Today’s Life’s Work Seldom Wife’s Work

“What I really need is a wife.”

The comment was rather surprising, considering that it was made by a female colleague one day last week. She was lamenting the fact that after finishing a hard day’s work each day, she returned home to find more work.

It’s not an uncommon complaint in this two-income era. In fact, before the day was out, another female colleague made nearly the exact same statement. What’s more, she said, “my husband needs a wife, too.”

After all, someone’s got to prepare dinner, do dishes, dust, vacuum and perform all those other nagging but necessary household chores. To couples working long hours, even splitting housework with a spouse can be tiresome and leave little time to enjoy the benefits of two incomes. So what my co-workers were saying, really, was that they needed an old-fashioned wife, the kind who stayed home all day and took care of the house.

While listening to their conversations, I sat back rather smugly because Tina and I have a professional “wife.” My mother lives with us six to eight months each year. When we get home from work, dinner is prepared, the house is clean and the laundry is done. Except for a few glitches, it’s a wonderful arrangement for all concerned. When Mom isn’t off visiting one of my brothers or sisters, Tina and I are relieved of many household chores as well as the usual arguments over who is going to do them.

Mom doesn’t enjoy housework but does believe in contributing to the household in a meaningful way. To her, housework is not a collection of annoying little chores. It is a profession that she takes seriously.

During the past 25 years, however, many in my generation have lost respect for homemaking and those who do it. We have come to regard the job as arduous, but one that is not challenging, dignified or fulfilling enough to dedicate one’s life to.

As the first-born son in an Italian-American family, I never gave much thought to housework. Beds were made, dinner was cooked, carpets were vacuumed. Clothes that I wore appeared in my closet and drawers, washed, dried and ironed. My only indoor chore was to dry the dinner dishes.

Usually, I let them “drain” for two or three hours.

It never occurred to me that there was a system to how it all was done until Mom moved in with us. Soon I discovered that she does particular chores on particular days of the week or particular months of the year. Thursday is ironing day. April is the month the windows get washed. And so on. She has a schedule to which she sticks, no matter what.

That’s when I realized that, to Mom, this wasn’t just an arrangement in which she was helping out because Tina and I both work. It was a chance to continue doing an important job at which she has few peers.

With her children all grown and gone, Mom had had no one to care for but herself in the year after my father died. It was like being forced into an early retirement. She was bored, she said, and lonely. She was used to having work to do, people to take care of.

So she was happy to become a “wife” again. And, needless to say, Tina and I were glad to get one.

In brief: Cyber job hunting: You may find your next job on the World Wide Web. Virtually every profession has a bulletin board, and most major corporations have World Wide Web sites on the Internet. Some cities and states even advertise their public-sector jobs openings on the Internet. The biggest such job site is America’s Job Bank, run by the U.S. Labor Department. Job seekers tapped into the Labor Department site 5.6 million times in May to investigate more than 500,000 help wanted ads. Neither employers nor job seekers are charged to use it.

Kid’s stuff: If you’re a mother, the likelihood of you working depends on the age of your youngest child. Mothers with a child under age 3 were the least likely of all mothers to be in the labor force in 1994, at 57 percent, American Demographics magazine reports. Mothers with only school-aged children (ages 6 to 17) had significantly higher labor force participation rates - 76 percent in 1994 - than mothers with preschoolers.

Working with your hands: If you’re looking for a job with a future, become a manicurist. The number of manicurists in this country is expected to nearly double to 64,000 by the year 2005, the Labor Department says. The Wall Street Journal says that one economist speculates that computer keyboards make people more conscious of their hands.

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