The other day I was rummaging through my dresser for a runaway sock, and at the bottom of the drawer were a pair of aprons handed down to me from my mother when I was twenty one years old, shortly after I was married. She gave them to me because they were old, and thought that I might want to have them. My mother never wore aprons, so how and why she came upon these are beyond me. But I started thinking about what these aprons represented at the time they were given to me, and how I see them now.

Five short years ago, I was slightly (and silently) offended that my mother had passed down to me what I felt were the very symbols of feminine marital repression, the chastity belts of kitchen fidelity where a “woman knew her place”, and that was in the home. I reluctantly took them because they were a gift from my mother and I didn’t want to be rude. However, it must be said that it has never been my temperament to be the Happy Homemaker, content with baking pies and scrubbing floors while enjoying a small allowance from the hubby every week. Thus, the aprons got tucked away in the dresser.

The days of Donna Reed and June Cleaver are long gone.

I grew up in a home where my mother had performed the same household tasks her own mother had done, just like her grandmother before her. Dad wore the pants, brought home the bacon, and my mother kept the house spotlessly clean, sometimes scrubbing until her knuckles bled. She had never worked a “real” job or tried to get her driver’s license, and no matter if my father was in the wrong, she stood vehemently behind him.

As a result of seeing my mother’s life firsthand, when I was a teenager, my definition of marriage was equivalent to a lifetime prison sentence. My mother had dreams that she had never had the chance to achieve, she married far too young, never graduated high school, and then by the time she could have realized what she wanted to do, she had two children to raise and everything got put on the backburner. My mother has a voice that would bring a songbird to tears, and every time I heard her sing, it was as if she were that caged songbird longing to be free. To me, marriage nailed the self you used to be in a dark corner, and what you were going to prepare for dinner had stepped in its place. Housewives were shells of their former selves.

However, I’m nearly twenty seven years old, and I find myself living a similar life. Similar, yes; but not exact. In these few short years, I have matured, and now I see that marriage is definitely not the misogynist demon I made it out to be in my younger years. My husband works ten hours a day, and between my day to day creative projects, I clean the house and prepare dinner before he comes home. I am not a housewife. I am a maverick, a multi-tasker, and a domestic engineer.

We now live in the time of Martha Stewart and Paula Dean, successful businesswomen who make a living off promoting the home. The modern, Pro-Fem versions of Donna Reed and June Cleaver.

By all of my teenaged assumptions and definitions, my not working in a physical establishment for employment defines me as a housewife. Yes, I already have one degree. I am pursuing my own writing endeavors while working on a book of folk tales set in Appalachia. I still create artwork manically, and occasionally I make a sale or commission (occasionally is simply because I have a knack for painting things that don’t match the couch or carpet and back home that’s why people buy artwork). And, I continue to go to college part time to get my Bachelor's degree in Art History.

Yet still, I realize I am living the day to day life of my foremothers. And you know what? It’s not so bad.

I’m not a shell of my former self. If anything, I’m an upgraded version. I found a partner who fosters nothing but support for anything I choose to do, and sometimes he nags that I should be doing more because it would be a waste of my talents. I really hit a hole in one with him. Especially after my teenage self went against my own judgment of lifelong anti-matrimony because I loved him.

I am glad I didn’t listen to my younger self, because I am experiencing on the whole, a great life that has only been enhanced by his presence. If he loves me enough to support me while I am going to college and trying to get my name out as a writer and artist, by golly I will be happy to cook his dinner and wash his clothes till the cows come home. Not because he brings home the majority of the money in the house, but because we are a partnership, and he made a long-term investment by putting faith in me. That kind of faith and support means that bigger, better things will come. It just takes time, and he’s in no hurry. He’s scratching my back so I can scratch his later. I do my work outside of the traditional establishment, but that doesn’t mean that what I do is less valuable than what he does. It’s a 50/50 deal and thank goodness we both see things that way.

Back to staring at those scraps of cloth at the bottom of the drawer, I looked at those aprons for a few more seconds and saw that when I was young, I made the mistake of not putting value on my mother’s work. If I had been objective, I would have seen that she really had the hardest job of all. I only focused on all the things she hadn’t achieved, not all the great things that were a product of her running the home.

She raised two intelligent, mostly responsible kids who turned out well. She kept our family together when the only thing binding it was a strip of moth eaten cloth. She made huge dinners that kept our bellies full on less than five dollars a day. She changed diapers and wiped snotty noses, washed clothes and did the yard work. My mother deserves a medal of honor for what she’s done, and she isn’t finished yet.

When I was twenty two, my mother got her high school degree and started college. She’s been working ever since. She didn’t miss out on life because she married young and raised a family for twenty years; she was just a late bloomer. I am so proud of her and thankful that she sacrificed those twenty years of her life just to care for her family. That was the greatest love of all.

Those aprons are now a symbol of love, and remind me at every glance that I’m lucky to love and be loved. Your worth shouldn’t be measured by whether you are running the rat race or not. Equal value should be placed on anything you do, even if it does require getting your hands dirty every once in a while. To all the mothers and domestic engineers out there, I salute you.

~Kell

Labels: Appalachia, feminism, housewife, housewives, love, marriage, mother, nonfiction, symbolism, true story