I have a secret...shhh...I watch the Home and Garden channel. It’s the pornography of the modern career woman. Imagine yourself with the time to make homemade peach preserves or a quilt. Isn’t it delicious? and sinful? About as close as I seem to be able to get to this right now is watching someone else go at it with enthusiasm.
So when I get a chance, between ordering the Chinese food and having it show up, I flip on the television and watch someone reducing a white wine sauce. I like to cook, when I have time and an appreciative audience. I also discovered that I like sewing and constructing things as well. It’s just that I don’t have either the time or the place for such things. That’s why I’m a domestic voyeur. But why does it feel like a guilty pleasure?
The problem is that the hard-driving career woman that I am isn’t allowed a soft cuddly side. To succeed I must be ambitious above all things. When I was a child, I cooked as a child: but when I became a career woman I put away housewifely things. Besides, cooking well only leads to not being fashionably thin.
As a modern career woman I am supposed to purchase these services. I should have takeout food, cleaning services, day care, and decorators. But what I’m really not allowed is to pine for them. So I sip 25 calorie diet hot chocolate and watch with guilty pleasure, as experts make three layer chocolate torts, and smoked salmon pate, and stencil or stipple or glaze walls. And while there is some outside chance that I might use those skills, I have even watched with rapt attention the instructions for trimming trees, when I have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of gardening skills that is pretty severe.
But given that at the moment we have about half again as much stuff packed into our little apartment than it will actually hold, I currently have no space. Of course, as soon as we move into our larger place on the East Coast I’m going to be working, and then will have no time. So I will undoubtedly remain domestically frustrated for a while longer.