I can dress it up all how I like, a gap year, an opportunity to try out some new projects and change career but the truth is, modern independent woman as I like to think I am, at this point in time I am simply a housewife. And, one week into this new experiment, I am loving it. Now being a housewife has never been a part of my plans. Certainly it wasn’t something that I went to university then got myself a career with a decent salary and my own pad in Rome for. Yet it turned out that the boy I knew way back when is actually the love of my life and somehow I dropped the salary, the pad and all the stress and hassle of the career to move back to the provincial little town I come from.
There is a certain challenge to it. Our house – a Victorian terrace my astute other half bought before the prices went out of any first time buyers salary range – had the unmistakeable bachelor black ash bedroom kit, (desk minus two drawers from when his mate stopped renting and simply carried his possessions to his new place in them). I’m considering carbon dating the junk that we’re no longer sure who was storing it at ours between flatshares and never collected it. And please, please do not send Aggie & Kim round until we’ve finished the loft conversion.
If I’m really honest though the real challenge is that I don’t have much of a clue about any of it. Passing directly from working all hours and living in dodgy flat-shares, to my own flat kept pristine by my amazing cleaner, housework needs skills I’ve never needed to acquire.
So the first thing I notice is that I ache. I start to think that maybe I don’t need the gym membership I just bought as I lug the Vax up and down the stairs wondering why they don’t make the nozzles stair-width so you can just run them back and forth a bit. Or why they don’t make the hose long enough so you can do the middle stairs without trying to balance the thing on the lower steps. Either way, as my muscles whimper feebly from hauling it around, I can tell that the person who made the thing doesn’t use one.
I do dread turning into one of those bores that can really hold an in-depth conversation on the merits of microfibre over j-cloths. Yet when its you that’s scrubbing the bath-oil off the shower you realise that yes, it does matter. My resolve not to discuss it down the pub remains. Yet I’ve a sneaking feeling that I am actually going to quite enjoy ‘keeping house’. And as I bung another load of washing on in our newly pristine kitchen and settle down to a well deserved coffee perhaps I will check out that website on the best way of shining up bathroom mirrors…
