Because you see, while you’re busy ideating, communicating, spinning sentences into webs of understanding and outreach, the chores don’t go away. So there you are, your wonderful self, doing all these things like researching black feminist thought, organizing resistance movements, investigating the origins of Women of Color, documenting the oral history of the Partition, speaking as a panelist, constructing a sphere of influence around your persona, learning, teaching, sharing, writing, and still, the piles of laundry are unmoved. With the patience of stoics, they wait, to be washed, dried, folded, ironed, closeted away; and the dishes sit heavy in the washer, parked until removed and stashed away; and there’s no telling your bed linen to get a move on and do a DIY job, because it needs your keyboard-focused fingers to fold the shams and fluff the pillows, and crumbs are spilled and countertops splashed and the business of getting dirty-clean-dirty spins in endless cycles every day.
Your plants beg for a drink. Your carpet dreams of a dalliance with the dustbuster. Your car could do with a nice soapy scrub. They don’t care who you are, or what you do, they’re not cleaning themselves up, or putting themselves away, and will outstare and outsit you in every possible battle of wills until you finally relent and tackle them darn chores. For all your fabulousness, and even if you divide and conquer, there’s always that laundry list of things to do around the house that keeps you grounded, with the possible aim of marinating your ego in some well-deserved mediocrity. Amplify that times a thousand, and enter children. But we won’t even go there for now.
Hausfrauness: dripping dullness into the scintillating everyday, one reincarnated house chore at a time.
Wisdom Wears Neon Pyjamas 
one way street housework and with kids it turns into a tunnel … and the light shining is the dimglow of the laptop which now reads orangejammiesdotcom
You just summed up the story of my life. I need a real job. One where I wear high heels and lipstick and zoom away in my car every morning. Sigh.
maidinmalaysia: Aww!
RS: You’re alive! I thought it was Death by Tinda.
dear OJ, don’t stop. Right you are that hausfrauness will thrive despite us. Don’t stop the things that won’t. With apologies to Lady Angelou –
Below mountains of grease
And overcooked lentils
Wearing hot pink rubber gloves
Scrubbing, I’ll rise.
Folded between layers
Of grass stains and stomach bugs
Ratty seams of their fabric
Can’t muffle my cries.
Does my domesticity scare you?
Or is it these scars on belly tires?
‘Cause beneath my silk pashminas
Are stains immune to lies.
You may shoot me with your wallet
You may cut me with your perks
Like dust on magic carpets
Still, I’ll rise.
This is sooooooooo true of my life, I’m wondering if you live in the house that has 3 windows that stare into my living room.
Null Pointer: More Angelou! “I”m a hausfrau, phenomenally. Phenomenal hausfrau, that’s me.” 🙂
MomWithaDot: All of us, hon. Or at least a huge, honkin’, chunky slice of the populace. Even my mum with domestics milling about her isn’t rid of it.
This is precisely why,
Though i stopped by,
Couldn’t comment
December totally spent
In functions that couldn’t be given the go-by!
So true! It’s a tussle to balance everything. Loved the ending: “Hausfrauness: dripping dullness into the scintillating everyday, one reincarnated house chore at a time.” 🙂
Aunty G: I hear you, I do
What you speak is so true
Without reason or rhyme
There flies the time
And the month is through!
DFSK: 🙂 Why they don’t send us to professional juggling school is what I want to know.
Wottodo???
It be there.
It needs to be done:(
dipali55: Unless, of course, one is Mary Poppins. I’ve watched that clean-up scene with increasing wistfulness in my adulthood. 😦