Playing '50s Housewife This Weekend
So far, my life has kind of been the antithesis of that of the sterotypical '50s housewife. I went to college, got a good job, took care of myself, put off having kids to have a career (well, actually what happened was a little more complicated than that...but that's another story), traveled, etc. etc. I married a pretty liberal man who is supportive of all that; he's also been in school for the past four years and I've been the primary breadwinner, which has worked out fine.
End of this week, my husband has a job interview out of state. (We haven't made any plans to move yet...we're just checking things out.) I'm going along as "the wife."
My job is to go to dinner with his potential boss Thursday night and be pretty and charming. While my husband's interviewing with people Friday, I'm going to ride around with a real estate agent looking at neighborhoods, potential houses for us, talking about schools for the kids, etc. It all feels so very retro, and so incredibly different from what I'm used to.
And you know what? I love it. I WANT to be the '50s housewife. I'd quit work when the kids came if I could (although we've decided it makes sense for me to work part-time from home, which I'm fine with.) I SO long for that life, maybe because I've never had it...or maybe because it's what I was meant to be doing all along and got monumentally sidetracked by all the messages I got growing up telling me that it was a waste of my time and intelligence to be a wife and mother; real women have careers and take care of themselves.
My husband and I are on the same page...we're working to make that more retro life (or a somewhat tweaked version of it) a reality.
This trip is kind of the first incarnation of that. This all feels so unreal. And makes me really happy.
XO
Image Credit: knowyourflo via Etsy.
Hi Everyone!
Wanted to post a brief follow-up here. My mom read something I wrote in this post and took it the wrong way, and I wanted to make sure to clear up any confusion.
I talked in this post about getting messsages from all around discouraging me from being a wife and mother and making family important, and instead being told that I should focus on a career and being able to take care of myself. And it's true I was told that over and over by my parents, my grandparents who were very influential in my life, the media, my peers, feminism that was so rampant at the time I went to college, etc.
But on the flip side, my mom made home and family and motherhood an absolute priority, and that's what I saw day-to-day growing up...she made a beautiful home for us...worked but just part time and only when we kids were older...had a good stable marriage to my father...put a nice cooked-from-scratch dinner on the table every night (plus breakfast and lunch)...did a lot to make holidays and family get-togethers special occasions. So I also had that influence, even while all the vocies around me were saying, "This is not something to aspire to."
Maybe having seen/grown up in a good happy home/family is what's made me yearn for it so badly all these years...