah, it's that precise) and then around 5 PM (her shortest nap and she doesn't really want to nap but I insist because otherwise it's a nightmare getting her to go to sleep at bedtim...