Poof! I’m a Housewife

I was transformed into a housewife while on a walk in the early spring of 2020. I believe it was St. Patrick’s Day.

I did not encounter a diminutive solitary fairy with an interest in footwear who presented me with a pot of gold with which to fund a life without my income. I was not granted a long-held wish to devote myself to hearth and home. A supernatural creature didn’t intentionally prank me. But, circumstances did arrange themselves in such a way as to make the transformation if not inevitable, or hugely desirable, then certainly practical.

A contagious disease of unknown origin oozed across the globe like some sort of Steven King fog and life, as we knew it, changed. In the US we entered a period of “lockdown” to attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Schools closed. Work was either temporarily suspended or transformed to home-based remote work done on computers over the internet. Only those whose jobs were deemed essential to survival  (grocery store clerks, emergency medical technicians, plumbers, etc.) attempted to go on in person as normal—only “normal” involved doing tasks while wearing Personal Protective Equipment and, if possible, behind plexiglass shields).

I wasn’t new to working from home. I’d been doing it since 2013 when I started a freelance editorial business that operated out of a desk space I’d squeezed into a corner of my bedroom. I helped authors develop college-level textbooks and related educational materials and had recently taken on curriculum design for high school advanced placement courses.

I’d stumbled into educational publishing after getting my Master’s in English. At first I did it in an office that I drove to every day. We created textbooks for future teachers that taught them how to manage classrooms, develop early literacy and mathematic skills, and utilize educational technology. I wore blazers and grabbed watery burnt coffee from the little deli on the first floor. I went to meetings in people’s offices, prayed I’d managed to operate the fax machine properly, and tried not to have to replace the toner in the copy machine. I attempted to avoid the lady who always wanted to start a conversation in the bathroom while I was peeing. I wore high heels every day and dress pants that buttoned at the waist and went out to lunch with work friends.

But then, right after I had my daughter and returned from maternity leave, I was laid off along with all the rest of the folks with my job description. But, the work we did still needed to be done, so we were offered our old tasks back, just paid hourly and without health insurance, bonuses, time off, and other such benefits. And we could do those tasks at home.

Less job security, but also less of a need to wear actual pants.  Very contract worker. So 21st Century.

I’d already arranged to have my mother-in-law (MIL) watch the kiddo while I was at work and saw no reason that needed to change. I set up my workstation in my bedroom, filed the paperwork for my new LLC, and got right back to it, picking up additional clients as I went.

It never occurred to me to stop working.

I was born at the tail-end of the 70s and raised in the 80s and 90s. While there was some depiction of women who stayed at home, and while my mother initially stayed at home with me, that way of life felt old-fashioned. The women in television reruns were the homemakers. Like June Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver vacuuming her house while dressed up to attend a dinner party. Or Marion Cunningham in Happy Days. They cooked and they cleaned and they looked after the kids.

The modern moms on prime time TV when I was a kid were feminists and had careers. They were lawyers like Clair Huxtable in the Cosby Show or architects like Elyse Keaton on Family Ties. They also cooked, and cleaned, and looked after the kids. But they had whole additional identities. In the late 80s, I remember looking at my grandma in her pumps and statement jewelry, coming home from her work as an office administrator in a hospital and marveled at how glamorous she seemed. And when my mom went back to college to become a teacher when I was in 4th grade it cemented that, regardless of all the other stuff women did, they also had careers.

In the spring of 2020, my daughter was in kindergarten. A bright kid, she’d always had a large vocabulary. At one point, in her toddlerhood, at a developmental stage where kids used, on average, 15-20 words, her dad, my MIL, and I started listing words we’d heard her use regularly and stopped counting when we realized she had well over 50. But she’d had a rough patch with her last preschool teacher that left her with bruised self-confidence. Computerized adaptive testing in kindergarten aimed at identifying her strengths and weaknesses eroded her self-esteem even more, causing panic attacks. Struggles with learning to read had her in tears, doubting her ability to master basic literacy.

And the lockdown was asking her to learn remotely at home via a computer. A functionally illiterate six-year-old was being asked to navigate a school-district-provided laptop computer to her prepackaged lessons that she couldn’t parse, manage her time, and complete school work with maybe, probably, but they weren’t sure how, some type of supervision by her teacher via the laptop’s video camera. A teacher who had playfully outed herself as technologically illiterate at meet-the-teacher night in the fall. This didn’t sound like a recipe for success to anyone.

I assumed that the kid would just go over to Grandma MIL for schooling during this lockdown period. (MIL being a retired preschool teacher and an excellent companion to the daughter.) But the thing with this disease was that it seemed to be hitting the older people way harder. And it was deemed necessary to isolate each household unit from each other. Grandma MIL wasn’t in our unit (or “pod” as the idea came to be known later).

My husband and I  were afraid that if we sent the kiddo back and forth to MIL we’d inadvertently kill the grandparents. Or we’d get the kid sick. And we didn’t know how getting infected with this novel disease would impact her future. Maybe it would cause brain damage or infertility or lead to cancer down the road like HPV. So, we were closing ranks. There were three people in our pod: the kiddo, my husband Jon, and me. A six-year-old, a freelancer earning shy of $50,000 a year, and a computer programmer earning much more than that amount.

Jon suggested splitting shifts. One of us would help the kid get an education while the other one worked and then we’d pass the kid off like a human baton in a relay race and the other would get to work while the first one entertained the kid. But I was already feeling pushed to my limit even before the disease with what in hindsight feels like unmedicated, chronic postpartum depression, a liberal dose of the effects of until recently-unaddressed alcohol use disorder, and possibly autism spectrum disorder or an adjacent spicy tinge to my neural functioning that makes me very sensitive to what I experience as disruptive stimuli.

My goal was to get through this whole virus lockdown thing and have the family all still like each other at the end of it. I thought about all the extra meal prep and cleaning that would be required for three people being at home 24-7. I envisioned three computer stations where we could all work simultaneously. I tried to imagine fielding questions about how a Chromebook works while simultaneously evaluating the readability of a description of the essential daily tasks of a paralegal.

It seemed like a lot.

But I was a feminist. Feminists had careers. But I was also a person. A person who wanted to stay sane.  And I made less money than Jon. And I didn’t carry the health insurance like Jon. And I’d spent the last 10 plus years developing books on early childhood education. That could come in useful, considering there was an early child in the house who needed an education.

So, in a moment of bitter practical despair, I realized that I couldn’t bear the thought of adding more work without taking something away. And, while I liked my job, it seemed like the easiest thing to let go. The only way I could see to deal with this lockdown and end it still enjoying the people that I lived with was to take a break from my business and become a housewife/teaching assistant. I would devote myself to cooking, cleaning, and looking after the kid while my husband worked. I wasn’t happy about it. I was angry. And I cried. But it made sense. I had no idea that it would last for two years.