Housekeeper's Diary

I lost twelve days. Not to anything interesting. No adventure, no scandal, no sudden and glamorous reinvention. (Damnit). Rather a stay at Ben’s sister’s to keep her busy household running while she recovers from a operation, coinciding with a terrible thyroid flare up that had me feeling like my legs were made of concrete and the rest of my body was on fire - as if that very body went, Oh! We are staying somewhere lovely are we? Ok. I am resting now, and there is nothing you can do about it? And so it was. I stopped. The doctor upped my medication, and I’ve since spent night after night, (after lovely days with proper showers and wonderful kids), snuggled up on the sofa watching cosy nonsense, cuddling a posse of cats and Mable (aka the best dog in the world) and finally catching my breath.

In-between times. A visit to a flat that may or may not be ours. Two lovely storeys over an Art Cafe (be still my beating heart!), huge rooms, two bathrooms and more in a truly gorgeous part of Manchester. A lovely night out, back in Didsbury, just Ben and I, remembering who we are when we can step out feeling fresh and aren’t exhausted by what it has been to simply survive. And my sister! Three short hours in her inspiring company over a cheese platter that had us both swooning.

I know you sense my longing for normality. For the little rituals that have long sustained me. But I don’t think I realised until this past week how very much I have missed the daily round. Though this house isn’t mine and is much, much bigger and busier than any I have looked after, with Hanna in bed and the house needing someone to run it, I became, temporarily, its person. And I cannot adequately explain the relief of it. I am its temporary mistress, and I am finding both solace and gentle bliss in folding sheets and sorting socks, emptying the dishwasher and organising meals. It anchors me in away I had quite forgotten I needed, not realising quite how cast adrift I have felt by living in one room, without the bells and domestic whistles of my own museum. 

It has had me thinking about how much we take for granted. Every time I fill the washing machine I am flooded with wild and preposterous joy. As the lights go down and I wander the house putting lamps on and fluffing cushions I feel a kind of peace that has been evading me: peace it seems was impossible for me to have util shored up by the ritualsI have for so many years, made the focus of my work. Peace I was irritated by not being able to conjure up on all those days when I have been antsy with the deep loss of a sense of self, I have been fine-tuning for so many years. Peace I was somewhat infuriated by, as not having it had me thinking that my intellectual, and physical self wasn’t enough, that my relationships weren’t enough and that somehow in the most un-feminist way, I was dependant on my most domestic self in order to feel whole and somehow, despite my work, that appalled me. Truth be told, I have been irritated by this fact for longer than I care to admit, as though needing the lamps lit and the sheets straight was a personal failing, a failure to have evolved beyond my most housewifely self into something cleaner and more enlightened.

But I am going to stop being irritated by it now.

Because here it is: the truth I have been circling for weeks, perhaps longer: the domestic self is not the enemy of the glorious mess. She never was. The woman who finds her breath returning as she smooths a pillowcase, who feels something unknot in her chest when she sets a table, and who is restored, genuinely, bodily restored, by the small choreography of a household running under her hands, is not a woman who has failed the feminist project. She is a woman who knows herself. There is a difference, I think, between domesticity as a cage built by other people's expectations and domesticity as a language you happen to speak fluently, one that your nervous system learned early and returns to the way a tongue returns to a mother tongue after years abroad. The glorious mess was never about burning the house down. It was about refusing to perform house-wife for an audience. And here, in Hanna’s lovely house, with no one watching, no content to make of it, no aesthetic to curate for anyone but myself, I am discovering that the rituals survive the performance being stripped away.

The glorious mess, it turns out, was never about dismantling the domestic. It was about refusing to perform it for an audience, doing it because someone expected it, because it defined your worth, because you had no other available identity. Strip the performance away and what is left? Just a woman who finds genuine peace in a made bed and a tidy kitchen. That is not a woman who has failed anything. That is a woman who knows herself, which is considerably rarer and infinitely more useful.

What remains when no one is looking turns out to be the most honest thing about me: I am a woman who needs to wander a house at dusk turning on the lamps. Not because it looks beautiful, though it does, but because something in me, some deep and unglamorous and entirely non-negotiable part, requires it in order to feel that the world is, for this moment, held.

Because I have also been thinking about this too: the held life.

We are not, any of us, islands. I know this is not a revolutionary observation but I think we need reminding of it more than we let on, particularly those of us who have spent considerable energy cultivating the appearance of self-sufficiency. The truth, which I am learning to say without apology, is that I am held together by small things. By ritual and routine and a handful of people I love without reservation. By the knowledge of where the good scissors are. By a dog. By the particular comfort of a house in the evening with all its lamps on.

This does not make me needy. It makes me human, which is a distinction I wish someone had made clearly to me about twenty years ago.

Nor does it make me small. I spent a long time worrying that wanting a quiet life with a short cast of beloved people was somehow a betrayal of my own potential. That ambition ought to look louder, bigger, more networked. But I was confusing smallness with diminishment, which are not remotely the same. A deliberately chosen life is not a lesser life. It takes more nerve than expansion, actually to stop auditioning for something larger and simply live, without apology, in the life that fits.

So let it be enough. The mess and the lamps and the beloved few. Let it be, in fact, everything.

Because being held is not, I have learned, a weakness to be overcome or a neediness to be ashamed of. It is simply the truth of what we are: creatures who require containment in order to unfurl. A plant in open ground with nothing to climb will sprawl and struggle; give it a wall, a trellis, the gentle resistance of something solid, and it will reach extraordinary heights. We are not so different. The held life, held by ritual, by the familiar weight of domestic routine, by the handful of people who know our whole name, is not a diminished life. It is a life with enough structure to make it safe to dream in.

Now, then. In the midst of an ordinary day here. Opening the door to postmen who seem deliver parcels on the hour, every hour. Making small talk with Jed, the man who pops in daily to take Mable the Schnauzer for a walk and makes such lovely ritual of it, opening the door and calling him to her, before taking his hat off and sinking to the floor to cuddle her into a veritable frenzy before they head out for a walk in the elegant park just the other side of the gates. Taking Hanna frothy coffees and reassuring her that she has no need to feel guilty, that she is doing me a favour as much as I am her, and that more fundamentally, this to me, serving a woman who has had something taken from the body she has known for. fifty-three years, is bigger than family and so very much about womanhood and sisterhood itself.

Then, Ben will return, ready to make the corned beef hash he has been threatening to make for days on end. The kids will wander in, leaving trails of trainers and bags and odd assortments of food and giant water bottles everywhere, and I will sit in the middle of it all, jobs done for the day, laptop on my knee, lamps lit, cats fed, calm and content with a clarity I have not felt for so long. For this is where I have landed, after twelve lost days and a thyroid that staged a small revolution and a borrowed house that turned out to be exactly the mirror I needed. Not in a conclusion exactly, but in a returning. A returning to the woman I actually am, as opposed to the woman I have sometimes thought I should be by now: more streamlined, more enlightened, less dependent on the smell of something cooking and the particular satisfaction of a made bed. That woman, it turns out, was never coming. And I find I am not sorry at all?

What I am is here. Present in a way I haven’t been for months, perhaps longer. Sitting in the middle of someone else’s lovely life, laptop on knee, lamps lit, the corned beef hash, trainers abandoned in the hall, cats arranged like warm, fuzzy punctuation marks across every available surface. It is not my house. But I have looked after it, and in doing so I have, quietly, looked after myself.

Perhaps that is all I want to tell you today: that the life you actually need is allowed to be the life you build. That the rituals are not embarrassing. That being held is not weakness. That a little life with its lamps lit and a tiny number of people you love ferociously is not a consolation prize.

It is, if you let it be, everything.

So if you have also been quietly berating yourself for needing what you need, the rituals, the order, the particular geography of a life arranged around your own unglamorous requirements, I want you to put that down now. Self-reproach is not serving any of us. It is not making us more enlightened or more feminist or more gloriously messy. It is just making us tired.

We need a trellis. There is no shame in this. There is, in fact, considerable wisdom in knowing which wall we climb best against and positioning ourselves accordingly.

 We all need a trellis. And more than that? We need to give ourselves permission to climb it.