"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Friday, November 11, 2011

My house would be cleaner

"....Housework is these days the subject of a great deal of fantasy. Designer cleaning products and accessories are marketed to high-end consumers.... who like to imagine themselves waltzing about in sheer black aprons while wielding feather dusters.

 Newspapers bring us columns on fashion that feature haute couture-clad models striking poses on washing machines, the presumed message of which is that you can be expensively dressed, impossibly thin, and dramatically photogenic, all while a load of towels spins dry.
Domesticity, we are led to believe, is a leisure activity, one that results in elaborate, spotless perfection while requiring nothing of us but that we purchase a few brand-name products or publications.

The reality, of course, is that housekeeping is not effortless, and it is never perfect, even when it does get done, which is less and less."




These excerpts are from a book my mom recommended to me called Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life by Margaret Peterson.  I'm only on page 5 but I'm already really enjoying it.

So I guess my house would be cleaner if I just went and folded some laundry and cleaned my bathroom while the babies are taking naps. (instead of blogging)

1 comment:

  1. The "elaborate spotless perfection" image has been the little domestic angel (or demon?) on my shoulder for many a year, always reminding me what a "good housekeeper" would have accomplished by this time. For everyone-here-at-home's sake I've had to forsake my "spotless" god, because she's just not worth sacrificing happy children and happy mama to.

    (Sheer black aprons and feather dusters sound like items out of Grey Town (in The Great Divorce), where aprons don't keep out stains and dusters don't remove dust. ;)

    ReplyDelete