Domestic Affairs

Domestic Affairs by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online

Book: Domestic Affairs by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online
Authors: Joyce Maynard
babysitter, keeping up with the laundry, baking at midnight, getting up at dawn. It’s hard scheduling dentists’ appointments and car inspections and immunizations. It’s hard, when there are three little mouths all asking for three different brands of cereal, catching what that other adult, halfway across the kitchen table, has to say, and hard having something to say to him besides “Can you take the compost out?”
    It’s hard to walk out the door, when there’s a two-year-old boy standing there behind you, stretching out his arms and saying, “I want you.” But the hardest part comes after.
    Out the door, down the road, on the plane. You’ve made your escape, and now you can open your briefcase, plug in your computer, make your summation to the jury. Buckle your seatbelt and soar …
    Only all you can think of is their faces. Did you remember to set out his Masters of the Universe training pants? Are we out of peanut butter? Does she know one of her winter boots is underneath the living-room couch, with a dinosaur stuck inside?
    “When you were growing up,” I asked Steve the other day, “how many of your friends’ mothers worked?” At jobs outside the home, I was careful to add, as always, knowing all the things a stay-at-home mother does, that make the life of a woman sitting at a desk seem pretty uncomplicated by comparison.
    He thought a moment. His own mother never held a job, until her four children were in high school and college. She is one of those women (that dying breed) who made running a home her art. More than once, over the years, I’ve heard my mother-in-law say, “I loved being a housewife. Those were the best years of my life.” Since then she has returned to school, worked as a librarian, run her own bookstore. But the job she loved best was (what I have never really been) full-time mother. At the executive level, and irreplaceable.
    Back to my question. As I said, Steve had to think about it for a while. Finally he gave up. He couldn’t think of a single mother he had known, in those years from the early fifties to the mid-sixties, when he grew up, who’d held a full-time job. Of course, he’d lived in a pretty middle-class suburb. But try finding a community anywhere, today, without one employed mother.
    Well, my mother held jobs when I was growing up, but I remember what an oddity that was, how torn she felt, and how unfair it seemed to me. There were no day-care centers or after-school programs back then. And somehow my mother always managed to make pies and keep our cookie tin filled, to sew dresses for us and our dolls, in spite of her jobs. There was no model, yet, of that other sort of mother who’s become pretty commonplace today—the one who comes home, at six, with a pizza or a box of fried chicken. The one who serves cookies from a package that says Almost Home.
    Now, among the mothers of my daughter’s classmates at school, nearly every one holds down a job. I know, because Audrey’s teacher has told me how hard it is, these days, to find a mother who’s able to help out with the class field trips or type up the children’s stories or volunteer to make cupcakes. When the first grade held their Pilgrim banquet, half the mothers signed up to supply juice and no one came forward with home-baked cornbread. As for me, I sent paper cups.
    There are still a handful of these other mothers in our town, and because there are so few of them now, they’re in big demand. I know all their names, because they’re always the ones at the Friends of the School meetings and the fund-raising yard sales. Sometimes their children come over to play, and they wear hand-knit sweaters, or a home-sewn dress identical to the one on their Cabbage Patch doll. I hear little things about them: They have ruffled curtains in their rooms, to match the bedspread. Their houses have window boxes filled with pansies. Their socks match. They wear their hair in French braids. The stockings they hang on

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