Not The Domestic Type

"My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance." - Erma Bombeck

Though I am 62 years old, I'm still a work in progress, still trying to figure out who I am and what I want to be when I grow up.  It's a lot of work.  The deterioration of my heart health has accelerated this process a little.  I've started cramming for finals.  It's not that I'm planning to kick off any moment but rather that the end zone seems a little more in sight. It is true that there was never time to waste, but I'm more aware of that now than I was a while ago.

I haven't found a blueprint to follow to help me get to the big answers so I'm forging my own path on this endeavor.  I decided to start with figuring out who I am.  The voice in my head has had a lot to say.  I have believed many things about myself that I accepted to be true because it is what people have said to and about me.  In really examining those things, I realized that they are not all true. The first realization of an untruth about myself that I have long held is that I'm lazy.  It is a leftover from childhood.  I was not the most physically active girl.  I was far more inclined to get lost in a book than to engage in a game of sandlot baseball.  I didn't do the yard work at home and given the chance, I liked to sleep in.  How that was interpreted as laziness is neither here nor there.  In fact, I was born with a dysfunctional heart and have always wrestled with the physical limitations imposed by it.  But it didn't make me lazy.  I wasn't lazy then and I'm not lazy now.  For much of my adult life, I have worked in some form or another most of the waking hours of the day. I've long suffered from an inability to do one thing at a time.  After years as a c-suite executive, mom, crafter, learner, wife, daughter, sister, friend, volunteer and Martha Stewart wannabe, I am a master multi-tasker.  Not lazy.  Never lazy.  When I tossed out that one belief about myself, I felt suddenly liberated to consider all the rest.  What else did I believe to be true about myself and how have I allowed those beliefs to place limits on me?

In my secret self, I've always wanted to be a painter.  In the years of my childhood when art was a part of the curriculum, I was lucky to get a "satisfactory" in art.  My sister Nancy was, and still is, the family artist.  She is brilliant and talented.  I wouldn't allow myself to pick up a brush.  I have no skill and I believed no talent.  I would not allow myself to paint when it was so clear to me that I would not be able to produce a worthwhile result.  But a couple of months ago, I decided I don't care.  So what if I don't produce a worthwhile result.  I wanted the joy of the experience of painting.  So I bought a canvas, brushes and paint and set up an easel.  I produced my first piece and had it framed.  It is not great art but it is my art.  I did the next piece with perhaps less than impressive results but I had just as much fun.  There is a larger canvas on my easel right now.  I've been planning it in my head while I lay motionless in scanners on long and painful days in heart clinics.

In the time when I started high school, girls and boys were still streamed into different courses which we called options. Boys went into "shop" class.  Girls went into "home ec" or "stenography and typing".  I wanted to take home ec but my mom wouldn't let me.  She told me I am not the domestic type.  While most of my classmates were learning to  sew and cook, I was trying to learn Pittman shorthand.  Apparently, I'm not the shorthand type either.  I didn't enjoy great success in typing class, though I would come to master the skill on my own.  What I did do, was get a bit stuck in the notion that I'm not the domestic type.  I did learn to cook, had a child and have successfully run my home for more than three decades.  I taught myself to refinish furniture which I frequently do while I have a loaf of bread baking in the oven.  I entertain regularly.  And yet, I somewhere still harbored this old idea.  Last week, I spent six consecutive days in my kitchen making jams, jellies, pickles and delicacies to share at Christmastime.  This morning I sat down to label the jars before I carry them down to the cold cellar.  It would seem that I am the domestic type after all.