Wonder Woman
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint. ~Erma Bombeck
When I was a kid, I thought I could be Wonder Woman, a teacher, and just a really good mom all at the same time. You know, diaper and feed the baby, write the names of everyone who’s talking on the chalkboard, pass out some worksheets, spin around in circles (KaPOWPOW!) and run off in a glamorous leotard and cape to catch the bad guys. Off go the dowdy glasses and on goes the boomerang tiara. Ask my mom. I had the Underoos and a bath towel cape.
Then I grew up and became a mom. I got here, hearing passionate anthems, my dancing-through-meadows dreams reshaping my notions of superhero status into one, simple ideal: Super Mom. I’d just be her. You know–able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, baby strapped to her chest, on her way to the closest fine art museum. When I got here, I figured great motherhood was really about packing the most supreme educational experiences available into my child’s life, all while looking stunning. I wanted to hear things like, “How DOES she do it all?” “And she always looks so beautiful.” ” Just look at those kids!” Then, after the first week, the soft focus started to just look blurry. God gave me beautiful babies who’d wait until I had managed to feel a tiny bit elegant and then spit up all over my dress. I learned that while motherhood is its own amazing adventure, it also makes you so insanely tired that you’re not sure you can spin around without falling down. And the housework. Even the word sounds boring. I did not enter into motherhood with the idea that a hike would be getting from the door of the laundry room to the washing machine. And am I the only one that wants to gag when I have to fill out the occupation line on paperwork and write homemaker?! “Stay-at-home Mom” never seems to do it justice either. Where’s all the pizzazz? Where’s Wonder Woman???
As a wife, a mother, a woman, well, I feel like I need at least space enough for a paragraph just to begin to describe the ins and outs of who I am and what I do. It doesn’t seem fair for so many passionate, strong, complicated human beings to have to thump one foot on the floor, tap our fingertips on a counter top, and say, “Umm, let’s see…” when presented with a seemingly benign question like, “So, what did you do today?” Personally, I break out in a sweat when I get that question, knowing that just by pausing I am fueling the ridiculous idea that I sit around staring at soap operas all day with chocolates melting in my mouth. But at the moment the last thing I want to say is, “five loads of laundry—clean, folded, and put away; sanitized the toilets, vacuumed the floor, returned toys to bedrooms (again again again), put supper in the Crockpot to cook, wiped fingerprints off the front of the TV, wiped who-knows-what off the wall, searched out the odd smell in my son’s bedroom, placed an unidentified black digital-looking object on my husband’s night stand (no idea what it is or where it should go), paid 3 bills, soothed a crying friend, prayed and recited “I can do this” ten times in preparation for homework when the kids come home…” From somewhere within, I hear a tiny voice say, “You know, KAPOWPOW!” and then I think, “Wait, did I just say that out loud?”
From the time my own amazing mom started teaching me how to manage a home (I remember my “how to properly clean a bathroom” lessons, which always began with a poor effort on my part and ended with me standing behind my mom, watching as she scrubbed the floor and the toilets with Comet and a rag on her hands and knees. “I don’t believe in doing a half-way job,” she’d say through her teeth while I watched, “and if you do a half-way job, I just have to come behind you and do it all over again. Excruciating, but effective.) until very recently, I thought of housekeeping as a means to an end. Housework: the chores you do because you have to if you don’t want to live in complete filth. They are to be done well (Thank you, Mom!), but they are to be done as quickly as possible. Then, maybe just maybe there will be time left over for something I’d really like to be doing. Like saving the world. You know, Amazon princess.
As a friend of mine once pointed out, “Heroines never do the ordinary things like scrub grime off a wall, or wash dishes, fold laundry, or heaven forbid—dust. For that matter, they hardly ever go to the bathroom! You will never read a book about ordinary women doing ordinary things because it’s just too…well, ordinary.” And there’s not a person alive who really wants to be ordinary. On the days when I feel especially mediocre, the last place I want to escape in the pages of a novel is into someone else’s bathroom, where I can just smell the Comet on my fingertips. There have been days, when I’ve found myself thinking, “Really? This is it?”
I am, after all, a Super Chick. I feel it. Come on, admit it. You feel it too. You’ve got enough passion bubbling up inside you to blow up a building, and you’re sweating it out on dirt that will be there again next week. It sometimes feels like such a futile pursuit. You know, even June Cleaver showed herself too spunky for her molded hair, her dresses, and her dinner-on-the-table-on-time role, raising her eyebrows just enough to let us know that while she tolerated Ward’s perception of who she was, that didn’t mean it was all that she was. There were things I disliked about Pleasantville, but what I loved about that movie was the idea that it’s passion and adventure that make the world a colorful place. No one likes to live blandly, and yet, as Simone de Beauvoir said, “The torment that so many young women know is to be bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.” So the housework gets done because it has to, but women (and here and there a few men) live their lives just trying to get through it so that they can move on to the thing that we were really meant to do.
A few weeks ago, the kids had Spirit Week at school. Every day, they headed out the door wearing a special shirt, or a specific color, or a wacky pair of socks (Adam turned his nose up at the loud socks I borrowed for him from one of the girls and opted for white.). Friday was “Dress Like What You Want to be When You Grow Up” day. On the way home from school that Thursday, Zoe started thinking about what she should wear.
“Mom, what am I going to wear for ‘What I Want to be When I Grow Up’ day?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I want to be a nurse. Nurses help other people. I can wear a white shirt, and a streth—–What’s that thing that, you know, nurses and doctors wear on their necks and sometimes they put in it in their ears and they listen?”
“A stethoscope.”
“—-yea, okay I can wear that and you can umm make me a name tag that says ‘Nurse Zoe.’ ‘kay, Mom?”
“Sounds perfect.”
So Riley chimes in. “Umm, Mom? What am I going to be when I grow up?”
“I don’t know. Something fantastic.”
And Zoe turns to her and says, “Don’t worry, Riley. I’ll look in your closet and help you find something you can be.”
We got home, the tornado started spinning everything into a froth, and I completely forgot What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up Day. The next morning, when I walked downstairs, the first thing Riley said was, “Mom? When Zoe grows up, she’s going to be a nurse. When I grow up, I’m going to be a witch.”
I slid my eyes across the room to where Zoe was sitting on the couch listening to Adam’s heart with her stREthoscope. She shrugged. “Well, it was the only thing she had in her closet.”
It made me wonder what she’d dress me as if she walked in my closet. Unfortunately, “Mom uniforms” don’t have nearly enough KAPOWPOW, and I’m starting to think we all need to do something about that. It occurred to me, one recent Sunday when Kevin and I looked across the room at each other over a living room that was in complete shambles (we had a whole conversation in that one glance), that motherhood and managing a home really is about saving the world. I confess that I’d been putting home management on the back burner, determined that now that the kids were all in school, I WAS going to WRITE. EVERYDAY. It sounded glamorous to me (writing is my ultimate passion, after all), and it sounded like time. After all, the other stuff will always be there. And it’s housework. Just housework.
But our world was falling apart around us, and frankly, we all felt out of control. And it’s not hard to feel like that at the Three Ring Circus, where typical morning greetings range from “Good morning, Mom” to “Good morning. 25 cents gets 39 gumballs!” to “Mom, why can’t we drink Windex?” In the space of that nonverbal conversation with Kevin it occurred to me that home management is not ordinary grunt work. It is not just anything. For my family, it’s huge. It’s crucial. It’s hard, hard work. And it takes all the Superchick KAPOWPOW in me to accomplish it. And it takes God, and the kind of Power He is to fill me up until I can focus away from myself. In some crazy, unexpected way, it’s about saving the world—our little, crazy, offbeat world, where I can be standing on a ladder wiping grime off the top of my cabinets, and Adam will stand on a chair to show me a magnadoodle on which he has written 35:97, waiting for me to say the numbers back to him, just so we can talk to each other in a language that only he could possibly understand.
So, I have a new perspective on what we stay-at-home moms do everyday. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I actually get a little excited about turning my attention to the millions of things I do that used to be chores and housework. I’ve got a new attitude (wait… Do you hear Patti LaBelle too?). And a new vocabulary. I have missions to accomplish, and I am flying (I LOVE flylady!! www.flylady.net). And I am not making light of any of it. Not anymore. It is not a means to an end. It’s saving the world. And it matters.
Oh…and just to pay tribute to strong, passionate, look-out-world women everywhere, I dressed as Trinity this Halloween. Talk about a Super Chick. Kevin was Neo, and Adam was the Matrix itself. Because part of what Kevin and I do everyday is to try to help two of our children pull free of a million sensory distractions and challenges with communication that make it harder (harder…but definitely not impossible…they are the real superheroes) for them to engage in real relationships. Ordinary work? Never. So I guess now if Zoe searches in my closet for a mom uniform, she’ll find Trinity.:)
You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping. ~Rudyard Kipling
Housework, if it is done right, can kill you. ~John Skow
My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors. ~Bette Midler
The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes. ~Agatha Christie
