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WolfyMontgomery -> RE: is it gold digging if... (12/5/2010 4:34:11 AM)
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I think of myself the same way, Aquatic. If I made enough money for two people to live comfortably, I wouldn't mind being the one breadwinner. So long as he brings something of equal value into the home, such as keeping the home while I'm busy.
And honestly, does no one believe that keeping home ISN'T a job?! It amazes me how often people forget how much work is put into taking care of your home.
Master's parents live with the man as the main breadwinner and his mother as the housewife. Most she ever brings in monetary wise is from dance lessons, which she gives dirt cheap to only a few people, and the occasional hula dance show. Usually doesn't add up to even equal the taxable minimum every year (meaning she only brought in $3,000-5,000 for the entire year). He doesn't seem to mind too terribly bad that he's working full time, other than coming home tired. But she does more than enough to make up for the lack of "monetary value" that she brings to the household.
His mother does all the house work, and I can tell you, she works her butt off.
- There's the cleaning, which includes bedroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, two bathrooms, the office, and the basement where the laundry room and her dance studio is. Bare minimum half hour each room (vacuum, dust, tidy, mopping, sweeping, etc), that's a good 4 hours of work at least. Granted you may not do this every day, but during the winter months when people track their muddy/wet leafy boots through the rooms you can be sure it'll be done every other day at least.
- There's dishes, which even with a dishwasher can take quite some time especially when people have cooked a large dinner with a lot of different pots and pans (you can't put shit in those things cruddy, it doesn't come off, gotta handwash first).On nights after a big meal, you could be in there for almost an hour scrubbing tough grease and caked on guck enough to put it in the dishwasher.
- There's the cooking - and she makes GREAT meals. She makes food from scratch when she can, and spends at least an hour in the kitchen every day preparing meals.
- There's the laundry - both her's and her husband's, plus their bedsheets, plus towels, plus any other cloth in the house that can and will inevitably get dirty. Think, each load is 40 minutes for a cycle, then about an hour to dry. A load a day is what she tends to do (two hours), or three loads every three days (6 hours).
- She takes care of the finances, balances the accounts and pays bills. They do it all paper (old folks, go figure), so it takes a lot longer than "click, bill paid!"
By my estimates (which I know are extremely rough but not wholly inaccurate, since I've done that stuff too and know how fast time flies) she's spending a good 4-10 hours each day making sure that house is up to snuff. And I KNOW I'm missing stuff on that list that she does that I didn't think of off the top of my head.
It's a full time job to keep a home looking nice and keeping it sanitary. Even if she were only getting paid minimum wage she'd be making four digits a month. She does the same amount of work he does, the only difference is that his has 'monetary' value. But if she went out to get a job and bring the same amount he does every month, who'd do all the housework?
They've lived that way for like 30 years. I doubt they have any qualms about continuing to live so.
And neither would I, because if I were the breadwinner, I would most definitely appreciate all the hard work Master would be doing around the house as his own job. And I know Master agrees with me on that one (though I also know that he wants to be the breadwinner, and me the housewife, lol).
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