How do I...?

I don't know how to do anything.  OK, that's far from true.  But the things I don't know how to do have been a surprise.  When my mom grew up my grandma stayed home, had four kids spanning almost ten years, made (really made, not from-boxes made) at least three meals a day AND hand washed all the dishes, kept a meticulous house and was involved in several volunteer activities.  Plus, she sewed clothes for Barbies, baby dolls, kids and possibly my grandpa.  She gardened, helped care for her ill mother-in-law and smoked cigarettes while maintaining a nice complexion.  In a word, she was a Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire, vacuuming backwards in high heels.  She was a consummate domestic diva without the benefits of modern convenience that I enjoy (shout out to my dishwasher!).  Apparently the only thing she wasn't very good at was cooking eggs; in light of all the other things she did I think that can be overlooked. 

Like most women of her generation my grandmother was trained, most likely from birth, that she would stay home and take care of her kids, husband and house.  Unusually for a women in the 1940s she finished college.  Up until she got married she taught home economics.  In order to finish her program she had to invent several recipes.  INVENT.  Recipes.  FOR BAKING.  It took me over  a year to figure out that my Toll House cookies were getting flat because I needed to add a quarter cup of flour. 

I was not raised from an early age to think that I would stay home and take care of a family.  I believed that I would go to college (which I did), get a degree in four years or less (BA in Psychology in three and a half years...let's not debate the usefulness of this particular program), maybe go onto Master's work and then get a job and be very successful.  Nowhere in there did I learn any skill that might be useful in a domestic sense.  We did have a department in my high school that was essentially a home economics department.  I think it was Family Studies or something like that.  I just checked my high school's website and it doesn't look like that department even exists anymore.  Anyway, I digress.  What I'm about to say might sound disrespectful and I do NOT mean it as such AT ALL.  But, the kids that took classes in that department were, to be tactful, not kids that seemed to be college bound.  Students like me were not really encouraged to take those types of classes.  Family Studies students might have learned how to cook or make a budget but what I mainly remember is they had to carry around these stupid babies that were supposed to show them how time consuming it is to be a parent.  Only you couldn't actually cause harm to these things and you got to give them back after three days.  So, maybe not the most realistic exercise.  (As an aside, my summers spent babysitting were more effective birth control than anything I could have possibly learned in three days spent with a baby doll.)

The upshot to all this is that I've had to figure out on my own how to cook, run a straight hem, take care of a toddler, keep a clean house, organize a budget, plan meals, and keep laundry from raging out of control in the span of about three weeks.  However I can tell you a lot about bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.  So that's useful. 

I thought all this would be relatively simple but it hasn't been.  I'm lucky to have rudimentary organizational skills and I've found that things keeping things clean and tidy are much easier when I put them on a four week schedule and post that on my fridge.  It's much easier when I think about weekly meals and plan them before I go to the store.  And everything is better if I have a sense of humor.  This is me as I figure out how to be successful in this new role.  I have every confidence I can do as well as my grandma, except that under no circumstances will I give up my dishwasher.