Interesting reading for just mothers out there:
The part that hit home for me:
...Hirshman is right about a lot of things. Yes, domestic work--even caring for cherubic children--is often boring, repetitive, demeaning, unfulfilling, isolating. Yes, my financial future has become unquestionably less secure, my future employment prospects dimmer, than if I had always worked full time. And, perhaps worst of all, I find I am now the primary caretaker of the butter."Never figure out where the butter is," Hirshman warns--her metaphor for "never take primary responsibility for managing the household." It's based on a passage by writer Nora Ephron in which a man opens the fridge and asks his wife where the butter is, while looking directly at it.
"'Where's the butter?' actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we're out of butter," Hirshman writes, paraphrasing Ephron. "Next thing you know you're quitting your job at the law firm because you're so busy managing the butter."
Staying home with my children required me to morph into a reluctant household manager, responsible for most of the quotidian details of family life: shopping for birthday presents and school supplies, arranging to get the dishwasher fixed and the taxes prepared, making school lunches and remembering which kid won't eat ham and which won't eat turkey, keeping track of appointments and playdates and Little League games and the never-ending flow of school papers … countless tasks, tiny and thankless and so nearly invisible that the only time they even enter my husband's consciousness is when I forget to do them.
ooohhh....quotidian details....that phrase makes me tingly.
Posted by Jen at November 12, 2006 9:39 AM