Confessions of a Failed Domestic Goddess

By Rita Toews

Collection of short stories about the many misadventures of a failed domestic goddess.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rita Toews
• Release date: Mar 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781465740243

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Confessions Of A Failed Domestic Goddess

1Copyright 2010 Rita Y. Toews

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Cover by - Rita Y. Toews.

Confessions Of A Failed Domestic Goddess

Domestic Goddess. The image brings to mind the Biblical wife who rose at dawn, baked and cleaned, wove her own fabrics, made clothes for herself and her family and sold any extras to merchants. The heroic woman provided for the poor, and somehow found the strength to work outside the home in an unspecified form of commerce. When she found time to take a breather, she heard about a sale on real estate so she bought a field with her own savings and planted a vineyard. Dare we hope she harvested the crop as well?

We are told her husband hung around the city gate chatting with the elders. No doubt he was praising his excellent wife, but we have no proof of that. Better this ... for want of kinder words ... piece of work was at home, if not giving his perfect gem a hand, at least keeping her company. One has to wonder how a woman who had everything in her home running like a well-oiled machine, could slip up so badly on bringing her mate into line. I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to cultural differences.

My gut feeling is that the vineyard profits were being squirreled away to provide for a ticket out of town, and her slave-like situation.

Fast forward with me to more recent times.

As with countless other baby-boomers I was born in the late 1940s. My formative years were spent in the 50s when the model housewife was very much in evidence. If we're to believe television, the typical family consisted of a dutiful wife whose home and person were never in disarray, a wise and patient husband who was an excellent provider, and an assortment of off-spring who walked around all day in clean clothes. Said siblings weren't at each other's throats, and said 'please' and 'thank-you' without being prompted.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, my mother chirped, as she did her best to turn me into the perfect future housewife. Everything, including folding laundry was a job worthy of my best effort. This did not consist of merely matching the socks and turning over the cuff to keep them together. A young housewife-in-training was to lay one sock on the other, heels together, then turn the cuff over precisely half-way down the socks so it wouldn't stretch out of shape. While I was at it, I was suppose to pick off any lint and check for holes in the toe. Remember, these were the days when women actually mended socks and ironed bed sheets.

While my formative years were spent in the tranquility of the fifties, my defining years were lived out in the counter-culture of the sixties. Clothes were seldom washed, we didn't own socks, and cleaning day meant the lint in your bellybutton fell out. Any domestic training from the previous decade that had actually stuck was happily tossed out the window along with shampoo and hair curlers.

With the dawn of the seventies reality hit. Hey, I was suddenly a mother, a homemaker and employed outside the home. How brutal could life get? Not only did I have a child who insisted on getting dirty, I had discovered the comfort of warm feet. To top it all off, my husband liked his socks matched and arranged neatly in the appropriate drawer. To my mother's joy I had to resurrect my earlier training. It was time to finally assume my Domestic Goddess mantle.

The big question: if it didn't work in the '60s, why would it work in the '70s?

After careful consideration I've decided there's a good reason some women aren't domestic goddesses. If we all did things to perfection, who would stand out for their abilities? I know any number of women who can whip up a fantastic meal from the ingredients in the cupboards. Some are also excellent pastry makers, others excel at keeping an immaculate home. Why would I try to muscle in on their territory? I'm one of the few who would rather build a deck, or repair the parging on the house, then slave away in the kitchen or run along behind a vacuum cleaner. I don't see anyone else lining up to steal my satisfaction.

That being said,