Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, Cheryl Mendelson (Scribner, 1999). A couple of months ago, a nice young man asked me to write something about being a SAHM. I’ve been home with my kids since my eldest was born more than a decade ago and I seemed (he said) to be pretty happy. Yet somehow, none of the nice young women he knew considered it a live option for their futures. It wasn’t that they’d considered it and decided it wasn’t for them; they just seemed to assume it couldn’t possibly be satisfying. I, obviously, think it is. What’s up with that?
Alexi and I try to make a habit of telling each other about the smaller, hidden bits of maintenance (e.g. the perennial wet swiffering of the floor, erased by the time he's home; unpacking and rearranging the boxes in the storage room). Because it would be easy to not notice them, and we try to tell and receive them not as a "Because you never notice" and more as a "I know you wouldn't want to miss the chance to be happy about this" and that's mostly where we land!
I love this book! I bought it when it came out in 1999 and it’s on my shelf right now.
As I’ve suffered through a debilitating illness over the last year, I’ve been grateful for the slack in our household system—slack which is only available because my husband and I made the choice for me not to work outside the home. Giving ourselves that space is, in my opinion, another good reason for one person to opt out of a “typical” employment track.
I have suspected for a long time that the reason it feels like everything is falling apart is that we have spent the past 50 years wringing out every bit of "slack" in our systems--domestic, family, business, health care, social services, transportation....you name it. Corporations have been mercilessly paring away extra capacity--both human and non-human---in order to maximize shareholder value. We're seeing what happens when there's no more fat to cut--you get a very fragile system where one interruption creates a cascade effect and a lot of stuff breaks.
There is a lot of hand wringing about the "daycare crisis" and the coming crisis in which massive number of elders need care and there is nobody to do it. The problem is that the kind of intimate and intermittent care that both kids and elders need is just not scalable. It makes no sense to go to a job and earn a paycheck only to turn around and spend said paycheck on paying somebody to take care of your kids while you are earning the paycheck and to pay somebody to take your mom to the doctor because you are at work and can't do it yourself. You're just on a treadmill trading dollars and you don't have much to show for it other than a hectic life where everything seems rushed and you spend your evenings doing laundry and ordering groceries online rather than reading to your kids or helping them build legos.
Anyway--great essay and thank you for expressing this valuable work in terms of quality of life.
Alexi and I try to make a habit of telling each other about the smaller, hidden bits of maintenance (e.g. the perennial wet swiffering of the floor, erased by the time he's home; unpacking and rearranging the boxes in the storage room). Because it would be easy to not notice them, and we try to tell and receive them not as a "Because you never notice" and more as a "I know you wouldn't want to miss the chance to be happy about this" and that's mostly where we land!
I love this book! I bought it when it came out in 1999 and it’s on my shelf right now.
As I’ve suffered through a debilitating illness over the last year, I’ve been grateful for the slack in our household system—slack which is only available because my husband and I made the choice for me not to work outside the home. Giving ourselves that space is, in my opinion, another good reason for one person to opt out of a “typical” employment track.
I have suspected for a long time that the reason it feels like everything is falling apart is that we have spent the past 50 years wringing out every bit of "slack" in our systems--domestic, family, business, health care, social services, transportation....you name it. Corporations have been mercilessly paring away extra capacity--both human and non-human---in order to maximize shareholder value. We're seeing what happens when there's no more fat to cut--you get a very fragile system where one interruption creates a cascade effect and a lot of stuff breaks.
There is a lot of hand wringing about the "daycare crisis" and the coming crisis in which massive number of elders need care and there is nobody to do it. The problem is that the kind of intimate and intermittent care that both kids and elders need is just not scalable. It makes no sense to go to a job and earn a paycheck only to turn around and spend said paycheck on paying somebody to take care of your kids while you are earning the paycheck and to pay somebody to take your mom to the doctor because you are at work and can't do it yourself. You're just on a treadmill trading dollars and you don't have much to show for it other than a hectic life where everything seems rushed and you spend your evenings doing laundry and ordering groceries online rather than reading to your kids or helping them build legos.
Anyway--great essay and thank you for expressing this valuable work in terms of quality of life.