The Diary of a Happy Housewife

When people ask me what I do, I get a certain perverse thrill from telling them I’m a housewife.

The term is so politically incorrect, so unspeakably bourgeois. Most people aren’t quite sure how they should respond to it. In the beginning, I used housewife because words such as homemaker and full-time mother sounded like euphemisms.

After a while, though, I discovered that housewife is provocative and leads to some interesting discussions about modern motherhood.

As far as I can tell, the experience of being a mother today is clouded with insecurity, anger and guilt. I’ve had working women tell me that they could never be housewives; they’d be bored to death. (Translation: I’m too intelligent to squander my talents on children.)

I’ve had a working father with an infant in day care yell at me, “What makes you think you can do a better job than a day-care center?” (Translation: I feel threatened by your decision to stay home.)

One woman said to me--and it was clearly meant to be taken as a compliment--”You just don’t seem like a housewife to me.”

This edginess works both ways. Sometimes I’m the one who gets defensive, and I feel an urge to whip out my feminist credentials, or mention that before I had kids I was a newspaper reporter. (Translation: I used to be a person who mattered, like you; now I spend my time with children.)

In the subculture of housewives I belong to, women say things they would never say in a group of non-housewives. One mother staying at home, a former editor for a publishing company, confided at a play group that she “just couldn’t be friends” with a mother who worked.

A friend of mine, a former schoolteacher, once told me over the phone, “Our kids are just going to turn out better, and that’s the bottom line.” (I felt envious: Why couldn’t I be so certain?)

This ongoing underground war over motherhood reached a new low for me last year, after Wellesley College invited Barbara Bush to be guest speaker at its graduation.

In response to the controversy that followed over inviting a mere wife to speak, the newspaper in that university town ran a page of letters to the editor from mothers who wrote to justify their decisions.

Housewives defended their contribution to society and described long, tedious days of laundry, cooking and picking up, which they did thanklessly, nurturing not only their own children but the neighbor kids, too. Working mothers wrote to say that in spite of the fact that they did two shifts--one at the office, the other at home--they spent quality time with their children, who benefited greatly from having moms who work instead of drudges without lives of their own.

I suppose mothers divide themselves into two camps as a defense against the terrible uncertainties of parenthood.

In no area of life is there greater potential for sorrow, and we all look for assurances, some guarantee that somehow we really will do a better job than a day-care center, or that when we quit our jobs and stay home, our husbands won’t run off and leave us penniless, or that if we wean our infants at eight weeks and return to work, we won’t miss anything, or that whatever we do, the children won’t end up in San Quentin.

My own mother was one of the biggest gamblers I know--she was the mother of 12. My childhood memories are of a small, animated, funny woman given to slapstick humor, trailed constantly by a plague of children and an enormous German shepherd.

Last year, I flew across the country to visit her after her second round of chemotherapy. At first, I did not know her; the cancer had made her so tiny, I thought she would fit into a teacup. She wore a pink terry-cloth turban to hide her hair loss and held a white toy poodle in her arms, company for her since my father died.

We sat on the floral sofa in her unfamiliar little rented house and picked through the chocolates I gave her. I brought out photos of my daughter and son, and she took them from me eagerly, raving about the beauty of those two grandchildren as if she didn’t have 17 others that she adored.

She looked at one photograph of my two preschoolers in their sunny back yard as if she wanted to climb right into it.

“I sure enjoyed you kids when you were little,” she said, her eyes still on the picture.

Maybe that’s what really bothered me about all those letters to the newspaper--nobody wrote in to say how much they enjoyed their children.

In spite of the perils, raising children is the ultimate in emotional and spiritual entertainment, but I’m not sure anyone appreciates that anymore--we’re all too busy feeling exhausted, taken for granted or feeling guilty.

I’m especially puzzled by my housewife colleagues who presumably have the freedom to do as they please. I think they describe their lives as pure drudgery to keep one of the world’s biggest secrets: Staying home with children is often fun, and even when it isn’t, at least you have the satisfaction of calling all the shots.

I don’t want to be a housewife all my life, but as a temporary gig, it’s OK. I think more men should try it, too.

In the six years I’ve been home with my two children, I’ve sometimes been wistfully envious of my friends who work--their smart career clothes, their promotions, the fact that they have furniture.

I’ve been haunted at times by the possibility that I would regret taking these years away from my career. Now that my son is 3 and I’m taking my first steps back into the world of employment, my only regret is that I didn’t savor my time with them more.