A Woman's Self-Esteem Is Tied To The House

By Chuck Snyder

Because my self-esteem is not tied to how our house looks, I sometimes don't get around to making repairs as quickly as my wife, Barb, would like.

It would be simple to prevent this stress in my life. All Barb would need to do is to look straight ahead and never notice the details of cleanliness of the house. But no, she sees her home as part of herself.

We men have no idea how closely a woman's self-esteem is tied to her home and how it reflects who she is. We men think a leaky faucet is just a leaky faucet, that gutters are just gutters, and that a broken window is just a broken window. We have to be taught that it is our wives who are leaking or stuffed up or broken.

Details, details!

We're not into details, so we don't realize that we make a woman's work harder by expecting her to pick up after us. I guess our moms picked up after us when we were growing up, and we continue this expectation into marriage. But Barb explained to me that a woman can't even begin her work in the home until she has picked up everything the rest of the family has left around.

An illustration of this came out of a seminar we did for a group of coaches and their wives. Barb asked the coaches how they would like to go out on the football field every day before practice and pick up their wives' slips, bras, pantyhose and other whatnots before they could start work. Of course the men laughed, but Barb pointed out that is exactly what it's like for a woman when the family leaves things around the house.

We men have no idea how much work a woman does to make her home presentable. Barb would vacuum for days, it seemed. She would dust everything, ask me to clean up my areas, and make me shove my books under the bed. She would prepare her best dishes and clean up her sewing room. Why was she doing all this just because a couple hundred people were coming over?

As far as I was concerned, when we had a group in, all we had to do was zip down to our friendly supermarket and pick up some Mother's Cookies, put them on a plate, and we were in business. There was no need to do all that baking and slaving, vacuuming and dusting, cleaning up desks and so on. Besides, I didn't want to put on airs with our guests. They needed to see me just as I was - messy.