Irritated SAHM/housewife has something polite to say.

The BBQ Pit
1

Maybe, since I intend to say this politely, this thread should go into MPSIMS. I’ll leave that to the moderators, if they want to move it.

Lately I have seen a few threads (no, not gonna post cites, because I am NOT interested in slugging it out with anyone) referring to folks like me in not-very-nice terms.

I am a stay-at-home mom. I am, and I admit to saying this with a slight cringe, a HOUSEWIFE. Yes, I also work out of my home on a part-time basis (at two different jobs), and I deliver newspapers at four-damn-a.m. to help pay bills. But you know what?

I also have a college degree, and I taught in a public school for ten years. I also have logged a lot of hours at a shelter for abused women. I also am a soon-to-be-published poet, with a five-page spread in what is known to be a pretty darn good literary publication, from what I understand. (See Wind…the next edition, I believe.)

So. Just because a woman stays at home and spends her hours keeping a decent house, taking care of children, shuttling babies back and forth to doctor’s appointments, meeting the sewer-repair guy, repainting the living room, shopping at Aldis so she can afford to raise her kids (look at a public school forum sometime, and what do you see? “Why don’t parents RAISE their children instead of expecting the schools to do it???”), paying her bills, cooking from scratch, taking care of the pets, getting the car serviced, and trying to keep things a little less chaotic for the people most important to her, these activities and lifestyle choices ** NOT make her bored, silly, uneducated, incompetent, or worthy of unkind labels.**
FTR:
I do NOT watch Oprah, or any daytime tv. In fact, I don’t watch tv at all, unless it’s a movie–and most of our movies have funny little characters in fuzzy costumes with one-syllable names.
I do read books. Lots of them, when I have time, although with four kids ranging in ages from 9 months to 15 years, it gets a little busy around here. But I CAN read, even big words.
I am not a bored housewife, I am not a hausfrau, and I am not desperately unhappy with my life.
I do NOT eat chocolates during the day, unless there are only a few left and I don’t want the older children arguing about them after school.
I AM happy with my choices. I have the full support of my husband and family, and oddly enough, most complete strangers…although some of these same people will, in the next breath, say things like “Well, it’s not like you WORK,” or happily generalize about what we “bored housewives” DO all day long.
I try to not generalize or to make those nasty blanket comments that get people so rightly riled up. But I’d like some fair play here, please.

Call me SAHM if you like. Call me an expert in Crisis Intervention and Family Services. Call me a Twenty-Minute Dinner Specialist.
But don’t call me rude names…and you know that by “me,” I mean, “housewives and moms in general.”

Thanks.

~karol

2

I tried to be a house-husband once. It lasted about 2 months. I couldn’t take it. No way on earth to be bored with a three-year-old in the house, dishes and clothes to wash, food to cook …

A regular job is much easier.

3

And better-paid.

4

I guess I just don’t read enough threads. I sure haven’t seen such insulting language.

5

Sorry, I can’t chime in…I don’t have a college degree, I haven’t worked with the homeless, and I’ve been known to eat chocolate in the daytime because I wanted to, not because I was selflessly keeping the kids from fighting over it.

I am a housewife, and I do get bored, and I’m not 100% happy with my life.

I guess I’m one of the people they’re talking about. Sorry I’m giving you a bad name.

6

Unfortunately, I have. See the infamous Oprah thread.

bodypoet: Great rant. Hear hear! (Though I do find your justification for eating the chocolates a tad bit…convenient. :slight_smile: )

7

Bodypoet, I just wanted to say that I admire you greatly. I admire any woman (or man) who is willing to make the sacrifices it takes to stay at home with their children. I hope to be able to do the same when my time to be a Momma comes. And I will, unless doing otherwise means living in poverty. I think kids do much better with a Mom at home, even if it’s a poor home, than being rich and put in daycare or being left at home alone.

You are doing the best thing possible for your kids. I wish more people would do as you do. And I’m sure I’m going to risk flames for this, but I think any Mother who doesn’t absolutely have to work but chooses to do so is being selfish. As bodypoet so elegantly pointed out, staying at home with the kids doesn’t mean you have to be intellectually stifled. You can live a very fulfilling life while giving your children the best gifts you can…your time and attention.

8

bodypoet - just wanted to throw in my .02 worth of support. I stayed home with my two boys for eight years before divorce ended that. Those were the absolute BEST years of my life and I would not trade them for all the money on earth. My kids are now 17 and 19 and I STILL yearn for those baby/little boy years. I am a successful “businessperson” now but, nothing I about my job is as fulfilling as those “stay-at-home” years.

{{{Hamadryad}}} I’ve been there, too! I also experienced some of the loneliest, most depressing times during those years. You’ve got a friend here if you need one.

9

My point being this: Just because you are a housewife or a SAHM, you are not automatically deserving of being referred to as “a bored hausfrau” or any other terms that I (speaking for myself, of course) would consider derogatory.
And I should qualify, I suppose: Sometimes I get bored. Sometimes I get unhappy. And sometimes I am unabashedly selfish. Don’t we all share these issues, no matter what we do with our lives?

Geez, I’m not trying to come off as a saint. I’m on the side of people making the choices you’re making.

You’re certainly not giving me a bad name and I’m sorry if I somehow insulted you. I just think that you and I and all the other SAHparents deserve a little more respect than we are sometimes afforded.

It’s just a mild little rant, that’s all…I’m not condemning anyone.

[sub]maybe I’d better just hush now…[/sub]
~k

10

I guess you don’t, andros. I’ve seen quite a few patronizing cracks in the threads lately, specifically the threads about reading romances and the Oprah book club. If you’ve never been a SAHM, you might not be sensitive to them.

I’m sending this from work (a part time job) but I’ve been doing the at home mommy bit on and off for 10 years. It’s a really tough job. I never watched Oprah. There was never time for tv during the day, and I’m still looking for the box of Bon bons all the housewives are supposed to have next to the couch. If you don’t like staying home (me) you end up on Prozac to cope. If you love staying home you get crapped on, literally by the babies and figuratively by the rest of the world. A couple of comments about the perceived ignorance of housewives can ruin your whole day.

And karol, good for you, for being where you want to be. I bet your house is cleaner then mine, and your family less stressed. And I did the paper route thing for a month, too. Hope you get to walk. Mine was rural. I quit because I kept running into mail boxes.

11

:smiley:
No, no, I ONLY do it to keep the peace. It’s part of my mission.
Sometimes, and I really hate it when I have to do this…but sometimes I must, in order to make sure that no one else over-indulges and gets sick, eat all but 10 of the Oreo cookies.

You have to do what you have to do, and all that.

~k

12

bp, if its any consolation, I was just attending a class the other day about disability insurance, and the lecturer mentioned an insurance for disability of stay-at-home spouses. He said the purely economic value added by these people is vastly underappreciated, but is beginning to get more recognition in recent studies.

13

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by kaiju *
** A couple of comments about the perceived ignorance of housewives can ruin your whole day.*
So true, and the sad thing is that most people, if you talk to them one-on-one, are perfectly fine with SAHparents. It’s just the sort of knee-jerk namecalling that people feel comfortable with that really bothers me.

Well, last week I knocked someone’s mailbox down completely. And this week I missed an apartment porch, lobbed it onto the porch directly below my intended target, and broke a birdfeeder. Nothing like sweeping broken glass up on someone’s front porch at four a.m., hoping that you don’t have a visit from Officer Friendly before you get the “Sorry, call me and I’ll replace it” note firmly in the door. :smiley:

And I want to say, too, that I have complete respect for moms who decide they don’t want to stay home. It can be incredibly stressful, and that is not very conducive to good parenting. What works for each person is different, and I trust every parent to make that decision for her/himself.

~k

14

I got “reverse patronized” once, and I’m not even a SAHM! (No kids, I’m self-employed and work in my home office.)

Mr. S and I were at a meeting at someone’s house to discuss a community issue. Not everyone there knew everyone else, so the host (bit of a jackass, he had been Mr. S’s stereotypical loudmouth gym teacher) asked everyone to introduce themselves in turn and tell a little about themselves. My turn came and I said, “Hi, I’m Scarlett and I work at home—” and Mr. Jack Ass cut me off loudly with “Nothing wrong with that! It’s a wonderful thing to take care of the house!! NEXT!” It was straight out of “The Sinatra Group.”

(I do get to read romances on the couch while eating bonbons once in a while, but it’s for my job. Really.)

15

I used the word in the heat of a Pit Oprah thread to denote a category of Oprah viewers, and I’m sorry if it offended you or anyone else. I certainly do not “look down on” women who stay home, think they have a lesser intellect, or sit around eating chocolates all day. When and if I ever have kids, I’d like to stay home with them as much as possible. So I’ll be a housewife someday.

Still, you can understand at least part of the source of the stereotype

Oprah = hugely popular morass of treacly “edu-tainment”
Oprah core audience = women who are at home during the day when she broadcasts her show
Oprah Books: some good, some “schmaltzy and one-dimensional” :p, all repackaged as “New And Improved Oprah Brand Literature” and recommended to her core audience - women who are home to watch daytime television.

So, sorry if offended you or unduly stereotyped you as an Oprah viewer. I can see how that would sting. :smiley:

I will certainly lose this stereotype from my vocabulary and future posts.

Women who stay home and raise their kids = good
Oprah = bad

Thanks for the reminder.

16

Let me just be the first to hijack my own rant and say:

My name is Karol and I am possibly the worst housekeeper in the world.

I have a friend who is the epitome of the Perfect SAHM. Her house is perfect. Her kids are shiny and dressed in little matching cheerleader outfits. She vacuums her kitchen every day.

I, on the other hand…am lucky to keep a diaper, much less clothing, on my two year old. He and his sister are clean, because they like to bathe about 4 times a day. Otherwise, it’s a wreck. Health-hazard mess. Glow-in-the-dark OMG what is THAT sort of mess.

In marriage counseling terms, this is a Therapeutic Issue. We’re working on it, and sloooowly getting the best of it, but the housekeeping beast is a fierce one and will not die easily or quickly. I’ll let you know IF we ever get to the place where we can actually have company. :smiley:

~k

17

So that’s what the kids call it these days?

:smiley:

18

Not just you, mag, and not just that thread, although that was the initial thread that got my attention. There is the romance novel thread that someone mentioned, and the IM-from-a-bored-housewife thread somewhere too. None of them were set up as flames against housewives, I think, but the language just tends to devolve as people get more into the rant.

Thank you, though, I appreciate your perspective, and you have narrowed down the whole “Oprah” issue to only a few words! Very concise, lol.

~k

19

:shrug: Fair enough. Since I don’t like Oprah or romance novels, I suspect I’ve simply not botherewd reading those threads.

Now, it’s going to be awfully hard for me to be a SAHM, not being a mother–or female–I have been a stay-at-home father, and will be again in a few weeks, for the indefinite future. And ya know what? I’m still not sensitive to it.

Why? Because I don’t give a rat’s ass what some idiot thinks of me. You think housewives eat chocolate all day? Good for you, fuck off. You think they read Harlequins all day? Good for you, fuck off.

See how easy that is? I don’t need to plead for understanding to make myself feel good about my choices. I’m doing it for my family and for myself, not for idiots and assholes.

20

Never mind the “Mom” part; I want to stay at home (and work from home) because I’m fed up to the teeth with the corporate business world. I do feel, however, that I have to somehow “justify” my decision to look after my fiance, our two cats, our house, and only work part-time. When did making decisions based on your own life and preferences become a bad thing? Where are all these judgemental attitudes coming from? Is it coming from people who are secretly envious that you have the cojones to make your own decisions, and wish they could be that bold themselves? Or are people just so short-sighted that they can’t conceive of any way of doing things other than the way they’re doing it themselves?
(bodypoet, I’m right there with you on the housecleaning. The phrase “bare minimum” comes to mind. I don’t have bugs, and the place doesn’t smell, and after that, the rest is just gravy.)