domestic instinct: mine and others

‘A perfectly-kept house is a sign of a misspent life’. As a young woman I never questioned these words by English writer Rose Macauley. Domestic life was a tangle of repetitive and unfulfilling tasks that full-time work was designed to release women from; this much I was certain of. Like my friends I assumed that caring about housekeeping was to avoid the real challenges of life. I laughed at the idea that running a home might ever fill me with pride; that I might one day undertake household tasks with a lightness and grace that ennobled my time on this earth. I had no inkling how intimately my happiness might eventually be tied to my relationship to housekeeping.

On leaving home to see the world I felt confident that life lay before me, beyond the front door. My sense of self would be forged through my work and my personal relationships. My self-esteem rested on my ability to meet the demands of other people and the world. Only gradually did my home become, as it had been in childhood, the place that grounds and sustains me, helping me to make sense of my life outside it. It wasn’t the only place where I played out my inner longings, my private dreams, but it was an essential arena for them. Each morning when I went off to study, work or the park, home was where I started from.

This shift in my own life – from distancing myself from all things domestic as a girl, to identifying with it as a young woman – led me to want to improve the image of housekeeping. To change our common perception of domesticity as unworldly, demeaning, even mind-numbingly dull, to making looking after ourselves a quietly powerful act. To make creating order from chaos, moments of beauty from household mess, an intrinsically worthwhile thing to do. To present domesticity as a strength to be admired along with every other strength. Which isn’t to say that everyone should be domestic; clearly housekeeping doesn’t make you into a better, more rounded person. It’s more that those of us who do take pride in domesticity, might celebrate it more.

Whenever I answer the front door wearing an apron, nowadays, the person on the doorstep looks me up and down. A flicker of surprise crosses their face. Whether it’s the postman, the plumber or a friend, there’s the same moment of surprise. What’s normal for me, putting on an apron to mix dough, vacuum the stairs or tip stock into a colander, is less so for others. Wearing an apron to the front door is as mildly provocative as opening it in my dressing gown. At very least, it isn’t what the person on the doorstep expects me to be wearing.

When people ask what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. It’s true, I write every day and sometimes publish things. I feel lucky to have work I love, even if I can’t rely on it for income. However in social situations only rarely will I mention my job. This is because my job feels less acceptable, less noteworthy than my work; even though in some ways it’s harder and more challenging. My job has long hours, unregulated conditions and maddeningly low status. It’s not exactly a calling, though some days it feels like it. Until my kids leave home, my job is to keep things running smoothly without shouting and moaning too much. My job is housekeeping.

Countless people keep their homes running smoothly without shouting and moaning too much. They may not feel called to it nor, as I do, wear an apron to the front door. Nonetheless they spend a similar amount of time shopping and cleaning and cooking and listening and sorting and fixing and laughing – and generally making things happen at home. And then clearing it up afterwards. Like me they don’t consider this their main work; and certainly the world doesn’t. Knowing this isn’t what makes them interesting to others, they rarely bring it up in conversation. Mostly they just get on and do it. Nonetheless measured in hours, devotion, effort and skill it’s a big part of their life.

My aim in this project has been psychological more than practical. It has been to change my feelings towards domestic life such that I experience it positively, rather than busying myself with suppressing my negativity towards it. It has been to experience my home as a place of satisfaction, a door to creativity. Rather than writing off housekeeping against a fantasy of leisure, by reclaiming domestic life as important and meaningful, my aim has been to realise a therapeutic potential within daily reach.

My hope is that more of us will make friends with ourselves at home; so that instead of projecting unrealistic domestic demands on to a demanding, internalised other, we’ll reconcile ourselves to who we are and what we have at home. And that by experiencing home life in this gentler way, we may come to feel less complicated about our domestic instinct – or simply to recognise that we have one.

‘Know me, come to my home’ is an invitation for others to see us in a more rounded way. It conveys the familiarity that we feel on entering someone’s private space. It expresses what we care about beyond our physical presence. This kind of expression matters. Having the courage to fulfil our domestic ambitions, in even the smallest ways, is what gives us confidence to fulfil our worldly ambitions; only once we can live up to our own expectations can we take on those of others. Looking after ourselves at home, in ways that make our spirit sing, makes it more likely that we’ll take ours strengths, our song, elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

spots and stripes

‘My Mum Likes Spots and My Dad Likes Stripes’ is a story by Ned Sharratt that I used to read to my kids over and over. It’s a story about a couple so incompatible that they end up dividing the sitting room down the middle with a stripe of paint. On one side of the painted line is everything that belongs to Mum, all spotty; on the other side is everything that belongs to Dad, all striped. Mum wears spotty clothes, her earrings are spotty, her car is spotty, and when she cooks eggs they come out spotty. Dad’s clothes are striped, he cuts toast in stripes, and on the weekend he mows the grass in long stripes.

Each time I read this story to my kids we’d laugh at the craziness of this pair; never for a moment thinking that this story might one day apply to our family. Fifteen years on, my kids are forever pressing home that I like spots and their father likes stripes. From their point of view it’s self evident. How else can they explain their two totally different parents?

My husband and I, we pretend we don’t mind. We laugh at our kids’ joke. We don’t argue the point. If anything, we agree with it. But privately I wonder. Would I have ended up liking spots if I hadn’t married a man who likes stripes? Or could it be that this is what marriage does to couples, once kids play a part in the story? Because ‘My Mum Likes Spots and My Dad Likes Stripes’ is told from a little boy’s point of view; a little boy who, in telling it, seeks to understand how two such different people, his parents, could ever have gotten together. Two people who are so different that, in the little boy’s mind, they’ve made a mistake to think they’re a couple, because really they’re opposites.

Perhaps, even without two kids to point out our differences, Paul and I would have grown in different directions anyway. Perhaps the seeds of change were there right from the day we met. Here are some obvious differences which spring to mind. I like green tea and Kombucha, whereas Paul prefers coffee and wine. I have a thing for Scandinavian design whereas Paul hankers for eighteenth-century art and furniture. I crave dark chocolate whereas Paul loves milk chocolate. I like a clean home whereas Paul longs for a beautiful home. I am a homebody whereas Paul loves to travel. Paul doesn’t like it when I wear jeans all the time whereas I don’t like it when he wears a jacket all the time. I learned to drive a car young and taught both our kids to drive; Paul learned to drive late and avoids tight parking spaces. If I’m at home in the day I’ll cook lunch; Paul, who works from home, will grab cheese and biscuits. I take my work seriously but allow family life to take over; Paul is devoted to his work and refuses to let life take over. I like our garden loose and untamed whereas Paul would like it formal and structured, with no weeds between the bricks in the courtyard. The list goes on.

Neither Paul nor I would want to paint a line down the middle of our sitting room, however tempting this sometimes seems. Really we gave up winning each other over to our own way of seeing things long ago. Not for want of trying, but because it ended up reinforcing our differences. It backfired. I ended up liking spots all the more, while Paul clung to his stripes. When, for example, I encouraged Paul to eat more vegetables and drink less coffee, he avoided vegetables and doubled up on coffee. When he objected to my wearing jeans, I wore them every day. And so it went.

These days Paul and I live a private truce, the terms of which we’ve never spelled out yet understand intuitively. Also, now that our kids are technically adults, the pressure from them has lessened and, with it, the tension between Paul and me. Sometimes I’ve caught myself wondering if our kids have spent their teenage years on an undeclared and unwitting mission to drive Paul and me apart, through the force of what they perceive as our irreconcilable differences. As if, in order to break free of Paul and me, to become independent of us, they’ve needed to drive a wedge between us as parents; to paint a line down the middle of their home to separate the spots from the stripes.

Other times I wonder whether what our kids fear most is that the world of their parents, of Paul and me, will fall apart when they’re no longer around to point out our differences. Just as they can’t imagine how Paul and I could ever have lived together for seven years before they came along, they can’t imagine what their parent’s lives will be like when they’re not around to prop us up. Could their inability to imagine Paul and me, without them around to provide emotional glue, reflect their inability to imagine their own future without their parents in the middle of it?