For forty years, I heard the same sentence repeated again and again, and each time it felt like a crown placed upon my head.
My wife doesnt work. Shes the lady of the house.
People would smile approvingly. Some admired me. Others, I think, envied me.
And I believed it, truly. I believed I was important, cherished, doing the grandest work one could imagine.
And it truly was work, although no one would ever call it that. I was the cook, the cleaner, the childminder, the teacher, the nurse, the counsellor, the driver, the accountant; the organiser of all things. Fourteen hours a day, sometimes more. No days off. No wage. No thank you, at least not as often as I needed.
There was only one refrain: Youre at home. Youre comfortable.
My children never left for school in untidy clothes. My husband always came home to a hot meal. Our house was always in order. My life was shaped wholly to ensure everyone else was calm and cared for.
Sometimes Id gaze into the looking glass and struggle to see myself as a woman at all.
I saw a role, a function.
But I reminded myself, This is family. This is love. Its my choice.
There was some comfort, in thinking it was all ours.
Our house.
Our money.
Our life together.
But reality proved otherwise.
When my husband passed on, my world collapsed not only from sorrow, but from truth. We wept. People spoke of him as a great man, a provider, the pillar of the family.
And then the day came when his will was to be read.
I stood there as his widowhands trembling, heart in knotshoping for some assurance, some protection, after all those years given to him.
It was then I heard words that made me a stranger in my own life.
The house was in his name.
The bank account was in his name.
Everything was his.
What was ours turned into his in the space of a moment.
My children, our children, inherited what I had kept, cleaned, and held together my entire life.
And me?
I had no right even to say, This is mine, too.
From that day on, I began to live not in poverty, but in dependencean indignity Id never imagined. I had to ask
May I buy some medicine?
May I get a pair of shoes?
May I dye my hair?
As if I were no longer a woman of seventy, but a little girl begging for pocket money.
Some days, clutching my shopping list, I wondered how it came to this
How could I have worked day in and day out for forty years, and for my efforts to count for nothing?
The pain lay not only in having no money of my own, but in feeling Id been deceived.
That I wore a crown of words, not of security.
That I was named a ladybut one without any rights.
It was then I allowed myself to ask questions Id never entertained before:
Where was I, in this love?
Where was my name?
Where was my future?
And most of all: why did I believe for so many years that having my own money meant a lack of trust?
Now I understand the truth.
To have your own income, your own account, your own pension, your own propertythat is not betrayal of love.
It is self-respect.
Love should never leave you undefended.
Love should not take your strength and then let you beg for it back.
A lesson:
A woman may give her life for her home, but that home ought to offer her a placenot only by the stove, but among the rights, the safety, and the money.
Housework is honourable.
Dependence? That is the trap.
Do you know a woman who was once queen of the home, yet ended with no rights and no future of her own?
