When I sent Himself an email at work Monday his vacation auto-reply was still on. There were eight categories of topics and five people whom could be contacted on the different matters for which he is responsible. (NPAP’s, STAR’s transfer pricing / Equities transfer pricing? Uh, okay). When he made his usual post-lunch call yesterday he apologized for the lateness of it as he’d been ‘running around’. It’s what he usually says when I ask him what he did at work that day. If he did go in to detail I would just have to do a lot of nodding, interested looks and appropriate murmurs of understanding (a useful skill I learned from observing fellow Corporate Wives when we were at work-related functions during the Asia stint). When he asks me what I did that day, my answer is usually ‘this and that’, followed by a bit of detail on the main this or that if I think it might interest him. I get a nod or two, occasionally asked for clarification or if I had remembered to also do such and such on The List. Then we are done unless I bring anything else up regarding domestic matters on which I need his input. Filtering, y’all: if you can’t do it, don’t get married. He assumes I take care of my obligations just as he takes care of his.
Women on the whole are kinda crap at compartmentalizing. I think too many thoughts all at once, though that might be my genes (yes, I have just spent a few weeks around my family), not just the hormones. We are slaves to both – and to family if you let it be that way — but we are also the masters of ourselves. In the end, you are in control. Women should not try to be men and men certainly should not try to be like women. We. Are. Not. Equal. Equal would mean everybody can do everything. Everybody cannot (and that would be why feminism doesn’t work so good). Once you figure that out, your life gets a lot better and I am glad to have been in this camp for some time.
Sometimes I go off the rails a little and wrong thinking slips into my head. Jewellery orders and requests for my sewing skills have poured in these past 24 hours so I had a brief trip down the ‘maybe I should pursue these things with more dedication’ route. Don’t get me wrong – I am always very flattered that folk like my designs. The teeny part of me that is still partly feminist kinda likes making my ‘own’ money: it is my guilty pleasure, like eating a half roll from the box of Thin Mints that my sister gave me last month. There is also a certain delight in charging people for simple alterations and dressmaking – a skill that uneducated women have honed forever and which so many modern women disdain until they need something made or fixed – but that is rather mean and ungracious so I should work on that.
Himself is very good at shutting one door and moving into the next room and I am trying to learn from him. He lets work go the moment he walks out of the office and that is what I need to work on. This skill does not strike me as something that should belong to one sex or the other. It strikes me as practical for the smooth running of one’s life. Perhaps a couple days without my Better Half, who is away this morning for the rest of the week on business, is not such a bad thing. I can get my head right for his return. For someone who goes off to work everyday without complaint and is so much a master of his world I can do no less.
I know that many people are amused at my choice to be a housewife. ‘How hard can that be?’ I was once asked. (I was also once asked if I was BORED during the day, to which I replied only boring people get bored). Doing the job right IS hard if you take the role seriously – that is to say it isn’t something that you have to reluctantly fit in around your other obligations. So long as the jewellery making, alterations, and other odd assorted jobs I take on don’t get in the way of my REAL job I should be okay. Better than okay.
You do as you like.
The International Woman Of Mystery 