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Domestic Goddess I’ve been called many things in my life, but Domestic Goddess is not one of them. As a woman with a provisional AARP card, you can hardly classify me as a young bride. But my pre-married adult life was spent with a roommate who did all the cleaning, so I was ill prepared for the real world when I left the single life at age 34. As a working, traveling, commuting wife and mother, I enjoyed the ability to pay others to keep my house clean. Now that I’m self-employed, the domestic engineering task has fallen to those of us who live in the house. Notice I didn’t say the task had fallen on me alone because, apparently, home engineering maintenance is not one of my areas of strength. The first sign that there might be a problem came when it took me over 10 minutes to figure out how to turn on the vacuum cleaner last year. There used to be on/off switches on the poles of those things, but apparently now you can just step on a large button and voila! “Hey,” I thought, “Once you know the secrets, it’s not so intimidating.” Last month, I
discovered there was an important vacuum
“We have an old vacuum cleaner out in the garage. Why don’t you try that one?” he said. “Why don’t you just tell me how to change the bag on this one?” I countered. “Because I don’t
want a bagful of dirt on the floor,” he replied. We were expecting a houseguest for the weekend, so I attacked the non-vacuum areas. When my daughter came home from school, I announced, “The bathrooms are clean. No one uses the bathroom until company gets here in a few hours.” “What if I have to go?” she asked. “Your father’s office is only two blocks away.” I replied. “The exercise will do you good. And no eating in the kitchen or dining room; I just washed the floors.” “Where am I supposed to eat my after-school snack?” she wailed. “How about the back yard?” I suggested. She rolled her eyes and exhaled a lot of air through her nose. The house was ready for our guest. My husband had come home and had gone upstairs to change clothes. As he descended the staircase, the rug on the landing slid wildly. He did a number of unattractive yet humorous full-body movements to break his fall. He came very close to falling over the rail. Flustered and in pain, he limped down to me. “Did you wax the stairs?” he inquired incredulously. “Does Pledge spray count as wax?” I answered meekly. “I was dusting the windowsills and thought I’d dust and shine the wood steps.” Why do people in my household always roll their eyes and exhale heavily through their noses? My husband had strained a number of muscles during his flying carpet ride and spent the weekend wincing in the reclining chair. When we offered to seek medical attention, he shook his head and winced some more. The guest arrived, and we ended up having a lovely weekend of conversation in the living room, partly because my husband couldn’t leave the chair. I experienced guilt over this incident. But there is a silver lining in every cloud. For a week afterward, my husband called my office at home daily to ask anxiously, “You’re not cleaning are you?” “That’s good,” he said, “Don’t clean anything.” As he hung up, I don’t think “Domestic Goddess” were the words flying through his head. I think I’ll wait a while before I try to figure out how the pressure cooker works.
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secret I hadn’t been let in on:
changing the bag. Encouraged with my success at turning the vacuum on, I
assumed the bag-changing ritual would be something akin to changing a coffee
filter. It wasn’t. After 10 minutes of switching a replacement bag from my
right to left hand while unzipping and rezipping the machine’s canvas, I called
my husband at work for guidance. He was leery. 