The Case for Housewives

First, there’s the challenge of picking up the husband’s socks from the floor, seeing to it that he has clean clothes at all times, and readying meals.  That’s no mean feat.

Housewives are easy to identify.  They are not employed for pay or profit.  Their occupation, which indeed has no pay or profit, is the domestic affairs of their households.  Note that it is an occupation, not an employment.

Housewives are defined too as married women in charge of the household, which puts them at a supervisory level in their occupation.  There is also the meaning of housewife as a verb, which is “to manage with skill,” making her no different from the corporate CEO.  Never mind its verb transitive meaning, which is “to economize”.  The meaning is supposed to be archaic. Perhaps the tribute is an oxymoron as some housewives tend to do the opposite.

It is a real division of labor, the husband declared before.  I do the earning while you do the spending.  He meant to make light of the truth:  that I could no longer hold an eight-to-five job.  The husband’s humorous turn was fine, but the thought that a chunk of my independence was being sacrificed at the altar of expediency was earth-shattering.  When I offered more resistance we both knew with words unsaid that I was battling for self-esteem.

Staying inside the house for days on end without missing anything of the outside world is more comforting than discomfiting, I must admit.  It’s just that I felt that I should earn my keep to give justice to my parents who supported my erratic education because, well, I was reading astrology and phrenology to keep from puking and crying because my classmates were dissecting frogs.  As for a career I could only dream about but could never have, yes, I once equated holding a job with self-actualization.

The husband helped a good deal there as the unwitting therapist. When I complained every so often, he always had words to set things right so I could see them in their proper perspective.

It’s not as if you have not experienced these things, he had said.  You’ve had your share of fulfillment in beating deadlines and getting promotions.  The downside is the stress and cynicism over office politics and their effect on our home life, and all for a few pesos more?  The words rang true when I found out later that simple math would show that I won’t make much of a difference in the coffers.  That’s after putting in the hours preparing for work, commuting, work clothes, taxes, and incidentals.

You can be creative anywhere, whatever you are, the husband said at another time.  I took him at his word and tried to be everything that caught my fancy.  I felt liberated sewing curtains, processing meat, experimenting with bread and cake recipes, practicing with three musical instruments, learning a new language, and reading anything I could lay my hands on, all in my own good time.

There were but two instances when the husband put his foot down on my plans.  The first was when I wanted to clean somebody else’s house and be paid the princely equivalent of 500 pesos an hour.  (Clean our house and I’ll pay you, he had said in pique.)  The other was when I wanted to be an extra, an anonymous face in a crowd scene, of a Philippine movie that was being filmed where we were.  (For all the trouble and the distance, only your hand may appear in the film, which will be edited out…)

With hardly time on his hands for leisure reading, the husband tasked me to give him a daily summary of world news, which I did with flair, complete with my own analysis and bias.  ‘This is not a movie production!’  I remember declaring when the 9/11 tragedy began to unfold on the television screen.

My acceptance of my fate was enhanced by a friend with whom I go back a long way.  Helen Sarigumba-Sarayno, who I wish to call Sars (culled from her maiden and family names) said in no uncertain terms in a call across the Atlantic that so many other women would want to be in my shoes.  She certainly had a way of making me feel good with positive reinforcement.  Yet being a housewife is to experience being told straightaway that one does not know anything.  Really.  Leave it to me to keep track of how many times (thrice) that same career woman smugly say it at my face, complete with the adjective plain, as in ‘You’re just a plain housewife, you don’t know anything.’

I bristled like a porcupine and would not have taken that sitting down, except that the husband had requested, nay, demanded of me, that for as long as my life and limb are not at stake I should hold my tongue.

For one thing, I’m more corrugated than plain, quite aware of the complex turns my mind and emotions take like most other humans.  My dream scenario in that situation was to tell her royal smugness that I would not want to change places with her, whose job is to count money which isn’t hers, and show her that I at least know Shakespeare’s alliterations.  Ahhh, inglorious female pride.

I settled with a feeble held-jobs-before, been-there-done-that answer and pointed out that I like what I am now because I don’t have to work for my next meal.  I now wonder which was worse, the dream scenario or the real one.

This goes without saying that women who are employed for pay are equally lucky.  Their case, as in the case for housewives, is a matter of liking what one is and taking it up from there.  At the end of the day, having the grace to know when to lower one’s bar spells the difference.  I do not write self-employed or businesswoman on the item for occupation in forms. Housewife is good enough.

(2005)