gathkinsons.net

I hate having my picture taken.  When I was in my 20s and weighed 95 pounds and still had dark red hair I was sufficiently narcissistic to pose for the camera.  Forty years and 3 children later I am short, squat and silver-haired and not particularly photogenic.  Consequently, I dodge photos much of the time.  My husband says I take a grouchy photo, and I must admit that in many shots I do look like I’m in a terrible mood, but I don’t consider myself congenitally bad-tempered.   I just don’t like most pictures that have me in them, whether I’m smiling or not.

My husband takes a  lot of pictures.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  When he aims the camera at me he never says “Smile” or even “Say cheese!”  Instead he says “Look happy!”  I try, really I do.  Generally speaking I am happy when Allen whips out the camera, but the pictures simply do not reflect it.  Occasionally it works out, but usually I am either not smiling or my smile looks more like a grimace.

Well, yesterday I lost my four front teeth, which should do wonders for my smile.   Technically I didn’t lose any teeth, just a partial bridge I’ve had for a few years.  I had to have a root canal in one of the anchor teeth, but as it happened there was very little root left to canal into, and the tooth anchoring the other end of the bridge is only slightly more, shall we say, present.  Now I really look like a Ozark Meth Mama, with a 2-tooth gap bordered by 2 little dental nubbins on either end.  I shudder to think about the photographic possibilities of looking happy for my husband’s camera in this latest incarnation.  I may have looked grumpy before, but now I look deranged.

I  just hope that when I have my new bridge I will also have a smile that dazzles  even the most  brutal camera lens.

Of course, there is a lot more to homemaking than dusting and washing dishes.  But housekeeping is a useful skill to have.  My mother nearly killed herself keeping the house clean after working all week teaching without any help from my father.  It’s not that he was a lousy husband; it’s just that it never occurred to him to pitch in.  I doubt it ever occurred to her that he might.  But, as I wrote yesterday, she didn’t raise her children to help either.  I suspect it was partially due to the way she was raised:  in a middle-class home in the 1920s and 30s, as the 6th and youngest child of a respected judge in Staten Island, New York.  In those days SI was a pretty nice place to live (I’m told that is no longer the case) and they had a big house with sevants.  How many I am not sure, but I know that they had, for example, a woman to do the ironing, and at least one maid who did most of the cleaning.  I think they had a cook some of the time, although Mummy would talk about the way her father cooked roast beef and some desserts that her mother made.  She never thought of her family as being affluent, but I don’t think she had a clue about how less fortunate people lived.  The point being:  my mother learned things like how to hem and to embroider, but I don’t think she had to do much daily upkeep of the house.  She hated housecleaning as a wife, although she worked hard at it, but when I asked her once when I was about 14 why I didn’t have to do the chores that were routinely expected of my friends she answered that I would have plenty of that sort of thing to do when I was grown up and married and she saw no reason to make me suffer now.  Being something of a martyr she never considered the fact that if her children had been required to help, she herself would not have had to suffer so much.  Clearly my two brothers were never expected to do anything, and my sister, who had issues with my mother from a young age (really it was the other way around, but that’s another story) was sent to live with our Aunt Mary (my father’s sister) and Uncle John, who had a very clear understanding of the value of chores. 

But, as I said, cleaning is not everything.  I think my sister actually has a pretty healthy attitude towards housework.  Taught by our aunt, she keeps a clean house, but she doesn’t obsess about it.  She raised all of her kids, 2 boys & 2 girls, to do their part and their training has carried over into their adult lives.  I have 3 daughters, who, without the model mother/homemaker to learn from, range from sloppy way beyond what even I can tolerate, to medium sloppy, to fairly neat.  I long for a staff, because I really do like to live in a clean and orderly environment, but I just really hate housework.  It is less onerous when the ambient temperature is reasonable, but it’s still not fun.

Then again, I know families who live in perfect houses, clean and well kept up, who don’t really have great homes.   They don’t sit down to dinner together, they don’t talk that much to each other, parents never read to their kids…  My parents served us four children well in that regard; we had a home full of books and music, we always ate dinner together (6:00 sharp or my father got very grumpy), and dinner was when everyone talked about their day.   Both parents read to me when I was very small, and long after I was old enough to read  them for myself my father still read the Sunday funnies to me and my Little Lulu comics as well.

We raised our children with books and music as well; there is still an unspoken competition to see who receives the most books at Christmas.  When all 3 girls were young it wasn’t unusual for the 5 of us to get 70 or 80 books among us.  Dinner wasn’t always served at a sacred hour, but we always ate together, with no TV allowed, and we talked and argued in much the same way as my parents, sibs and I had done 30 years earlier.  Our daughters have grown up to be, if not perfect homemakers, intelligent and competent adults who are funny and creative and generally nice to be around.  So, despite being  something of a slut (earliest known usage = “a dirty untidy woman”) I think I have, with plenty of help from my spousal unit, succeeded in making a home. I decided awhile ago that I wouldn’t be embarrassed by my house any more; it’s not spotless but it’s okay, and if you like me you’ll put up with it.  If you can’t put up with it, you don’t have to come over.

Well, it’s been close to a year since I posted anything and in the meantime I forgot my password.  I am not at all blog-savvy and only somewhat computer literate; I only got up and running with extensive help from my spousal unit, so technical questions about the mechanics of the blog will probably go unanswered unless my very harried husband happens to be present and alert when I read such a question.  Comments/questions on content are welcome and I will really try to keep up this year.

Changes since last year:  We are in the middle of installing A/C after living in this monster house for 16 years.  I say middle because, this being an enormous building one unit does not suffice, so, just as we have 2 furnaces (3 actually, but I’m not counting the huge wood furnace since it will not have an A/C unit attached)… we will soon have 2 A/C units.  I was astonished to learn that air filters have to be replaced every 1-2 months in normal houses.  In our super-sized former schoolhouse, filled with cats, a dog, spinning and knitting fiber and all the resulting dust dinosaurs (and absent a staff or a functioning housewife) we will probably be changing every other week.  It’s worth it not to be sweating from the effort of sitting.

After about five years of talking about it, Allen is building the deck!  This is a major undertaking, and was begun shortly before Allen had a big change (or should I say increase) in his work responsibilities, so most of the daylight hours on weekends are devoted to it.  I have 2 bad shoulders and am not particularly handy, but I was able to help some in getting the beams in.  I’ve been trying to prove my usefulness by taking over other household duties that I normally don’t do, such as cooking.  I don’t want to be replaced by a lusty blonde who loves fixer-uppers.  On the other hand, Allen & I really could use a wife.

We just got back from 2 weeks in Costa Rica with a good friend and his son, whom we taught to play bridge.  Haven’t played–except with the iPhone, which is irrational–in over 20 years, so it was a lot of fun.  Oh yes, we enjoyed the monkeys, sloths, etc. as well, but I’ll do a separate post on the trip.  I will also upload pictures, once Allen shows me how, of the trip, deck-in-progress, and my fiber fun (I finished the scarf begun last summer in my first?  last?  blog post and it was quite impressive.  I took a couple of pics before sending it to my sister, as the yarn was really more her colors than mine.

Can I maintain a blog beyond two posts?  Time will tell, but you can always check out my spousal unit’s Civil War blog or my daughter Hannah’s Pumpkin Patch, which deals with food, fashion and crafts mostly.  She usually does a couple of posts a week and I find them very interesting.  Her food & libation suggestions are particularly good.  Of course, I am her mother…

I have decided to join the rest of my family–or at least most of it–in the Blogosphere.  Once school starts in earnest (tomorrow) I may not be able to find the time to keep it up, but I’ll give it a try.  I don’t have a particular theme in mind, so no one should expect long treatises about the Civil War or the current political scene.  I do like to talk about books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, music I’m listening to, stuff I’m knitting…  So, much like my mind, this blog is likely to be sort of a goulash.  Feel free to read, comment, argue or ignore. 

Now I have to start preparing for movers to deliver all of Sophie’s stuff, which will leave again by the end of the month.