FAILING AT DOMESTICS

Sarah Thompson - 30 Jun 14

You didn’t like to say it out loud –  lest you should compromise the feisty feminist anti-housework stance that had been your friend in the home ’til now – but you were secretly quite excited about maternity leave, not only because of the lovely baby you’d be having, but because maternity leave meant you’d finally get to play at all that domestic stuff.

As a busy working girl, your repertoire had extended to wrenching the wet clothes out of the washing machine and trying not to drop any socks as you transferred them to the tumble dryer and rammed the door shut with your backside. You only ever ironed clothes a) if they had been on the floor more than one night and b) if you were intending to wear them within the next 30 minutes. You cooked, yes, but you also had a healthy Pret habit and occasionally nuked an M&S ready meal if you were hungover or home late from the job you used to have – the one where you wore nice clothes and had drinks with live males after work and generally swanned around looking fabulous while holding pieces of paper.

What you were really looking forward to, now you were going to be a mother, was batch-cooking – whatever that was – and putting things in those handy freezer bags like a proper 80s mum. You were going to hang your wet clothes on an actual line and get a nice retro peg bag and saunter around the garden with a basket on your hip and your hair in a victory roll. You couldn’t wait to fill your (imaginary) larder with mysterious store-cupboard essentials like bouillon and bouquet garni, and yeast for all the bread you were going to make.

In fact, you were going to be a right regular Kirstie Allsopp. Because, she made it look so easy, didn’t she?

Why you should look forward to this sort of thing is unclear. Maybe millennia of oppression conditioned you, or maybe a double dose of X-chromosomes really does make women better at wiping surfaces. Either way, you felt ‘running the home’ was a rite of passage on your journey to complete womanhood.

And then it started. Laundry on an epic scale. Mountains of clothes – yours, the baby’s, your partner’s – all stuck together with sick and blood and milk and poo, whose it was wasn’t clear. You asked your mum how you could get them clean – surely you couldn’t put poo in the washing machine? –  and she told you the joke about how you’re supposed to soak them in a bucket of detergent! Ha ha ha! As if you were going to do that! You didn’t have time – the mountain was growing before your eyes, like a sinister blob from a 50s Hollywood B-movie.

Sometimes babygrows full of babycrap would fester in the bottom of the laundry basket and by the time you got to them, they’d be so grim, you’d quietly just throw them away. Ordering six more bumper packs of impossibly cheap babygrows online, you’d try not to think about the ethical and environmental impact of your inability to soak babygrows in buckets and feel like a total failure as a woman.

Your thoughts may also have turned to your great-grandmother, who had 33 children, including eight sets of twins, and no washing machine and only an outside loo and you may have marvelled at how they did it in those days, and felt like even more of a failure.

And as you glanced at the hieroglyphics on the care label for your one nice jumper and wondered what all those symbols meant (seriously, what the fuck do they mean?) – as you shoved it in and hoped for the best, only to pull it out and find it had shrunk to the size of all the babygrows, it occurred to you that this domestic stuff was quite hard work actually, and you really were failing at it quite spectacularly.

Your plans to do a Delia and get with your freezer didn’t come to much either. You tried freezing a few stews, but freezing stuff, you soon discovered, also meant remembering to get it out of the freezer the night before (naturally you refused to get a microwave because of all the cancer-rays, though with hindsight  you realise that one, single appliance may have transformed your life in those early days – another fail). So you ended up with a freezer full of indiscernible brown dishes in bags and ice-cube trays full of weaning gak (nice one, Annabel Karmel), which you eventually threw away because you weren’t sure how long you were supposed to keep things in the freezer and if you could de-frost them and re-heat them without getting salmonella.

You’d discovered those baby-food pouches by now anyway, and it was your guiltiest of pleasures, to sit the baby in the car seat on the kitchen table and let him suck the pureed organic mulch through the plastic nozzle like a little baby astronaut while you got on with your jobs – anything to avoid fishing yet more plastic cutlery and bowls out of the dishwasher (and what was that flashing S for on the dishwasher by the way?)

And as each day went past and the washing never saw the daylight and you came round to the idea of fish fingers as an acceptable mid-week supper for all the family, you may have cursed your education for not teaching you about home management and laundry care labels and raged at how the system sets women up to fail at work and at home and then reminded yourself that you didn’t want to do this shit anyway and you had a proper career out there somewhere, and got yourself in quite a massive tizz about it for a moment, until the sound of the washing machine finishing its cycle brought you round and off you went again.

Read Sarah’s other Selfish Mother posts here… 

Sarah Thompson

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