Life as a housewife

12.02 by Jim Riccitello (www.slowtwitch.com)

I’ve often said that I wouldn’t trade my life for anything. But let me tell you this, after watching my wife leave for work every day with sadness in her eyes at the thought of missing just one minute of her new son’s life—so great is that sadness that I can honestly say I’d give up the past twenty years of my life in exchange for the means to allow my wife to stay home every day and be a mom. Yes, I know that money can’t buy happiness, but let’s face it—it sure can buy lots of other stuff.

The reality of the situation however, is that I can’t give up the past twenty years, and I don’t have much money. You see, I’ve spent the last two decades as a professional triathlete, and while the returns have been well worth the investments, it hasn’t provided me with much that I can use to rear my son…from an economical standpoint, anyway (at least not until he’s able to eat Clif Bars and Clif Shots, drink Red Bull and Champion Nutrition products, and fit into my size 9 Sauconys and my Hind clothing).

The birth of a child will open your eyes a little bit. I don’t have many regrets, but I certainly regret the fact that for too many years I lacked the foresight and perhaps even the capacity to think about a future that contained anyone but myself. If I’d have been more careful and thoughtful, perhaps my wife could stay at home all day with her son whom she loves more than anything, instead of working her butt off to put money in the bank to pay for our son’s future. At least I’m thinking about it now.

My wife and I feel strongly that one of us should be home with the child. For the moment that means me. So until I become rich and famous, I’ll just have to focus on my current job—being the best housewife I can be.

First of all, let me just say this: Any woman who says being a housewife is hard work is a complete wuss. I realize I’ve only been a housewife for nine months and we only have one kid, but so far it’s a piece of cake. I used to think being a professional triathlete was the most ridiculously easy occupation, but this housewife gig blows that away. The hardest thing about being a professional triathlete is kicking your own butt out the door three times a day to workout, which was never hard for me, and shouldn’t be hard for anyone who has all day to workout. The hardest part about being a housewife is—I don’t know…getting up in the morning?

I don’t mean for this story to be an expose or anything, but all’s I’m saying is that there are a lot of women pulling a big cotton diaper over the “fellas” eyes. I heard the horror stories and I was scared: non-stop crying baby, dirty diapers out the ying-yang, poop everywhere, projectile barf all over the walls, more poop, no sleep, constant washing of bottles, constant flow of dirty laundry. I was told, “Life as you know it is over, mister.” What a crock of baby dung that’s turned out to be.

I mean there is a crying baby, dirty diapers, barf, laundry, lack of sleep, and lots of poop. Actually, there’s an amazing amount of poop when you consider we’re talking about a small baby. I haven’t officially weighed the dookie yet, but I’m thinking that, pound for pound, nothing craps as much as a baby. Coming from me, that’s saying a lot, but I digress. My point is that it just isn’t that bad. It probably takes about three hours of my day to tend to the chores associated with a baby. That leaves a lot of time for other things.

Let me give you an idea of my typical day as a housewife.

I wake up when Matthew wakes up. He sleeps in another room now. We have one of those monitors which allow you to listen to your baby while in the comfort of your own bed. I’m very impressed with this piece of equipment. I could’ve had a lot of fun if I’d have known about baby monitors before now. That sucker is one powerful listening device. You can hear way too much. I usually wake up to the sound of my kid farting, then taking a huge dump, which sounds very impressive at about 200 decibels. Like father, like son, I guess. If only I would have taken a baby monitor with me on the road, I’d be writing stories a heck of a lot more interesting than this one, let me tell you that.

Back to being a housewife… Traci feeds Matthew because she has breasts full of milk that he goes crazy for. Once fed, Traci and I, or just I, strap him into the baby jogger, and head out for a nice, one hour run. How hard is that? I’ll admit it’s a little harder when you’re pushing a baby jogger uphill, but it’s not a huge deal. And the baby jogger does go downhill pretty well, so that kind of balances things out. If the run is on smooth surfaces, Mathew usually sleeps through the whole run. If it’s bumpy, he does seem to have a little post-traumatic stress syndrome when we’re finished. He doesn’t complain about it all that much, however.

Upon finishing the run, if he’s still sleeping, I’ll wolf down some chow, and clean the kitchen, make the bed, do a load of laundry, surf the internet, read my Real Simple and Martha Stewart magazines—whatever I can squeeze in until he wakes up. When he wakes up I play with him until he needs to eat again. He eats about every three to four hours. It takes about 20 minutes to feed and burp him. I love burping him. I’ve found that by varying the intensity and speed of my burp pats, I can produce a multitude of belches. I’ve taken to taping his belches on the Dictaphone for posterity. So far I’ve got about ten minutes straight of burping.

Traci pumps out huge quantities of breast milk that I can use to feed him during the day. My wife has the most awesome breast milk producing boobs on the face of the earth. We have enough frozen breast milk stored up to feed a small country. I’m thinking about making a submission to the Guinness Book.

When he’s done eating, I play with him some more. Now that’s a tough assignment (sarcasm). I don’t see how anyone can say that playing with a baby is not fun. Babies find fun in the goofiest things. I can do just about anything, and my kid gets a kick out of it. As long as he doesn’t start imitating me we’ll be fine. After I play with him until he’s so tired that he passes out, I try to get some work done again. It’s like interval training.

When I don’t have much work to do or my chores are almost done, I load up the sleeping baby up and go to the mall. Nothing beats an empty food court when you’re bored. Actually, my trips to the mall are what prompted me to write this story/expose.

At the mall there are lots of women with babies. They all gave me dirty looks. I couldn’t figure out why. Amidst the mass of women and children, I found one man with a baby. I sparked up a conversation.

“Hey. How’s it going?” I asked.

“Not bad,” he hesitatingly replied.

“Dude, let me ask you a question—why are all these chicks giving me the evil eye?”

“They won’t warm up to you until they know you’re in ‘the club,’” he replied.

“Club? What club? This is the mall isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s the mall,” he replied. “It’s just that they’re afraid you’ll go home and tell your wife and all the other men what a scam we’ve got going here.”

“Scam? What kind of scam, and how do I get involved?”

“Well, we all meet here every day and spend our significant other’s money on clothes for us—and a few for the kid, of course—as a diversionary tactic. Then we let the kids play together for a while until we head home. We then try to frantically finish all the chores we didn’t do because we were here all day, before the spouse gets home. The more frantic the better, by the way, because then you’re genuinely flustered when the wife gets home, which makes it appear as though you’ve been working all day to rear the child, when in fact, you haven’t done squat.

To help deflect the criticism you will get for not doing all your daily chores, I suggest leaving a turd in the diaper to fester so that when your wife gets home you can hand the crying baby to her and tell her that you’ll gladly go back to work if she wants to stay home and take care of the little monster all day. A steaming old turd really makes a statement. You’ll learn the ropes soon enough. Are you in or what?” he said.

“Oh I’m in all right.”

I only said this so I wouldn’t get jumped by 30 leery women and one weasel of a man in the parking lot on the way back to my minivan (yes, I said minivan). I drove home shocked at what I had seen and heard. My day at the mall confirmed my initial suspicions: being a housewife isn’t all that bad. All those horror stories about tending to a child are exaggerations spun by a clever club of women: the Housewife’s Club. How ruthless are they that they could mislead honest, hard-working men? How unconscionable are they, to happily live with the fact that they may be scaring unknowing women from having a child. I could never perpetrate such a lie.

I thought these things as I parked the van and headed inside the house. I contemplated them further as I frantically tried to fold the laundry, empty the dishwasher, pick up a shitload of toys, and get rid of the turd my kid had pinched out two hours ago in the food court at the mall, as my wife pulled into the drive way after a hard day’s work.

She entered the house happy to see her wonderful son. She might’ve been happy to see me too, if the house didn’t look like a disaster area: toys all over the place, dirty dishes, dirty bottles.

“I see you got a lot done today,” she said sarcastically. “Were you too busy to pick up a little—and what smells like…? Don’t you know how to change a diaper? What’ve you been doing all day?”

“What have I been doing all day? You have no idea what I’ve been doing. Matthew was grumpy all day. He has some kind of stomach thing going on. He barfed all over the clean clothes that I had just folded, so I had to re-wash them. He’s been crying all day. You try being cooped up all day with a screaming baby and see how you like it,” I said defensively…almost instinctively.

I surprised myself with my reply. The lies rolled off my tongue without much of a thought. I was equally surprised with the outcome: total forgiveness for what was basically a day of decadence on my part. Let me just say this: man or woman, don’t let the baby scare you. If you can get a gig as a housewife, get it. I know what I’m talking about. Despite my initial feelings, I am now an official member of the Housewife’s Club…at least until my wife quits her job in December and puts two and two together. Until then, I’ll see you ladies (and maybe a few men) at the mall. I’ll be driving the white minivan.