Haus-frau happiness

They told me I would become a doormat. They told me it was a thankless job — almost a non-job. They told me my brain would slowly shriv...

They told me I would become a doormat. They told me it was a thankless job — almost a non-job. They told me my brain would slowly shrivel and die. They told me I would be an intellectual nonentity. They told me nobody can have a career in homemaking. They told me in no uncertain terms that I was the stupidest individual around of the feminine kind who had no sense in her head for throwing up a ‘good job’. and deciding to stay at home where there were no perks, no fringe benefits, no bonus, no superannuation, no paid leave, no nothing — only a steady stream of headaches and more headaches.

The best part was it was not just my kind friends who tried to avert this disaster in my life. My mother, in her quiet way, implied that it was the most brainless thing I was doing. Being at home means learning to live along with oneself. And I liked to have a thousand people around me at all times. I had never handled aloneness before.

My boys left threatened. To have a mother flapping around them after all these years of independence was not exactly their idea of an ideal life. The newspaper representing my husband’s opinion with its own uncomfortable crackles, shrugged in a non-committal sort of way. I could smell doubts hanging in the air. The family for whom I was leaving the life I had grown to love, for whom I planned to spare more time, to whom I longed to grow close after all these years, did not exactly jump for joy at the prospect of having me around. I saw my boys exchange apprehensive looks.

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Whatever they said or felt — I had decided. Nothing and no one could change the plans I had made for myself. The world had called and I just could not deny it. I wanted to experience the great outdoors. I had to live before I died.

It is six years now since I gave up my life on the road. I have baked, grilled and toasted. I have cooked, washed and cleaned. I have spent hours watching the sun rise and dot the forehead of the earth. I have sat and talked to my boys and my husband into the wee hours of the morning, with no fear of the morrow. I have laughed, cried and lived with a passion as never before. I have learnt to be around without stepping on toes, without disrupting the disorder in my family’s life, without making myself seen or heard, adding a little live here, a little quality there. I do not get a cheque at the end of the month, my payment is at the end of each day, when they lean upon me to ease their fatigue. It has been a life of many splendours.

Once in a while it is wise to listen to the whispers of the heart.