Am I “the Marrying Kind”?
Husband and I have always been interested in what makes a successful marriage “tick”. When we were newly engaged, we played out different scenarios in our minds about who would stay home and who would go to work. We mutually hyphenated our names when we got married. We knew the flexibility of modern marriage did not confine us to certain roles.
In practice, it turned out I was not destined for a career outside the home, as I immediately embraced staying home when our firstborn son was born. I was “into” cooking and cleaning and caring for children and found great fulfillment in it. I loved reading the children stories for hours on end, playing with blocks and making birthday cakes. Changing diapers wasn’t all that bad, as long as I got to do these other things, too.
Throughout the years, marriage and the idea of a “good wife” has been “reinvented” multiple times. This is the focus of an article written by Lisa Belkin in the March 22, 2010 edition of the New York Times, entitled, “The Marrying Kind”.
All this redefinition has become possible as women have been given more choices. While some of it has been helpful, as a fairly traditional woman who stays home with my children, and tries to make a home for my husband, I have found some of it a maze to navigate. My impression of what makes “a good wife” has been subject to society’s influence over time, particularly when I was young and forming these ideals. I believe I had the “perfect mother” – she tended to my two brothers and my needs with extraordinary devotion and care, in a way I’m quite afraid to admit that I am unable to do myself today. Dinner with all food groups represented every night at 6:30pm, Sunday brunch without fail, meticulous attention to detail when we were sick. Although I have twice as many children as her, and my life choices have dictated that I won’t be able to pull off motherhood with as much careful concern as she did, a part of me still wishes I could. At the same time, I am grateful that the standards aren’t so perfectionistically high that this type of care come solely from me (my husband is just as active in it).
However, the “osmosis” education that my peers and I received to become a H.I.T. (Homemaker in Training) was conflicting at best. It tooted the benefits & supposed freedom of being a ‘supermom’, who could “bring home the bacon AND fry it up in the pan”, just like the Enjoli perfume commercial said. In other words, we were told we could be a mom just like my mom and a career embracing feminist, as well. In high school, we had a home economics class (one of the most popular classes!) in which we all donned aprons and baked apple pies during school hours. When that class ended, we were whisked off to the next class, “Business Economics” which encouraged us to have skills for a successful career outside the home. Confusing? I’ll say. And most of us still don’t know how to make homemade gravy from scratch.
In the aforementioned article, Ms. Belkin highlights the latest “twist” in the redefinition of marriage and what it means to be a good wife: the fastest growing subset of cohabitating couples today are over the age of 50. These women, having been previously married and lived out the “ideal Mrs.” – having wanted nothing more from life than to don the apron and be married -now scoff at it. These women, who were enmeshed in that rejection of the “old ways”; ”housewives” protesting they were not married to their houses, began calling themselves the more respectable title of ”working moms” instead. Gradually, we have realized since then that “Supermom”, due to its unattainability, is more comic than reality. Seeing the old guideposts gone, what impetus is there to follow?
Women today are not what they were and as a result we are probably much more relaxed and reasonable. It is perfectly fine to enlist the help of a device to do housework, instead of scrubbing each square of bathroom tile with a toothbrush like grandma did. With the constant redefining of our roles, it will be interesting to see the scenario play out.
On that note, I am off to eat a wonderful meal, home-cooked by my husband, who is a five star *Mr. Mom*, doing all the cleaning and homekeeping while I recover from birth. In the “old days”, it might be unthinkable that Mom or Mom-in-law would not be at my side for two weeks, so hubby could get back to work since he was clueless when it came to running a home. However, this is not the case for us, nor for many women today. Due to this redefinition of roles for women, our mothers, *too*, have the freedom they earned themselves thirty years ago.
