Category Archive

I don’t believe I’ve gone to great lengths to protect my anonymity on my blog.  If someone really, really wanted to find out who I was and where I lived, there is probably enough information here for someone to do just that.  However, I don’t think it’s excessive modesty that makes me doubt anyone is that motivated to stalk me.  After all, most of you have jobs.  And the rest of you, well, you have all these other blogs to read.  Bottom line:  we’re all busy people; therefore, we have nothing to fear from each other (theoretically).

Whilst surfing Mormon blogs, I found someone I used to know, before I got married.  We were acquaintances, we went to church together–not close friends.  But I still thought it was cool to figure out that she really was this real-life person I had already met.  And now I know more about her than I ever did before.  I don’t even know if she’d remember who I was, which is why I haven’t said, “HEY, C!  REMEMBER ME???  HOW KOOL 2 FIND U HERE!”  Or something dumb like that.  I’m still strangely interested in her life, i.e. I have more curiosity about her inner goings-on than is probably normal, just because when I knew her in real life, she was essentially a stranger to me.  She’s still technically a stranger, only not really.  I’m the stranger because she doesn’t know I’m me.  This is a very poorly-written paragraph.  I’m trying to find an innocent way to characterize this feeding frenzy of my Inner Voyeur.

I found an old high school chum online by googling his name, and we actually ended up meeting in real life a few months later.  That was fun.  But we didn’t stay in touch much longer, and his website is no longer active.  Also, I’m not sure I care anymore.  The curiosity is satisfied, the “closure,” so to speak, of the relationship has been obtained.  In other words, he’s dead to me, but in a nice way.

There are other friends I’ve lost touch with, and I’ve tried to find them on the internet, but they don’t have the good manners to just put themselves out there for anyone to see.  Maybe they’re like me.  But I don’t even know what I’m like.  Obviously I stay anonymous to protect myself, but it’s not to protect myself from real-life stalkers, whom I don’t fear.  In real life I’m not so transparent as I am here.  And I’m not so transparent here as I used to be, before my husband read my blog.  (And no, honey, it’s not because I used to write horrible things about you.  Okay, the rest of you shut up.  I did not write horrible things about him.  It’s all here, SD, you can read it for yourself.  Except the stuff I took down.  Heh heh.  I’m kidding.  Or am I?)  It makes me wonder how much longer I can keep this up.  In either sphere.

Yes, I am a mother.  And no, I have not paid Social Security in several years.  But I am NOT a stay-at-home mom.  For one thing, it sounds less like a job title than a command you might give a dog.  "Stay at home, mom.  Stay.  Good mom."  Also, it sounds like I'm under house arrest.  A usually-accurate assessment of the situation, to be sure, but there's no need to rub my nose in it.  Plus, it just sounds stupid.  Call me a linguistic snob, but if God had wanted me to abuse my mother tongue in this fashion, he would have made me German.

I've tried on the other monikers.  "Homemaker" is just too much Your Mother's Euphimism.  I feel a bit dishonest using it, like I'm giving people the impression that I spend my days baking fresh bread and making my own pot pourri.  "Domestic engineer" smacks of resume-padding–technically true, but…come on, who are we trying to kid?

Until someone comes up with the perfect word for my job–and we may have to borrow from the French or Swahili or do one of those loan translation things–I am going to stick with "housewife."  It's a grown-up word that makes people uncomfortable, but I plan to reclaim it just as those Vagina Monologuists have attempted to reclaim vulgar slang words historically used to denigrate women and their bodies.  I think I am already more successful than they.  And I think this is the very last time I will use the word "vagina" in this blog.