Day 22: "I Just Sit At Home"

Household work is the hardest job in the world! (Photo credit)

I remember going along with my spouse to an event organised by his company. His colleagues came in with their wives and it was a nice social get together. During the wives' conversation, I asked one of them - yes, I have been guilty of asking this - "What do you do?". She got defensive and went to great lengths to explain how she is an architect and worked till after she had her baby. And how it got demanding with site visits and irregular schedules and she decided to call it quits to become a full time mother.

The evening did not end there. I put my large foot in my even bigger mouth and asked the same thing - as a general query, in my defence - to another of the wives. She resignedly replied that she took care of two kids full time and the tone suggested that there was no scope for taking up a job.

There's a reason why this incident is so clearly etched in my memory even after a year - the attitude of women when they spoke about not having a career outside of home. We - the society and the women - have made the "working woman" such an epitome of success that anyone who doesn't have a job feels inferior. Apologetic, defensive, resigned even. The malaise starts with, "So, what do you so?" which leaves a huge dent in the self esteem of women who do the most amazing job in the world - making a home sweet home! And I don't know who invented the phrase but most women who stay at home call it "just sitting at home".

Just sitting at home!!! If you analyse the phrase, the work that fits that job description is pretty much everything that keeps things functioning in a household. And keeps babies, if any, alive. This is exactly the job where you don't realise things are functioning till someone stops making them function. When I looked up online to research for this post, the stats objectively prove how hard housewives/homemakers/full time moms work. British women work 11 hours  a week more than their husbands. In Italy, women clock the highest - 21 hours per week - more than their spouses. And these numbers don't balance out even if women are part of the labour market and have jobs that pay. While we feel that men share the burden of household chores more frequently now, that's just a myth. According to a survey in 2014, only 19 men do household chores on a given day compared to 46 women. I don't think the numbers have evened out 2 years later.

All this proves that women 'just sitting at home' are mainly responsible for everything that works around the house. From the freshly laundered clothes in your closet to the clean bed you jump into at night and the hot meals at the table. And we should be proud of "just sitting at home". It's worth much more than any job can pay. We should be beaming when we talk about making things work 24/7/365 with no annual vacations or incentives of 401Ks. And this is what I call truly supporting the men go out and earn their 401ks! We should be unapologetic when it comes to nurturing the future of the world full time in the form of our kids.

Here are 8 reasons why it is harder to be a housewife than people think from a man's perspectives.

What do you think about this debate on housewives vs working women? Shouldn't we be proud of managing home full time too?

This post is a part of #NaBloPoMo which stands for National Blog Posting Month hosted by BlogHer.