Six Housewife Hesitations
by Zoë Landale

1. Smarmy marm, half-mincing, never convincing about her real desire to stay home and do dishes. Education needs grading-up. You know she wants to be lazy. Crazy to prefer that to making money. 1950's honey, brain made of Betty Crocker cake mix. Half-baked.

2. Making war on laundry for the third time that day, measuring out detergent in a cracked white cup and sneezing. Malevolent intervention: whenever she washes the baby's quilt, the kid immediately spills milk on it. Puffy soft warmth from the dryer. There is no smell so retchingly dead as rotten milk in fabric.

3. All I want is a fix of family far away from the cold night air. I cannot worry about female spring-offs, society-shaping: I'm too busy making a home. Don't groan. Maintaining. Someone has to do it. What do you want, some cute little four-footed dinosaur in an apron to come in and tidy the table where all the mail and magazines accumulate? Who makes sure the dinosaur's wastepaper baskets are emptied and clean clothes occasionally put away? A two-footed gremlin? Who cleans the gremlin's bathroom sink? Out of the way while I display my awesome female efficiency.

4. Sufficiency not of self. Another income not added. And the brain-drain, watch those suds swirl down the sink for the eighth time in one day and get literal. Definition of a human being: two-handed mess maker. If I create more garbage than anyone else I know, does that make me cleaner or more dirty? I've always wanted to be an executive, frankly. The two-ton briefcase syndrome. Let the cleaning woman look after stale domesticity.

5. The secretary at the party last week ruffling her daughter's black hair. Three children she wants, she'll go back to work again after four and a half months home, the longest her company can get by without her. The resentful blonde whose parents worked all the time. She moved across the continent, misses them from a safe distance.

6. Add three hearts and stir. Cook on tenderness for forty-five career. Remove when nurtured or delicately browned, whichever comes first. Tidy as you go. Around here, that means washing up coffee cups and stray dishes which breed after dinner. Get a dazzling part-time fulfillment and leave it to your children to figure out, why don't you?