Super Mom

I really don’t know how my mom did it. Three kids, a large house, and a full time job. I have myself, a little apartment, and I’d hardly call it a “job”. And I feel like I am always doing housework. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not stressed or in a time crunch but that’s only because I have as much free time as any one person needs. Like today I went swimming in the morning and then went to the grocery store and outdoor market. I bought milk and eggs, fruits and vegetables and loaded them all into my cart, steering through the pot holed streets of my neighborhood and up to my apartment. Then I proceeded to clean my whole house, mopped the floors, washed the dishes, put out my fresh cut flowers, and washed all the produce. After that I ate and took a nap before practice. And that was my day (okay so somewhere in there I got my nails done). A great day for me, its sunny outside, I love going to the market and cleaning my apartment feels so good. But I do find myself cleaning a lot just to keep my apartment looking nice and I don’t have to clean up after anyone but myself. I don’t know how my mom kept our house livable because aside from “family clean up” every Sunday, which, by the way, always turned into a giant family fight, I don’t think we helped her out with house work all that much. And we made a lot of mess. Plus I don’t think anyone ever sympathized with her much when she freaked out about the house being dirty. As a female and a feminist I should have been more understanding but I was the youngest and just wanted to play with my brothers and not hear about how the dishwasher needed to be emptied. I just didn’t understand why she hated having the house dirty. Now of course, I can totally understand how coming home to a messy house after working ten hours could drive someone nuts. But then, no, I had more important things on my mind…. Like how to avoid getting pinned down on the oriental carpet in the living room.

Food preparation alone is a job. I mean for three growing kids who didn’t have small appetites, just keeping the house stocked with food must have been difficult. We bought in bulk a lot; trips to Costco where our cart was bigger than the Vietnamese store owner’s next to us in line. These trips took a long time, used a lot of money and the food didn’t really even last us that long. So my mom would then have to go to the supermarket just to keep food on the table. I find myself going to the grocery store like every other day. Granted I don’t have a car so I only buy about 20 euros worth of food at a time but still, I am only feeding myself and I’m happy with a turkey sandwich for every meal but breakfast. I can’t imagine cooking for a family every night and keeping enough food for them to have lunch, breakfast, and snacks. We ate a lot.

Plus just planning for meals takes work. You have to make sure you have all the ingredients, make sure people will eat it, and then go about cooking it. We weren’t especially picky eaters I don’t think but, inevitably there were times when whatever she cooked wasn’t what someone was in the mood for. So she’d whip up some eggs or rice pudding. Simple meals but still time consuming when she probably just wanted to go to bed. All that on top of a 40 hour week?


Then there is laundry. To think that I used to have my mom do all my laundry! Like it was her fault if my jersey wasn’t clean or if my favorite pants hadn’t been washed. She only had four other people’s laundry to do and all the linens and towels. Oh I think we all started doing our own laundry off and on when we were about 12 or 13 years old. But to this day she still does the laundry if it is just sitting there. I can barely keep up with my own laundry here. Granted my washing machine takes about an hour and a half, I sweat through enough clothes for about three people, and I have to hang dry everything. But, I don’t work! And I am not even going to start on the ironing because I don’t iron anything but my mom does and its just one more thing on her never ending ‘to do’ list.

I guess my point is that living on my own has taught me just how much work everyday things are. In college I studied in my sociology and women’s studies classes how career women are often times working double duty. Most women who work to help support a family find themselves working a second shift of housework and taking care of the family. I know my mom felt the strain of what amounts to two full time jobs and I am realizing more now how much work that really is. My mom and I always marvel how a whole day can be spent just doing things around the house. You don’t even have to have a project to do, it can be simple things like cleaning, doing laundry, organizing. I don’t mind doing them because I have the time but they take more time than I ever imagined. In college, we had training table so we didn’t have to worry much about food and our apartment was small and during the season our practice clothes were laundered for us. So I didn’t have a lot of chores to take care of. But now, its all up to me and I finally realize how someone could be a house wife and keep perfectly busy. And I definitely understand why my cousin Jamie told me not long ago, “Whatever you do just make sure you make enough money to hire a housecleaner.” Wise words. Maintaining a home, not too mention a family, takes a lot of work and now that I am doing a fraction of what my mom did I am realizing even more how unbelievable she is.