The Extremely Undomesticated Goddess

Question: What do June Cleaver, Carol Brady, and I all have in common? Answer: Nothing. June and Carol epitomize the ideals of being a good wife. They cook, they clean, they always have a smile for their husbands and a solution for the squabbles between their children. What do I do? I can order a mean pizza, wipe the counters with a five month old sponge once in awhile and, when my dogs fight, I think to myself, "As long as one of them doesn't wind up dead, we should be alright." Is this wrong? Was I born without the "wife" gene? To me, that theory doesn't hold up. I come from a looooooong line of good wives. My mom has seven sisters and every single last one of them knows how to bake a pie, get the ring off the tub, and possesses the recipe for the exact vinegar-to-water concoction that is sure to clean your floors. I just don't think it bled down to me. When I get home from work, the last thing I want to do is, well, anything. Which is ridiculous. John can come home from a full day of school followed by soccer practice and mow the lawn, take out the trash, plant flowers, and grade papers. What am I doing that whole time? Eating crap and watching TV. I. Am. Awesome.

I'm not sure what got me thinking about this today. Maybe it was the fact that when I asked John what he wanted to do for his birthday, he asked for a home cooked meal. How pathetic is that? Most husbands would jump at the chance to go to a baseball game or eat at a great steakhouse or get away from the norm. For the Terrys, getting away from the norm is actually using our stove. To further hit home the fact that I am a failure, we recently found out that our oven was broken. The way we found out? I was trying to pre-heat the oven to warm some leftover pizza (takeout, not home made, mind you) and the oven just wouldn't heat. The sad part of this story? The last time I had used the oven prior to that fateful March night was CHRISTMAS. Who knows how long the thing had been busted? If it weren't for frozen pizzas and the occasional need for break and bake chocolate chip cookies, we could just build a bonfire in our backyard every once in awhile and call it good enough.

As I was reflecting on all of this today, I couldn't help but let my mind wander long enough to compare my life to what I know best: TV. I'd like to play a little game now called "Imagine You Are Cate and Baze from Life Unexpected." In this fun game, John and I awake one Saturday morning to the doorbell and, standing on our front stoop, is a sixteen year old girl who claims that we are her parents. Now, there is no way this is possible because 1) I would have had to conceive her when I was 13 2) John and I would have had to know each other when I was 13 and he was 17 which is gross and 3) these things don't happen in real life. Anyways, this spawn of John/Chrisanne was never adopted and now is looking to us to take her in. We are of course thrilled that our perfect, beautiful, smart daughter with no apparent tattoos or drug addictions has found her way back into our lives and we fully agree to take her in and embark on the funny, at times frustrating, heart-warming journey of becoming a family. The only obstacle: passing the home inspection with DCFS. Herein lies the problem.

I imagine that home inspection to start with a house tour. Our house looks perfectly presentable on the surface. Sure we have a bright purple kitchen, green living room, and ugly gray hallway, but the surfaces are clean-ish and the toilet works (for all intensive purposes,we will at least imagine that the toilet works on this day). Hopefully the home inspector will ignore a couple of spots on our hardwood floors which are slightly tarnished from where our dogs may have had a few accidents awhile back. Also, we hope that she doesn't look underneath anything stationary to realize that I employ the "sweep-around" method when "cleaning" instead of actually sweeping under things. Bending down to look under our couches will induce an allergy attack on the strongest of lungs. If she pulls out the white gloves, we are in trouble. The home inspector would then move on to see that our furniture collection is a hodgepodge of items that could easily be found at our neighbors' garage sale. Our bedroom set is new, but that is only because IKEA had a sale and our stimulus money had to go somewhere. She would then notice our dogs and mark on her clipboard, "Hmmmm...two dogs...seemingly not puppies...one's a little scrawny but they seem to be alive, so that's a plus." Then, she heads straight for the refrigerator and that's where we lose all hopes of keeping our hypothetical daughter in our lives. The Terry refrigerator holds exactly these contents:

Two half gallons of milk- one expired, one ready to expire
13 bottles of beer, three different brands (we are connoisseurs)
Aquafina Flavored Water (Raspberry)
Tab (Yes, Tab, like from the 80's where my husband still lives)
Diet Pepsi
A bag of lettuce
Two half eaten peppers
Ketchup
Hummingbird juice

The freezer isn't much better:

A Kringle
Expired frozen dinners
One frozen pizza
A bag of OPENED tater tots (said tots strewn all over the freezer)
Ice

That social worker would take one look at us, laugh in our faces, and ask us if our child was going to live on a liquid diet. When I tell her that we sustain ourselves on pizza, Subway, Lung Wah, and Burger King, she would gather our child up so fast that we wouldn't even get to say goodbye. She would then call God, place a stop order on my ovaries producing any eggs, and squash all chances of us procreating.

This all may be a little extreme, but I really do feel like I am a failure in domesticity. I can cook, I just choose not to. I hate to grocery shop for real ingredients because grocery shopping for stuff that you don't know how to locate sucks. Our house looks clean, so why do I actually have to clean it? If my mom were to read this, she would just shake her head and wonder where she went wrong. To this I would say, "Mom, you have been fantastic. I am just a total dummy when it comes to all the things you are good at." Will all of this change when we have kids? Hopefully...? I really can't feed our toddler frozen pizza and McDonald's every night, at least not if I don't want them to weigh 5,000 pounds or die of MSG poisoning. I think this is going to take some baby steps to get right and hopefully I can pull through. June Cleaver, if you're reading this, I am going to rival you one day...mark my words. And I'm going to start...um...I don't really feel like it right now. Maybe I'll make it a summer project. Or a New Year's resolution. Until then, I am going to sign off of blogger, grab some Cheetos, and get back to what's really important. Which right now equals "True Life: I'm Hustling in the Hamptons." Domestic bliss can wait.