New Expectations Arise...I Sink Beneath Them

From the moment I married my husband (who, after sixteen years of stacked dishes and laundry mountains, continues to come here after work), I set about becoming a domestic goddess. The only problem with this worthy goal was that I had only one cookbook, that being a ratty paperback copy of the standard Betty Crocker collection. I managed to pull from its bland pages a pretty dern good lasagna recipe. I also made a chicken pasta primavera my husband would actually eat, the recipe yanked from those same sacrosant pages. The tome was soon sauce splattered as I tried meatloaf concoctions and other hearty, albeit unsophisticated creations. He ate them. I loved it! I sometimes lit candles on our hand-me-down table or tuned whatever archaic music-playing device we had working at the time to classical. I tried to make our apartment a home. I even purchased a rabbit at the mall, who used to run figure-eights around my feet in a mating dance of some sort. I kept him on the back patio of our ground floor, one-bedroom apartment. He would escape from time to time, darting in and out among the cars in the parking lot. Once, as I was dressing for one of a succession of menial jobs I worked in the beginning, a flood of residents leaving for work stopped by my apartment to say "Your rabbit's loose." I suppose Gary noticed rather early on that, despite my love of homey decor and scented candles, I was remiss with cleaning chores. I just hardly ever got to that dern bathroom with that bucket of supplies, stopping along the way to answer the phone, yell "WHAT IN THE WORLD???" as a news story caught my attention on the television, look out the window and remark "Is that man REALLY wearing that to work?" while hopping on my heels to keep my wet toenails from smudging. Wearying of my career trials I remarked to my husband "Maybe I'll just be a housewife." "No," he said, laughing heartily. "YOU will never be a housewife." I have now been a housewife for thirteen full years.