A Traditional Housewife: Part 2

I’ve staying with Dotty this week, and it has been really, really hard!  She works 12-16 hour days, so I stay home, just like a traditional housewife, and I get some work done and it is OK, but, wow, would it have sucked to have this as a life.  I had quite a bit of work to do, but since I was on vacation, that meant 4 hours a day.  And then I’d shop for her, cook for her, clean the house for her.  She invited friends over and at one point wasn’t there to great them and I had to play hostess to her friends when I didn’t know where she was.  One night, she didn’t get home until midnight, when she said she’d be home “in a couple of hours” at 6.  I had a plate of food waiting in the fridge but she’d snacked at work. 

I felt a lot of the resentments that I read from women in the early 1960s.  When I took care of my dad when he was ill, I felt really fulfilled.  I made a difference for him and I loved taking care of him.  But with Dotty, I felt lonely and neglected and taken for granted because I have no social life here (my cell phone doesn't work where she lives--only Verizon works) and at the end of the day, I want her to notice what I did to make her house nicer and ask about my day and she is too tired.

And here’s the thing: Dotty is one of the most lovely, thoughtful people I know.  But work is eating her alive.  She is ‘only’ scheduled to work 9 hours a day, but that’s my equivalent of billable hours.  And, of course, I make a third of what I could so that I don't have that stress. It seems possible that in 6 months, she’ll be down to working maybe 60 hours a week, but right now, I’d say she’s working closer to 100.  She needs a ‘housewife,’ but it would be a pretty grim, isolated and lonely existence for anyone depending on her for a partnership. 

Dotty is stretched to the breaking point.  I can feel the stress.  She feels 10 years older than when I saw her in January.   I’m scared for her--I don’t know how she can keep up the life she is living. But she only gets 10 vacation days this year, and they have already been scheduled for a cousin’s wedding and to visit her parents.  (I cannot even imagine a life where I only got 10 vacation days a year.) But it made me realize that much of the traditional male/female issues can be accredited to the shitty working conditions in this country.  There are no gender issues with Dotty and myself.  There’s just the fact that she is horribly overworked and I’m staying in a community I don’t know, in a home where I’m a guest, trying to take a little of the stress off her shoulders.

But clearly, we need better conditions for the people who work full time as well.