Please Help Me, I’m Losing Myself

I am turning into a 1950s wife. I am almost Harriet Nelson (Google it, kids).

I was born in 1956, when women wore dresses and pearls while making dinner for Dad and the kids. I was born in a time when Mom’s stayed home and scrubbed the floor while Dads went off to the office to do manly things.

Which means that I grew up in the 1960s, when women were burning bras and demanding birth control. I went to college in the 1970s. I marched, I read Gloria Steinem, I became a feminist.

When I married my high school sweetheart, we both went into the relationship with the understanding that we would be equals. We shared the shopping, the cooking, the dishes, the laundry duty. We both went to graduate school, and we both embarked on professional careers.

We were a part of the generation that defined the idea of work-home balance. We both worked. We both cleaned bathrooms. We both took the car in for inspections.

When our kids came along, the pressure to keep that balance increased exponentially. With both of us working, there were lots of frantic early morning near-fights, with both of us whisper-shouting behind our bedroom door, “I CAN’T STAY HOME TODAY! I have a meeting….” “Your turn to take him to the doctors! I cannot miss another staff meeting!”