I have a feeling that this entry might get a little long.  They do that when I’ve been up for a day, caring for a stray dog that found its way to our house.  (Strays tend to find me.  I’m okay with that, especially when they come in the cutest little puppy-package ever, and despite the fact that we have three already and I only have two hands.)

Yesterday…er…well, the day before, technically….when I was in the bookstore looking for books on the whole Wifely thing, my first thought was to hit the self-help section.

So I did.  And while I found several shelves of books on relationships, ranging in topic from how to marry the perfect man and how to change the perfect man you married, all the way to how to dump a man and be okay about that — I really didn’t find much on how to be a wife.  What to do, how to act, what all goes into it.  That kind of thing.

The religion section, shelved in the next aisle, was a little different.  By way of comparison, there were twenty-seven books on how to be a devoted wife.  (And, I might add, precisely ZERO on how to be a good husband.  Clearly, the Christian publishing industry thinks that either men don’t read or that it’s the women that need all the help.)

I eventually scrapped the idea of finding written inspiration and retired myself to the cooking section instead, but I did spend some time looking at a few of the books, which seemed to me to be diametrically opposed to one another.

The self-help books were all about what you could do, as a wife, to make your husband behave better.  The blame was squarely on the shoulders of the men in the relationships — they didn’t clean up after themselves, or they didn’t attend to your needs, or one of a host of sins that they were making.  The “inspirational” section’s books took a different tack, of course.  Most of them were about the biblical idea of marriage, and what it entails in order to be pleasing to the God they were talking about.  Much of the book I looked through had to do with the idea of submission, and what the wife’s responsibilites are, and about how the husband is always right unless he’s asking the wife to do something that would be a Sin, capital-S.

Between these two very different volumes, I had the thought that marriage in this day and age is a confusing thing.  It’s almost like there are two different ideas of what marriage even is.   The secular crowd has the whole idea of partnership of equals, each pursuing his or her own goals and ambitions separately and partnering on the decision-making.  The religious marriage is one of heirarchy and responsibility to one another — the woman, agreeing to marry a man, is taking a job, of sorts.  And it’s a job where she will always have a “boss” in her husband.

It also occurred to me that the divorce rate in this country is insanely high.  They’re saying (the ubiquitous They Who Know Statistics, I mean) that it’s somewhere around 60% of couples married today won’t still be married when they leave this earth.  That’s a little scary, and putting the two-and-two together made me a little angry.

Partnerships are hard to maintain.  Equal partnerships even moreso.  Look at businesses that are partnerships if you need an example of that — sooner or later, one of ‘em is going to either leave or be profoundly disgruntled at the other’s show of power, since they were supposed to be equal.  Without a Final Say Person, decisions are either made by consensus or not made at all. After all, there are only two choices and no deciding votes.

So why are we encouraging married couples to put themselves in a position where there’s no deciding vote, without a religious framework to say who’s in charge?  Which led me around to the fact that there are entire legions of people who think that marriage is outdated as a concept anyway, and for secular people, not really relevant anyway.  The word “husband” has that whole animal-husbandry connotation, and most modern women wouldn’t want to feel “kept” or “shepherded” anyway, because we’re taught that we’re equals in everything.

So who’s wrong?  The people who say that women should be equals in a marriage or the people who claim that wives should be submissive and subservient in all things to her husband of choice?  (Not subservient as a person, but within the context of the marriage itself.)

I’d intended to vent here a bit about the idea of submission being distasteful — and franky, a little scary — to me personally, but the philosophy behind it is fascinating to me.  It all comes down to what kind of a wife I want to be and what kind of a life I want to live, really, in the end.

I’m still not sure what’s right, though.

In an attempt to keep up my momentum today, I waited until J got home from work and went to Target to pick up a new vaccuum cleaner. Ours was eaten about a month ago by the Demons Of Dog Hair, and upon the recommendation of several of my cleaner friends, I’d decided to splurge a bit in the vaccuum department and get something that was made for The Pet Hair Of Dooom (insert ominous-sounding music here).

I’d thought I’d pick up a different model of Dyson, one of the upper-level, sell-your-kidney-to-science-to-pay-for-it models, but when I got to the store, they were running a promotion on the little baby pictured above. It’s not top of the line, but it’s still a Dyson (and has a five-year warranty), and it’s PINK. Not only am I kind of a fan of pink, but Dyson is donating $40 to the Breast Cancer Reasearch Fund with every purchase. So I’m getting rid of my dog hair AND I’m helping women everywhere to have healthier breasts. I’m all for healthy breasts, since my own aren’t so healthy. (That’s a story for another day, though.)

Of course, I immediately came home, assembled it, and started vacuuming everything in the house. No surface with dust or hair is now safe — it even has an attachment that will work to brush and vacuum the dog hair…directly off the dog. This makes me happier than I really want to admit to anyone other than y’all. (I just keep imagining there are a handful of close friends out there reading this with me. So I’m talking to you.)

Also in the wifely “Exceedingly Geeky But Happy” department of purchasing, I thought I’d spend my 30% off coupon at Borders bookstore on another knitting book (my library is insane…), but I thought I’d look through the domestic arts types of sections in an attempt to further this Wife Project a little. Normally, I hit the magazines and the crafty-type area, and maybe get some coffee, but I found the cookbook sections today.

As I wandered into the aisle, my eye caught something a few shelves down that made me squeal a little. I wish I could say it had been an under the breath kind of squeal, too…but it wasn’t. I scared people in the diet section, the next aisle over.

What I found was this:

The Cooky Book, by the Betty Crocker Editors.

Seriously.

When I was growing up, my mom had this book.  The original, 1973 version, with the color inserts and the vintagey-looking recipes with the letterpress-type flourishes and illustrations and all.  I used to sit there at the kitchen table — the impeccably clean and dressed kitchen table, with its matching placemats and seasonal floral arrangements and not a speck of dust on the counters — and go through this book page by page, picking the things I would bake as soon as my mom would help me.  Our family’s favorite EVER sugar cookie recipe comes from this book, which I’d thought was out of print.  Apparently, the Betty Crocker folks brought it back this year, and is publishing it in its original form.  It even looks the same on the inside!

I beat tracks getting to the counter, clutching it to my chest like I’d found an abandoned puppy or something, and paid so quickly that I forgot to use my coupon.

I’m forseeing lots of cookys (sic) in my near future.  Which, of course, won’t help with the getting-in-shape part of my goals, but will definitely help me get in the kitchen more often, and has that whole Fifties Housewife feel about it.

I’ll make sure to take pictures.  If I’m not too busy baking or vacuuming, that is.

It’s late, I’m exhausted, and my studio has gone from having a relatively clear floor to being a giant disaster area.

But, you know what?  I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

In the interest of getting started with the “nurturing relationships” part of my general set of first goals (see the About the Project page over there on the left…), I hosted a huge (for me) party for about a dozen crafty women tonight.  At one point, half of them in the room were people I didn’t even know.   And for me, that’s big.  (You’d never know it to “meet” me online, but I’m horribly shy in skinspace.  It takes a fair bit of caffeine and possibly some tequila before I’ll start talking to strangers.)

We all came together under the banner of yarn.  We knit and spun and crocheted together, talking sometimes amongst ourselves and sometimes as a group.  I taught two people how to spin yarn with a spindle, and we collectively dumped out the cullings of our wool-and-fiber stashes on the studio table and picked through them for new things to take home.

I had intended to make it a little more personal — I wanted to make homemade cookies or pies or something — but we ended up with pizzas and garlic bread from a local chain, and the world did not implode.  My house was not 100% clean, but the sky did not fall.  Hell, I wasn’t even wearing a bra when the guests started to arrive.  But it all went incredibly well.

There’s a lesson in this for me.  For a while now, I’ve been too worried that things weren’t perfect at home, and that when they were, finally, I’d start inviting people over more often.  I thought I’d take that step when I’d finally started in with the house, so at least I could blame the chaos and disarray on being in the midst of rennovation.  But I don’t need to wait until things are perfect.

I just need to take the steps, be a gracious hostess, and do what I can.

The rest takes care of itself.

(Not that it’ll stop me from starting the rest of The Project.  But it’s good to know that I’m able to look past it long enough to really connect with people if I need to.  It’s all part of this evolution, baby…and if it means that next week there are painted walls and I serve hors d’oeuvres in an apron — or not — that’s fine, too.)

Step one, taken.

I’m one of those people for whom a book can be made or broken by its first paragraph.  I’ll stand in the bookstore and read the first page of books I’m considering, and if it bores me, or at least doesn’t intrigue me at all, I put it back on the shelf and walk away, looking for something else to read.

So maybe this first post has a bit more significance to me.  I’m hoping to come up with just the right paragraph that will set the stage, tell my story, serve to introduce myself and this project.

It’s a lot of pressure.  I think I need more coffee.

In a lot of ways, I’m a first-time housewife.  We’ve been married for two years now, my husband and I, but for a lot of that time, I’ve been fighting against the internalized belief that I had to do something.  Make money.  Be productive and responsible in the world at large.  Have a career my husband would be proud of.  Somehow, I thought that taking care of him, the dogs, and the house, and preparing for and working toward having children wasn’t as good as if I’d been out in the world, bringing home a paycheck.

The other day, though, I sat down and looked around at my life.  I’m relatively successful, I work at home, and my body is falling apart.  We won’t even talk about the state of our house.  (Let’s just say that the dust bunnies?  Spawned.  They’re now dirt elephants and they keep trying to carry off the dogs.)  The whole point of my rearranging of my work so I could do it from home is lost when I’m working from home for eighty hours a week or more, and there are two weeks’ worth of dishes in the sink.

I have strengths and weaknesses, and goals I want to achieve with this project.  I’ll list them over there in the sidebar, under the “About the Project” page.  (Understand, this project and site are primarily for me to keep track and record my own process.  It might also apply to you, but I’m not trying to make this universal.  Feel free to use the information as applies, or not.  Either way.)

Through this blog, this Project, I really want to learn things.  Improve things.  Stop being ashamed to tell people that I’m a housewife or homemaker, or feel like I have to gloss that part over when people ask me what I do.  I want to focus on what’s important, my (hopefully soon) growing family and our lives.  I want to make my husband’s life easier the way he wants to do the same for me.

And I’m inviting you along for my wild ride.

Enjoy the roller-coaster.  I know I’m going to.

Amy, of Angry Chicken (a *very* cool housewife, by the way), has in her blog today a link to a free PDF that she created with all her favorite recipes on one sheet.

Talk about a brilliant idea.   I think I might make one of these for myself, customized a little for the stuff my husband and I eat.  (Which, by the way, is a little less baked and a little more grease-laden, sadly, than Amy’s.)

Hoping to launch this site today, or at least get writing rather than messing with code.  I’ve some social obligations, though, that might get in the way.

This is a placeholder post. It is holding the place for actual, real content, which will be here as soon as everything’s set.

eta:

Hi. I’m Wife. Also known as Liz to friends and family.

I’m a CSS dunderhead, so if you’re finding this on or around October 10th, you’re not crazy; there’s nothing here yet. As soon as I finish picking my way through this code and making things pretty (homemaking on the internet?), this will be a blog for and about a particular type of housewife — but will be applicable to most homemakers, housewives, and domestic engineers.

Welcome. Wipe your feet before you come in, and have some cookies.