"You became a housewife"

"You became a housewife", were the immortal words uttered to me by a dear friend. This assessment came after a long online chat session about where we are at in our lives. Both of us had retreated from the corporate rat race for sometime now. My friend is a gifted designer with a great entrepreneurial spirit and is never short of ideas, she has worked from home for a few years. I always envied her, she has a discernible skill that very few have so she can earn a living at home and as a bonus, she gets to spend all day with her pack of furry friends by her legs all day.

I had also retreated from the corporate world, not entirely by choice but because the industry I was in was pretty much wiped out by the sub prime mortgage fiasco and the recession that followed and so I took that opportunity to move out of the county I was in and tried to work from home, it turns out that I don't have a identifiable skill to work from home and  I lack the discipline-I hate to admit it, I thought I had great discipline, but I don't. The other aspect of working from home, which was totally unexpected for me were the tensions that would arise from that situation. I spent more time tending to the requests of others (husband and elderly relative) than doing my own writing or practicing my interpretation and translation skills. It was too convenient for them to just shout my name when they couldn't find something, forgot something, or just too lazy to go to their mental CPU storage unit and retrieve the answer for themselves. I felt like I was a live customer service center always ready to answer any and all questions. 

This left me feeling frustrated and angry at times, I felt like I wanted to escape-from my own home, it was ridiculous. It is not right for me to feel unhappy, depressed, stressed out in my own home. So, I did the next best thing to get myself out of the house, I found a job. Any job that didn't require me to mop floors. It was what I needed and my prayers were answered (I prayed to God to help me find peace and balance in my life, whatever form it came in was fine with me). I started to feel useful again and I was learning something new and my language skills were put into use for the first time in my professional career. 

Another dimension to my dilemma were the feelings of guilt I felt towards my family, I felt like I was being disloyal to them by having these negative thoughts about my situation. I can't blame them for treating me like a live customer service center, I put myself in that role and now I loathe it. I kick myself every time I hear my name called and something is being asked of me, so it was time for a change. And people don't like change, even the most self-aware and self-attuned people don't like change, when I announced that I got a job and that I will no longer be home to answer the bidding of everyone (I left the last bit out); I was originally met with "well, what am I going to do now, what about me" type of responses, which I promptly answered, "you'll get used to it, just like before." Indirectly reminding everyone that I had a job from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 once upon a time.


Since I was a child, I was constantly told how my bilingual skills will outshine my peers and competitors, sadly, this has not happened. Every job I had up until now, my bilingual skills played no part in it, I could have been a semi-literate English speaker with horrible syntax and grammar who can barely spell, like many people I have worked with before, it wouldn't have mattered. So, as I relayed all this to my friend, she said that she understood my feelings, which I totally expected. If anyone is to understand my feelings of conflict and disloyalty to the ones closest to me, it would be her. And it was at this juncture she said to me "you became a housewife" and I shuddered, I have become the dreaded housewife-without the desperation, yet. 


I am not a die-hard man hating feminist. I don't think that being a housewife is less than a working woman. I don't have very strong views about whether to work or not once you have children. It's to each their own, many would love to stay home more often and spend quality time with their children, but economics won't allow it. There is no right or wrong way here. It's just that I never think I would become a 'housewife' before I had children, to me, housewife and mother went together, not housewife and nothing else. And to my husband's credit, whatever he lacks in communication skills, he makes it up with his keen sense of perception, he realized that I was happier and perhaps he was happier too, not having me there all day. More breathing room for the both of us. I never did ask him how he felt about the both of us being home all the time. I am not a big proponent of 'talking about everything', especially when one has no choice in the matter thus cannot enforce a change, there is no point in talking. From my perspective, it's best that I don't spill my thoughts, a lot of times it's not pretty and they should just remain as my thoughts.