Thoughts on Domestic Vocation

There is a lot wrong with articles like this one, demeaning the work of stay-at-home parents everywhere, in my opinion.  Not the least of these problems is the generally negative attitude towards housekeeping.  It's a term bandied about quite a lot these days, a label with lots and lots of hidden layers of meaning, but when I use it I mean the routine, often repetitive work of maintaining a home and a family.  Vacuuming and dusting and laundry, yes, but also applying for passports and taking a cooking class and planting a garden, those are housekeeping, too.

When intellectually cutting down those who choose to stay at home, one woman says:

"One of the things I've done working on my book is to read a lot of the diaries online, and (stay-at-home mothers') description of their lives does not sound particularly interesting or fulfilling for a complicated person, for a complicated, educated person."

For a complicated, educated person.  That says something about how society sees and values a person who keeps house.

The truth of the matter is that all jobs have an element of the menial to them, and many jobs are ones that fulfill a basic need for society.  Clean water, adequate schooling, health care and food production are great examples of this - would this woman claim that a doctor was 'wasting her time' working at a clinic, or a schoolteacher 'squandering her abilities' teaching children?  I doubt it, this is just an assumption, because I don't know the writer, but I imagine her definition of appropriate work is based less on the tasks and more on the location.  If you teach your own children, you're letting down the team, but if you're teaching other people's children, then you're doing your part.

What categorizing jobs ends up doing is categorizing people.  When you say, with words or simply attitude "your job is less than my job", then you end up saying "you are less than me".  Any jobs that fall within the realm of critical for a functioning society, jobs like keeping house, must be done by someone.  And if those jobs are also seen as beneath some members of society, then the underlying premise becomes that there is a stratified society, with some people being on top and having other, less worthy people, taking care of the cooking and the cleaning.

This woman wears clean clothes and eats healthy food and, assumedly, lives in a tidy house with lightbulbs in all of the sockets and sheets on all of the beds.  Her houseplants are watered, her vacations are planned and her magazine subscriptions are renewed.  If you were to open her fridge, there would be food in it, and if you were to go into her front hall closet, you would find an umbrella.

I wonder what she thinks of the person or people who keep this status quo in her own life?  Does she believe, as she does of the work they do, that they are beneath her as well?  Does she think they're boring, dull, uninteresting?  Is it in fact she herself who does these things for the home, feeling unworthy and ungrateful to her own hands for such "menial, base work"?  Or does she hire it out, perhaps, to an "unworthy and base" person?  Someone from another country, someone with different coloured skin, or someone who lives in a mobile home, in an unfashionable zip code, with "too many kids". 

I can't help but wonder, as well, how her home reflects her.  When she has friends and family in for a meal, is she proud of and happy with her house?  Does she show off the brilliant yellow tulips that just this morning started to open in the garden?  Does she invite her guests to try the tomatoes from the farmer's market?  Or is home, and everything lovely and wonderful and hard and fulfilling about keeping it, is it all "beneath" her?  Perhaps her food is all pre-made and take-out, her child's education purchased at a steep price and then unmonitored ever after, her clothes laundered outside the home and picked up only as an errand, her floors washed by unseen hands, paid weekly in an unmarked envelope on the kitchen counter.

The challenge in housekeeping isn't obvious to her, though.  As a law professor, I imagine she would be surprised by how empty I think her world must be, how sad that she can derive no joy, no sense of accomplishment, from doing the most important work there is: creating order and safety and health and happiness and a future, every day, for those you love best, and for the stranger at your door.

Thoughts?