Wife's Tale

I’ve written fifty thousand words of the ‘book of the blog’ and I’m calling it Apple Island Wife just like the blog. Not because it’s all about me, but because I want it to be a tale from the wife’s point of view. Sort of Gourmet Farmer with a pinny on.

It’s made me think, again, about defining myself as a wife. Me, who was once a radical fem, who changed her name during her student years because she didn’t want to have only her father’s surname, because that’s how they name race horses – by the name of the stud that sired them. ‘My mother bore me for nine months, I want her name in my name!’ I wailed. I was probably quite well-oiled at the time, on the whisky and blackcurrant juice I bought with the allowance that my dad gave me to supplement my student grant.


Fast forward twenty five years from those heady days of student lounge-room activism and here I am, a wife and mother.


In the intervening years I’ve been many things, Assistant This, Assistant That, Administrator, Organiser. Not always, but often I’ve been sidekick to a man, beavering away in the background. As a wife, I’m still beavering away in the background, and I use many of the same skills. The difference is, I don’t find it soul destroying, as I often found the world of work: that feeling of being owned, but never fully valued.


I know and understand that many women have careers they love, that fulfil them. Me, I never found my niche. But I’ve found one now as a wife and mother and chief executive of my household.


Anita Roddick used to look for women who were returning to work after having a family, to run Body Shop outlets. She said a woman who’d run a household had all the skills for running a business – they could budget, manage people, had liaison skills. Conflict management? We wives invented it.


Being a wife and mother, managing this household and everyone in it including my Other Half, is my most demanding, most rewarding job. At times it’s like an endurance event, but there is also great joy here.


I’m not earning, but I am being remunerated. It all depends on what you recognise as currency. I’m paid in love, cared for and valued, and I do all those things in return. The world still thinks that money makes it go round. But the world of money is crumbling.


A wise man in the field of sustainability, Ted Trainer, pointed out that if we employed the same principles in the family home as we do in the markets, you’d make all members of the family bid for their food. Whoever could pay the highest price would get toast in the morning, and everybody else would starve. Run along those lines, the human race would die out. He believes the kitchen table should become the centre of the community, and the universe. Where the young, sick and old are cared for and nurtured; the providers are provided for and everyone provides differently.


Our generation and our children’s will see some rapid and dramatic changes as our economy crumbles and the environment starts to dictate its terms for what we’ve done. Will we manage our future intelligently, or just be dumb witnesses? Either way, we have quite something to prepare our children for. It’s we who will instil the values they will need to survive, or lead in some small way. We are creating the leaders of the future, the leaders, the managers and the parents and lovers.


Women are expected to have everything now – career, home, love, children. It’s exhausting. I haven’t been able to do it all well. I’ve had to cut back and concentrate on one thing at a time. People may say, well you’re just at home, you’re not doing much are you? But I’m working hard, in the house, in the garden, at the school, in my Other Half’s business, as a counsellor, cook, caterer, event manager, nurturer, buyer, barterer, interior decorator, laundress and all-round capable and relied-upon person. Sometimes I have to lie down and have a cup of tea to stop my head spinning.


That’s me. I’m a wife. It’s a role I’m proud of. Since my rad fem student days my understanding of what it means to be a wife has gone a radical transition. On most days it feels like the most important job in the world. And so, Apple Island Wife.