Sometimes I Feel Guilty

For not having to get up before daylight and get dressed and go off to a job where I would sit all day at a desk and type things into the computer or stand all day at a cash register and ring things up. Sometimes.

And then I think back on all of those years where I still had to do everything else after a day of working at a horrible boring tedious low paying job. Cook the dinner and wash the clothes and clean the house and do the errands and plan the menus. For many years I was a single mom and the kids did need to be fed and their clothes washed, and there was nobody else there to help with the daily chores, then the kids grew up and I got married again, but I was so used to doing everything that I still did everything. Except on the nights when I was working, then somebody else had to fix their own dinner and maybe even clean up after themselves. What I needed was a housewife.

And then I became the housewife again when I decided to see how far I could take my online business and would it really pay enough to be able to stay home? It did for the first few years and I didn't mind doing all of the other household stuff because I was home anyway, but then the economy crashed and everything went south along with my business because nobody had any money to spend on frivolity on the internet. And then when I tried to go back to a low paying boring job, it was too late because nobody was hiring.

Now things are leveling out with my business recovering and money coming in again, but I feel guilty some mornings when I wake up without an alarm clock and get a cup of coffee and sit down at the computer to check my email. And not have to do anything else all day if I don't feel like it. Except clean the cat boxes and feed them of course.

And then I think about how nice it would be to go to that boring job each day and come home to a clean house, clothes that have been washed and put away, cats that have clean cat boxes, and dinner ready and waiting on the table. Something I have never experienced in my life, but something that Keith gets to experience every day. He can fix himself a snack and leave the mess knowing that someone else will clean it up. He can throw the dirty clothes into the laundry basket knowing that someone else will wash them, fold them, and put them away. He can sit down at the dinner table and eat his food and know that someone else will pick up his plate and put it in the dishwasher.

All because I don't have that outside job.

So, I'm going to try not to feel guilty about our arrangement, in all marriages there is that division of chores where one partner does certain things and the other does other certain things. We seem to have the 1950's version of the marriage partnership where the woman stays home and does pretty much everything and the man goes off to work and comes home to dinner on the table. It just kind of worked out that way, and besides if I didn't do the laundry I wouldn't have any clean underwear because nobody else would do it for me.