THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE
Yes. She said yes a lot. ‘Mam’ they would scream. ‘Yes’
she would answer. ‘Can we…?, will you…?, can you find…?, will you make…?can I have…?’
. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes to everything. Sometimes she wanted to stand on
top of the kitchen table banging pots together and scream ‘NO’ at the top of
her voice. Sometimes just picturing their shocked little faces should she ever build
up the courage to actually do that got her through the tougher parts of her
day. Parts where she was wrist deep in greenish yellow baby poop, with a
kicking infant peeing on her while ‘In The Night Garden’ blasted from the
sitting room at deafening decibels as her other two little angles punched,
kicked and bit their way through the morning.
This was not what she signed up for. She just would never have imagined that seven years on from their magical first date, they would have a brood of
children, (her first thought there had been horrible little monsters), he would
be losing all the hair on his head only to find it again on his shoulders,
back, neck and stomach, and she would be leaving unholy amounts of dandruff on
her pillow every morning and be suffering from mild, yet highly embarrassing
and inconvenient bladder problems as a result of giving birth to twins with
abnormally large heads.
No, this really isn’t what she signed up for.
But all the same she loves them. At least she supposes
she loves them although she is not quite sure if it’s out of a sense of duty or
if she really truly from the heart loves them. Either way she’s stuck with them
now.
‘oh you’re so lucky!’ her single friends bleat at her
with their perfectly coiffured hair, flawless make up (actual make up, not the
marker her five year old found in her handbag and decided to put on her as
lipstick), size ten jeans, and highly impractical nails. Yea, sure.
But no she knew she had everything that most women her
age desired, craved even. The problem was that she had never desired or craved
this sort of life. In fact she used to loathe it. She used to think that women who settled for this
sort of life were beneath her somehow, that she would never fall into the trap
of mainstream misogynistic patriarchy by settling down and having children
while the man of the house went out to work and the wee wife stayed at home to
keep house. Yet here she was. She resented herself for giving in to societal norms.
Where was the fire in her belly gone? Where was her passion gone? Where was she
gone?
A clattering sound from the kitchen broke her reverie, ‘MAAAAAAAM!!!’
hellish screeching met her ears and a red squinted face, tear streaked and sniffling
peeked round the door at her.
‘Yes love, mammy’s coming.’
