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FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT YOU CAN BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS WITHOUT GETTING SWEATY
WORDS: NICOLE BUCKLER
Since women are so time-poor these days, we sometimes consider begging with a cup on the Millennium Bridge for any spare minutes other women might want to give us. A cup of extra minutes sure would go down well in my gaff. Us chicks are doing it all...the cooking, the cleaning, the child raising, the dog-feeding, the husband soothing, the rug beating (as if), the growing of our own organic herbs on what paltry balcony this housing boom has limited us to. And the question is, why the hell are we doing all this work ourselves? Why is it that even though we have never earned better money, we can’t seem to let someone else pick up the slack for us on the domestic front? I don’t blame the men. They are like bunnies in the headlights when it comes to their roles in the home. Most women (particularly chronic overachievers...ie. most of us) assume that (a) the world will blow up if we don’t make it into work or (b) if we aren’t perfect in every way, including being a domestic goddess, that all human beings will mutate and die and (c) nobody can do anything ever as well as we can and if they try they might just implode in upon themselves in big meaty pieces. With chicks carrying around these attitudes, it’s no wonder most men are afraid to approach the dusting cloths. Most chaps are frozen with fear, damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. Every time my poor husband picks up the vacuum cleaner I feel like saying ‘do you think I don’t vacuum well enough?” He’s just helping me out. He freezes, not knowing whether to keep vacuuming or whether to suck himself into it and try to enter a parallel universe where he knows what his role is. I say this to all Irish women: we have got to get over ourselves. Guarding the domestic front with a perfectionist attitude like it is the last bastion of superwoman judgment is just plain mental. And in 2008, we won’t have time to be mentallers. So what is the solution to this dire situation of over scheduling ourselves? My solution is to go with the old adage of ‘Fake it until you make it’. Women have been doing this for generations. I’ll give you an example. When I was a kid, my grandmother used to come over once a week, and bring a cake with her. Every single week, the cake looked the same...it was perfect. I used to say to her, Grandma, how do you get your cakes to look so perfect? And she would say, ‘It’s a grandmother’s touch’. Years later, I said to my mother that I felt like a failure because I would never be able to make a cake as perfect as Granny’s. My mum nearly fell off her chair with laughter. “Nicole, come ON,” she said, “Granny never baked a cake in her life. She bought it from the shop up the road.” So there it was... the realisation that everyone fakes it, especially women. It’s the only way forward. So let’s all agree to fake it until we make it. It is so much nicer to acknowledge that perfection is totally bogus. So how do we fake it? We call in some hired help, of course. Just look to men for a working example of this. They don’t consider it a masculine failure to pay some guy with manly garden tongs to clip the natty ivy hanging off the back fence, ready to strangle our dog. So where do women get this idea that we are a mess if we pay someone to clean the gunk off our oven (which has now become so feral that it has its own postcode).
A GOOD CLEANER PART TIME NANNY WEBSITES
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