Tales of the Undomesticated Housewife.

Ground beef is cooking on my stove top for freezer meals, grocery bags filled with veggies are being emptied into the refrigerator. The floor got vacuumed yesterday, and toys from the last 2 days of playdates are slowly making their way into their proper places. The dishwasher has been filled, run, unloaded, and is getting refilled again as 3 days worth of dishes are being catched up upon.

Too bad I have had nothing to do with any of it (except the freezer meals. That was my idea).

I have come a long way in our almost 10 years of marriage, but it's still safe to say that my husband is a better housewife than me. It's the joke in our marriage, with our families, and with my friends. I laugh about it as much as my husband does, and joke about the benefits of not living together before marriage (so he had no idea how much work I would be).

Sometimes it hurts my ego way more than I let on, and work my a$$ off to prove to EVERYONE (myself included) that I can do this whole homemaker thing. It doesn't come naturally to me, and often I spend a ridiculous number of hours tidying things that I coulda/shoulda/woulda just put away when I was done with it, instead of leaving it for 3 months. I stay up late dusting, folding laundry, and sweeping the floors. I get up at 5 to spend 3 hours cleaning the kitchen and washing the bathroom floors by hand before the kids wake up. I invite people over to see all the clean in my house (while it lasts), apologize for the clutter on the counter, and give my husband a detailed report of all I got done, just in case live has messed it all up and it's not obvious when he walks through the door. Dinner is ready at 5:30, appointments for the kids are booked, they are registered in activities, and forms/permission slips are signed promptly. I bake and craft and sew and redecorate, and make my home "pretty". And I feel great about myself and my house.

Other days, like today, I am impressed that we made it anywhere on time for anything, I leave a huge box full of peaches on the livingroom couch (because couch peaches are the bestest), it takes me an hour and a half to make mac and cheese for lunch (from a box. Think gluten-free KD. It's not like I'm making the pasta from scratch), and dinner is ready "on time" only because it was thawed by my husband the night before, and it just needed to be put in my slow-cooker this morning when I still had energy. Laundry is done only because of Princess' NEED for clean socks for tomorrow (which reminds me, they're still in the washing machine...) and the fact that both children made it through the day unscathed I wear like a badge of honor. If company is coming over, papers and clutter might be "filed" away into laundry baskets and put in the laundry room, and I might make up excuses that we just got home from a trip, or we are in the middle or reorganizing the house, or we were too busy on the weekend to clean up after ourselves, and I am embarrassed and frustrated.

I used to think that success in personal growth in this area meant that I became the diligent housewife - that the first person I described to you was the person I would be at least most of the time. That I would love spending time cooking and cleaning and always have the energy to bake and sew, that my house would find more order than chaos, and my husband wouldn't need to start dinner when he got home from work ever again. I used to think that someday, somehow I would suddenly become Martha Stewart, and 31 years of mess-making and chore-incompleting habits would suddenly vanish.

I now realize that I will never be that woman. While I will say that moving to a new (bigger) house has helped (more space to store all our stuff) and older kids has meant that I have more hands to help (and different messes to clean), I might never not-have days like today. And I need to be ok with that. I will still have mornings where I choose a clean kitchen over sleep, I still have aspirations of inviting friends over for tea in my spotless kitchen with freshly-made scones (hopefully with all the required ingredients, unlike my last attempt), and I do hope that someday I can walk through my entire house without stepping on legos, a dust-bunny, or a hotwheels car, but I need to cut myself some slack. I need to let go of the notion that I need to be all-or-nothing, that sometimes my house will just be messy, that sometimes my husband will need to pick up my slack, that sometimes surviving the day will be all I can manage, and sometimes there will be peaches on the couch.