Tuesday, December 8, 1998
FORGET equal-opportunity, forget equal-pay; I don't want my husband's job, I want my husband's wife! Help wanted:
By Ruth O. Bingham
Rent-a-wife;
no pay, high rewards
I want someone to get the kids up, fed and out the door in the morning. I want someone to remember haircuts, permission forms and all the paraphernalia for those after-school activities.
I want someone to cook all those dinners so that I can sit down when I get home after a long, hard day.
I want my and the kids' clothes clean and ready to go Monday morning. And I sure as heck don't want to spend my weekends cleaning, chauffeuring the kids around, running errands and shopping!
I want someone to watchdog my family's mental and physical health, someone to keep on top of appointments, medications, and new books on parenting and relationships.
I want someone else to remember relatives' birthdays and to plan Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I'll show up, I love them all, I just don't have the time and energy to do them.
Perhaps if I were more organized I could do it all and have time left at the end of the day for a quiet cup of tea and gentle conversation with my husband. Or so the theory goes.
Or if I were a better mother/manager, I could patiently teach my children to be responsible for themselves and teach my husband to pick up his own piles and write thank-you notes. And they would actually learn it all.
That's a good laugh.
And we've all heard the one about the ideal relationship, in which husbands and wives share household chores 50-50, but that will never work. He works far too many hours and hardly even has time to sleep as it is ... which is why I don't want his job. I don't need any more to do, I would miss my time with the kids, and besides, who would do all this other stuff?
I can see only one reasonable solution: wives for everyone!
Why should only men have wives? Equal rights! I want one, too. They're a basic necessity for modern life: we all need someone to take up the slack.
Imagine the new household: parent(s), child(ren), pet(s) ... and wife. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone take care of the details so we could concentrate on living our lives, raising our children, working our jobs?
Of course, the wealthy have always lived this way, hiring "personal secretaries," "butlers" and the like, which is why so many wealthy women seem to accomplish so much in the world. I just think the availability of an extra pair of hands should be more common. At the very least, it would establish a market value for what wives do.
And yet ... Even daydreaming, I think about what I would be giving up. That jumble of nagging details keeps me intimately connected to my life.
I learn more about my two sons by pushing a cart through a grocery store together than I do by discussing the day over dinner. I celebrate birthdays and holidays more fully by creating them than I do by attending. And I discover more about the tides of living and loving by struggling through than by hiring out.
I've always wondered whether one of the reasons women live longer than men is that we often have more and better living skills.
Wifing is valuable, if not valued work, inwardly productive although externally intangible. Perhaps that is why I can't quite give it up yet.
Now, if only I could get my husband to want to do some of it ...
Ruth O. Bingham has been a wife for 22 years and is the mother of two.
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