I Say Housewives Have the Best of It

LUKY;
SOME TIME AGO A FRIEND OF MINE gave up her well paid job as a Nursing Sister to become full time mother to her young children.
Her colleagues could not understand why she left work. Among her employers her work was highly thought of, and she had been working for years.
However, my friend felt her children needed her and so, from the month her husband paid off his prestige car, she stayed at home.

Full time
At first she loved being a full time housewife. She went on diet and did lovely things to her face and hair. She spring-cleaned her house, planted flowers in the garden, crocheted and knitted, sewed new curtains and bed-spreads, baked rusks, fudge, biscuits and pancakes for her offspring and spent entire afternoons talking to them and checking their homework.

A year later she still performed these tasks, but her erstwhile euphoria had worn thin.
"At the hospital", she said, "the patients, nurses and doctors had respect for the opinion of nursing sisters like myself.
For instance, if we organised rounds for 8am, our request would not have been disregarded.
I suppose my position of leadership may have turned my head a little, but I do feel that at home things are too bad. Not even the dog listens to me there."

Cry from the heart
Any full time housewife can identify with this woman's cry from the heart. Yet my friend had to learn, as did the rest of us, that it is only a privileged handful of us who can manage to stay at home.
So we do feel frustrated and depressed at times: what of it? Life can be a valley of tears from time to time, whether you view it from a classroom, a hospital ward, a scientific laboratory or a kitchen window.
It is the housewives, moreover, who have the best of it.

This fact was brought home to my ungrateful heart by a friend who went back to work after twelve years at home.
On the day before she was due to start work, she said to me mournfully:
"I was hanging out my washing for the last time this morning, and I thought how dreadful it will be to miss the smell of lovely clean laundry."
"Never mind", I consoled her. "At least you'll get a smell of lovely dirty money now. I wish I could change places with you."
I didn't really mean it, you know. I was old and hopefully wise enough by then to realise that the grass is always greener on the other side, and that this is the reason why working wives and the stay-at-homes sometimes wonder about each other.

Motherhood and marriage
So each time I reflected on my stenographic skills as opposed to my utter inability to bake a sponge cake - unless it's one of those packet affairs you mix with a couple of eggs - I shrugged my shoulders and told myself:
"You chose marriage and motherhood at the time when your job was going well, and you were only too glad to do so. Why can't you be grateful now for your protected and privileged position of wife and mother?"