Anne of Green Gables Set Me Up for Domestic Failure

My mother did not raise my brother and I as slobs. We made our beds each morning. We were expected to vacuum every evening. Despite my mother's belief that our house was always dirty, we really grew up in a tidy, clean home.

In college, to stave off the omnipresent housekeeping battles among roommates, we established a cleaning schedule. Each week all the roommates alternated between cleaning the kitchen, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, and scrubbing the floors. Of course that left dishes as a free-for-all and as can be expected among a group of stressed out girls that did not go well.

The point is, while I prefer a tidy house, I'm not the sort who's going get their knickers in a twist over a little dust and will go so far as to claim that a little dust strengthens the immune system. But oh are there times I wished my living space was just a little cleaner.

Let's take this past week for example. Andy is undertaking yet another project that involves cutting holes in the ceiling (installing a bathroom fan over the shower to help battle against the mildew problem) and that means the living room that was clean for about two minutes when we took out all the recycling last Tuesday, is again a pile of power tools and empty cardboard boxes. The rug by the couch is so dirty that I haven't done my knees exercises the last few mornings because I can't be bothered to vacuum. The kitchen counter seems coated with some mysteriously sticky substances that Mrs. Meyers' countertop spray can't penetrate. The bedroom basically looks like to went through a hurricane of dirty clothes.

When I first read Anne of Green Gables, I was an impressionable young adult. In the books, the characters are always overwhelmed with domestic duties: cooking, cleaning, etc. There is a particularly poignant scene where Anne expresses a desire to make sure every inch of the house is always spotless because while guests to the house would never know that cellar steps hadn't been swept or the attic dusted, she would know it wasn't clean. It seemed so admirable to set yourself up to such a high standard of cleanliness and deep down, I wanted to be like Anne. I wanted to be the perfectionist who knew there was no dust to be found in the house. 

But I can't do it. I just can't. 

I mean, do you know how often you're supposed to be washing your sheets?! At the risk of an over-share, let me just state that I feel lucky if I get the linens washed once a month around here. This morning I swept up a dust pan full of dust, hair, crushed tortilla chip particles, and goodness knows what else from our kitchen floor, which, for the record is about 12 square feet. I can almost feel the glare of Marilla Cuthbert (Anne's guardian) on me every day I walk through our front door.

With today's standard two income households, housekeeping seems like the most logical first thing to let slide. (After all, I can deal with a dirty house, I'm less tolerant of an empty stomach.) I could blame Anne of Green Gables for prompting me to set unattainable standards of cleanliness. But the truth is that Anne and I are from different eras. I don't spend every day cleaning and preparing meals. I spend my days out of the houses pursuing a paycheck. Even my days off involve more errands than cleaning. I should feel any range of emotions about the fact that I will not be Good Housekeeping's poster girl any time soon: guilty, disgusting, a failure. But for some reason, I don't.

Because let's be honest, even Anne, after she'd hunkered down with Dr. Gilbert Blythe, hired Susan, the housekeeper.

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Happily Ever After? What's Wrong With Fairy-Tale Weddings

Marriage may be at an all time low in the United States, but it doesn't seem the twenty-somethings of the country have gotten that message. I'm not be getting married, which pretty much means I'm standing still while a stampede of brides-to-be course around me. Starting to feel like a tinny, broken record of "Congratulations!" here.

I'm not opposed to marriage in the least. But over the years, I've grown increasingly apprehensive of the notion that we need just wrap ourselves in a "let's get married and have babies" bandage to reach "happily ever after." For half of us, our marriages won't last a lifetime. Contrary to popular belief, problems to any potential union aren't vanquished with the magic words "I do." So I tread carefully with the whole marriage issue.

Still, I'm a girl. I get the excitement that goes into planning a wedding with all the decisions about cake, dresses, and colors. If we can keep our inner-Bridezillas at bay, I think planning a wedding sounds like a pretty good time.

But I guess I'd forgotten that the stampede of brides-to be rushing past me spent as much, if not more time, watching Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, as me. And that means that this whole generation of girls grew up with Disney's female leads, Belle, Ariel, and Jasmine, as their style inspirations. I never realized the biggest first name in the wedding dress industry isn't "Vera" or Vivienne," but "Walt."

This past week, Disney announced its "Fairy Tale Wedding" dress line which offer seven dresses all inspired from dresses worn by animated characters from Disney films. And the dresses aren't bad. Some of them are really quite pretty. But I find something discomfiting in the amount of suspended reality that's involved with slipping into one of these dresses.

Can I say something? It does not bode well if you are getting married solely so you can be princess for the day. A wedding's meant to be a celebration of two people committing to a life together. It's not supposed to be your last shot at the great Halloween costume you never had. This latest dress collection just seems mildly unhealthy for the concept of marriage.

But I could be wrong. . . . Maybe it really is true love if you can get your fiance to stand at the alter looking like this: 

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Bake or Buy: Be Happy

By all intents and purposes, the females of my generation – the Millennials – and of my socioeconomic and racial profile – middle class, Caucasian – came into this world a pretty privileged lot. Women had gotten the vote 65 years before I was born and by the time I was toddling around, the Feminist movement was on its last legs (be that good or bad). In fact, females my age sometimes take the idea of “equal opportunity” so for granted that we often treat the word “feminist” like a profanity. We didn’t have a whole lot to prove: we were accepted for who we were.

But as the first generation of women who have basically gotten whatever we wanted, we might be just a tad spoiled. We forget how hard other women fought to get us where we are today. We forget that at its heart, feminism is about equality. More than that, we forget that equality and getting whatever you want are two different things entirely. And we forget that we have feminism to thank for several general ideals we use to navigate through life.

Ideals? Well, like the fact that we can do whatever we want to do, but with that comes an obligation to find some sense of purpose in life and to live up to your full potential. It’s fine to have kids, if you want them, but we were taught that being a mother is meant to be a small part of a larger context. And also, you better be really, really into being a homemaker if that’s the path you decide to head down, young lady.

Often it seems as though I’m in a strange power struggle with feminism. I never know who’s winning and I don’t understand why we can’t just be friends. Try as I might, my inner career woman is always picking battles with my inner homemaker.

Which is why I threw a fit when I discovered we were out of bread yesterday morning. (We’ve been out of butter for ages too.)

Lately, it’s seemed like the gears are finally turning and I’m starting to slowly chug down the tracks towards my career goals. It’s exciting and fun and it means long hours and having to eat store bread while your house falls into an increasingly chaotic mess. In general, I try to keep homemade bread on hand – when there’s time -- but that’s not to say that we don’t eat a fair amount of store bread too. For the last month, we’ve been buying a loaf of bread every now and then to tide us through until I have time to bake. But instead of me finding time to make bread, mostly we’ve just been running out of bread on a pretty consistent basis.

Yesterday, when I opened the fridge door to grab the sandwich makings for my bag lunch and spied only a flat bread bag holding a single crust of bread, I felt as though something in the big scheme of things had failed me. After all: does having it all mean we’re so busy we don’t have time to stock basic food stuffs?

So today I made Betty Friedan roll over in her grave. I baked bread and brownies and attempted to make sense of the piles of crap that had accumulated around the cabin. I realized what a lot of work it is to be a homemaker. For sure, it’s a full time job (I’m exhausted), yet we largely poo-poo homemaking because we fear the great merit of homemaking – comfort – is synonymous with complacency. That’s not really fair.

Maybe the secret to being a female in 2010 is to stop feeling like you’re letting someone down. I don’t want to have to eat store bread just because I have a busy work life. I don’t want to feel like Betty Friedan is glaring at me every time I take a loaf of bread out of the oven either.

I have yet to strike the perfect balance between, well, everything. It’s tricky business determining how to best live life as a privileged female, without squandering or taking our advantages for granted. And at its heart, being a female in 2010 isn’t really about choosing one way to live your life. Rather it’s about mixing together all the life lessons from previous generations of women who taught us to be independent and determined and who reminded us that baking should be a pleasure, not a stressful obligation

So the moral of the story is this: Bake your bread when there’s time. Buy enough to last when there isn’t. Above all else, be happy. After all, we’re a pretty spoiled lot.

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