Summer 2008 - The Reluctant Housewife

Age: 46
Occupation: Housewife/ Homemaker/ Merlot drinking stay-at-home middle aged mother with nasty shopping habit/ Homemaker

I should be enjoying my holidays at the cottage but a recent run-in with a popcorn kernel has sent me to the emergency dental clinic in a nearby town. As I sit in the waiting room, hopped up on Advil and finding myself vaguely entertained by my tongue as it gets intimate with the hole that used to house my tooth, I work on completing the New Patient Information form the receptionist has handed me.
Address: and Phone Number: are straightforward enough but I can’t help but stumble when I get to Age: and Occupation:.

“Well, yes, technically I am a 46 year-old homemaker,” I want to explain to the chipper, young receptionist, “but I’m so much smarter, funnier and more fashionable than that.” I glance at my cottage attire – brown rubber flip-flops the dog cut her puppy teeth on, baggy black bathing suit with elastic fraying around the left leg opening and faded terry-cloth shorts and t-shirt that I generously describe as my “cover-up”.

Well, I’m smarter and funnier.

I toy with the idea of putting down “Home wrecker” as my occupation. It carries way more cachet and if I’m ever called on it, I can always claim it was a Freudian slip.

Neither the age nor the occupation question would bother me all that much if the form demanded I answer just one or the other.

I can happily imagine myself as a pert, young housewife a la Mary Tyler Moore in her Laura Petrie days. And I’d have no problem introducing myself as Dr. Karen Hamilton, 46 year-old brain surgeon or 46 year-old Nobel Prize recipient, Karen Hamilton.

But put them together - 46 year-old (read, middle-aged) homemaker - and the image that comes to mind ranks up there with dirty dishwasher or gravy congealing on a plate after unwisely responding in the affirmative to the question, “Do you want gravy with those fries?” We know these entities are among us but we’d rather not spend too much time dwelling on them.

Ironically, in our not so distant history, it was a fine and noble thing to describe oneself as a homemaker. My 1960’s youth was spent watching many a game show with contestants who proudly declared themselves to be homemakers. (“Well Monty, I’m a homemaker from California and I’ll take Door Number Three!!!”)

Of course, considering that most of those women either became addicted to tranquilizers or flew the coop in favour of burning their bras or campaigning for local office the minute they had their consciousness raised, casts doubt on just how fine and noble a calling theirs really was.

But today’s middle-aged homemakers are different than that. For one thing, many of us don’t actually do housework. There is a segment of the homemaker population that is not only fortunate enough to have the money to stay home, but can also afford to have, well, homemakers.

This elite group busy themselves instead with such engaging pursuits as Xtreme wine decanting, attending fund raising events and brightening the day of less fortunate women by regaling the minimum-wage workers at the mani/pedi salons with stories from the aforementioned fund raisers.

Of course there are the hardline “traditionals" who bake their own bread, scrapbook/knit/make jewelry (select all that apply) and shepards the kids to their lessons in the mini-van. They only buy themselves new clothes if they actually need something and force their children to wear generic jeans and running shoes ("Why spend money on the "in" thing?"). They rarely are invited to Ladies Night Out because of their adamant stance to have only one glass of wine then switch to tea while the rest of us order another round and begin getting into the good stuff like which mom in the neighbourhood is having an affair.

Then there are the rest of us who live by the motto, "Good enough!".

Our cooking skills may not be on par with the likes of Martha Stewart but at least we haven’t served time in a federal prison. And is it such a bad thing when Friday afternoon finds us chatting in the backyard hot tub with our fellow homemakers, deftly tossing rubber ducks at the kitchen window to summon our children to bring us another bottle of wine? At least we’re home with the kids.

I complete the New Patient Information form with a flourish, just as the dentist calls me in. As I get settled in the chair, he peruses the form. “So Mrs. Hamilton, I see here that you’re 46 and a . . . stripper?”