by Rose Calder

Created on: November 13, 2008

As someone who is often branded as being an introspective person, I often find myself reflecting on life and the various twists and turns it takes. It helps inject an often-needed sense of wonder and amazement into my day, and helps keep me grateful that things haven't turned out as fantastically horrid as I thought (since I also have a tendency to jump to the worst-case scenario in any given situation.) But of all the things that have turned out right in my life, there is one things that still-to this very day-amazes the ever-loving crap out of me, and that is the fact that somehow, beyond all reason and logic, I somehow ended up being a housewife.

The reason this continues to surprise me isn't a matter of arrogance; I don't think of myself as being "too good" for this kind of lifestyle, nor have I ever looked down on women in the past for choosing this path. It's more a simple matter of trying to figure out how somebody who couldn't be less suited for such a position if it were medically possible managed to wind up with the politically-correct moniker of "domestic engineer". Because honestly, folks, I'm not cut out for this.

As a kid, I never bothered to learn such useful and (dare I say it?) traditional homemaker skills, such as baking, knitting or even how to sew on a button. I could try to explain this away by saying that it was because I was raised without a maternal figure, but the truth is that anything that involved sitting still for too long just didn't interest me. Back before the handy-dandy diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, I was accused of having a chronic case of antsy-pants; I couldn't be bothered to keep still when something didn't strike my fancy, and nothing even remotely related to learning how to keep house struck my fancy. My preferred way of spending the day involved playing with my friends and doing things with my bike that involved a lot of iodine and bandages afterwards. Knowing how to properly cook a brisket or how to crochet an afghan didn't even register.

Now that I'm older, this has come back to bite me in the butt more often than I'd really like to say. To put it at it's most blunt, my past experience would have served me better to live as a young bachelor instead of a married woman. Many of my female friends and sisters-in-law are astounded that I'm nearly thirty and do not possess the intricate knowledge of how to grill pork chops, nor do I know the difference between basting and hemming. At least I've learned not to tell

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