All three of us hacking and wheezing and then the pilot light blew out so we were cold, too. But worst of all was that I never recovered from my initial bad mood and we all know that it’s the main caregiver who sets the tone for the rest of the house.

I think of pioneer women and what they went through just to get through the day — the mountains of work and unceasing poverty — and I know that I couldn’t have made it. I’d have been Mrs. Brewster (in These Happy Golden Years) who threatens her husband with a butcher knife and demands that he take her home back east. Yup, that’d be me because I can’t even handle a blown pilot light when the kids have the sniffles.

I don’t like this about myself.

I just finished reading Hannah’s Daughters, which I finally found at a thrift store. (Simon’s Family is one of my favorite books.) One of the observations made in the book is that as women’s outside workload (drudgery) decreased, their ability to have inner-lives increased. So while Hannah is too preoccupied with survival to do much thinking about her life, her granddaughter Anna, who is a writer, spends most of her time in her head.

Anyway, despite having all of this luxury to bitch about small things and a job I can do in sweatpants that Madison has repeatedly wiped her nose on, I’ve been feeling stressed and miserable lately. Too much work, too little time and if you’ll recall I decided to quit writing for awhile and lo and behold, now I really want to do this proposal. So I’m hiring a housekeeper for once or twice a month (twice, I hope) and if this babysitter doesn’t work out, I have some other options on the backburner. Brett has always said that there’s no point in me making money if I won’t spend it to make things easier on myself and I decided to stop feeling guilty about it and just try to start bringing some help in.

There’s a lot I don’t want to give up (I’m greedy) like cooking for my family and having time to play tea party with Madison or a game with Noah. I want to be able to take them to storytime at the library and hang with the other homeschooling moms at gym class. It seems like way too much to ALSO want someone to scrub behind the toilet and to hang with the kids in their downtime but this isn’t the prairie, I’m not a peasant or a pioneer and the money could run out any minute so I may as well enjoy it while I can. Right? Right.

(Of course being me, I have been talking about this to my mom — former housewife and continued neat-freak — since forever and she’s always said that I should hire out. I’m a lousy housekeeper, she is happy to tell me, but she also says she raised me to know a dirty carpet is not the end of the world. “I always figured you would get someone to clean for you,” she told me. “I don’t know why it’s taken you so long.”)

p.s. For those of you who didn’t like the terminology we used when we told Madison her birth mom story, we did introduce uterus lately (Noah knew uterus by two so I don’t know why I hung back — well, I do but it seemed stupid; I felt like it made Madison’s story more practical-sounding and less loving). It’s pretty cute to hear Madison say “use-a-us.”

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