In Favor of Incompetent Housewives

In Favor of Incompetent Housewives November 22, 2014

File:G. K. Chesterton at the age of 13.jpg

 

Your must-read column for today is Calah Alexander’s essay on what it’s like being part of the current generation of incompetents, “Those Pathetic Millenial Moms.”

. . .  I was raised by a loving, attentive mother who stayed home until I was in high school. But culture is pervasive. Kids learn it through osmosis, and unless you lock them in a fortress, they’re gonna pick up on it. “Stay-at-home-mom” had a negative connotation for me from the time I began hearing “mom” qualified as such. Women who wanted to be “just moms” were baffling to me — I literally couldn’t understand why anyone would voluntarily chose a life of snot-and-vomit-filled drudgery.

Yet like so many young millennial moms, I’ve spent the majority of my adult life as a stay-at-home mom.  . . .

I’ve come to understand that the domestic arts really are an art, that it takes skill and virtue and mental acuity to be a good wife and mother. I’ve also come to understand that I’m woefully unprepared for this life that I once thought fit only for those women who couldn’t (or didn’t want to) make something of themselves.

This isn’t just a “millennial” issue.  I’m no turn-of-the-century child, but I remember the steady despair, which still clings, of living out a vocation that consists of scrambling through failure after failure.  Of never, ever, being able to do the job, and honestly not even being sure what the job should entail.

When you get hired someplace, they check your qualifications.  You get hired for jobs that you’ve been trained to do, or that someone will soon train you to do.  If you misunderstand the scope of the work, someone quickly (if unpleasantly) clarifies what is needed and what is not.  If you are ill-educated or ill-suited to the work, they hire someone else.

We incompetent mothers are wedged in the crack between a society that tells us to outsource the work to the professionals, and a heart that knows we can hire out any other task but this one: No one else can be my child’s mother for me.

Which means that, lousy though I am at it, I have to figure it out or die trying.

Read Calah’s excellent essay on how we got here and what we can do about it.

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Image: G. K. Chesterton at the age of 13 (no later than 1908) Source: G. K. Chesterton, A Criticism: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3334524;view=1up;seq=87 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


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