Adventures of a Househusband -- Part 1
In the middle of September, I decided I no longer wanted to show up regularly at
what had been my place of employment for the past umpteen years. I won't go into details, but suffice to say that there were issues with the environment at work that I was no longer willing to tolerate. To be fair, my own interests had also changed. For some reason, I decided that becoming a househusband would improve my overall quality of life.
Yes, I said househusband. I could not have contemplated leaving work had I not had a working spouse to provide health insurance. One of the most insane things in this life is the alleged health care system in this country. If you're rich, you can buy yourself some. If you're not rich, well, "life is tough". This is America, if you weren't born fortunate, then that's your problem, and most likely your fault as well. At least that's been the attitude of the people running the place the past 25 or so years. Obviously, they never read Matthew 21: 31-46. Weird, because they've been staunchly supported by people professing to be Christians, who really should have read Matthew 21: 31-46 multiple times.
Anyway, back to the househusband thing. The first thing I figured out was that househusbands had to fix dinner. I am a chemist, so I figured cooking was similar: just mix stuff up, heat gently for a while, and voilà, something good happens. We're not talking gourmet stuff here. Just comfort food, mostly. I must confess, that in addition to being a chemist, my mother vowed that no child of hers would leave home without being able to cook a simple meal and iron a shirt. Ironing shirts is a thing of the past, but cooking skills have retained value. Eventually, I'll post a photo gallery showing some of my creations.
Then I figured out that you can't really cook meals unless you have some idea as to what is in the pantry. So I had to take over buying the groceries. My wife thought that was a good deal. She hated grocery shopping on her own, and found it only barely tolerable even when she could get me to come along to help, which was most of the time. Actually, I didn't think it so bad. We went after church, and met a lot of our church friends in the grocery store. Ofttimes, we saw church friends in the grocery store who hadn't actually made it to church that day. UCCs aren't exactly known for their religious fervor or constancy.
Don't forget the dishes and laundry. Apparently, househusbands have to learn to wash things. It's not so bad, really. You just dump stuff in machines with appropriate amounts of soap and push a button. Eventually, things automagically become clean. At least that's the hope. I have yet to figure out general cleaning. Vacuuming rugs and the like seems to be actual work, so that's a task still to be learned. The one thing I learned about vacuuming, the one time I
tried—after spilling dirt all over the floor while I was re potting plants rescued from my former office—, was that it is hard work. It was very cold inside that day, but by the time I was finished vacuuming, I was becoming hot and sweaty. Clearly househusbanding is not for pansies.
