No Domestic Goddess Lives Here
Have you seen inside my kitchen cupboards? Smelt the mouldy orange lurking at the bottom of my fruit bowl? Tripped over the mattock that I left in the garden last summer?
A year ago, convinced it would erase my cooking phobia and turn me into a confident chef, I bought an air fryer. For all this time it has sat, pride of place, on a benchtop in my very small kitchen. Embarrassing but true, I’ve yet to turn it on.
Another type of appliance has caused me no end of grief. The vacuum cleaner. A stick version, to be exact. Five minutes of vacuuming and then ten minutes spent emptying the canister, cleaning the filter, and struggling to click it all back into place. Frustrated and annoyed, I usually give up at this point and resort to wearing my gumboots inside.
Naturally, I have blamed my mother for my incompetence, while of course my father got off scot-free as a man of his generation who contributed nothing to our domestic life. Anyway, my mother outsourced what she could to other women, like the cleaning and ironing, and went into the kitchen each evening like she was heading onto a battlefield.
My posh private school didn’t have Domestic Science. And I chose to study Latin rather than Craft, which means I became an expert at declining nouns but never learnt how to sew on a button.
It’s taken me a while but I do now, finally, accept that I will never be a domestic goddess. I will never host sumptuous dinner parties around my extension table, bought years ago in hopeful anticipation. I have also stopped thinking that I will ever get around to hemming those five pairs of pants that have lived for years at the bottom of my wardrobe.
And actually, I no longer care that I don’t measure up. I do just enough domestic stuff to get by, and that’s okay with me.
The truth of the matter is this: it’s simply not my priority. I’d much rather spend my time writing than cooking or cleaning. Whether it’s a blog post to write and share, a new short story to draft, or even an email to a friend, that’s where I’ve chosen to put my time and energy.
Just don’t open my kitchen cupboards.