Saturday, May 7, 2011

Two Jobs And Not Enough Time

A wife wears many hats, especially if she works outside the home. She works inside it as a given. That is her first and always-primary job. Household management is intelligent labor; it requires planning, ordering, purchasing, delivering, and cleaning, among other services not rewarded monetarily. And that is WITHOUT kids. With kids, it goes beyond full-time fast, and in the early months beats the medical resident's hours at their worst.
To ask us to work outside the home is hardly modern, as women have often worked the fields and served alongside men in various capacities. But the modern insistence that the woman is equivalent to a man and thus can ignore the home duties or leave them to paid substitutes is perilous. Who can afford to pay others in these economic times? So we struggle to meet expectations ourselves, and the dust bunnies gather.
I have two jobs and not nearly enough time to do them justice.