*This is reposted from a blog that Liz and I started last year and hoped to continue before life got too crazy. I’m posting it in hopes that it’ll inspire me to blog more and document my homemaking successes and more often, failures.
I recall one time shortly after Finn was born Patrick and I were sitting around filling out forms for something or other. On the box under my name that said “occupation” Patrick paused. “Homemaker?” he asked. I bristled. Seriously? Did he really think I just sat around all day keeping the house clean and his slippers ready by the door? I felt demeaned. I was NOT a homemaker. I have a degree from a good university and interests outside the shininess of my floor. I had a career before having Finn and planned to go back to that career when he was older. But what was my current occupation? I decided on “stay-at-home mom.” At least there was some dignity in that. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom ever since (or SAHM as the kids say).
Enter Radical Homemaking, a book by Shannon Hayes. Friends were talking about it a few weeks ago and I decided to pick it up. The subtitle is “Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture.” Intriguing. I read the first few pages and was hooked. The author is interviewing a homemaker, a women with a Ph.D. who is agonizing over whether to continue on a career track or become a homemaker, her real desire. She voiced the question that has been floating in my mind for years:
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