My Mother Doesn't Work

"My mom doesn't work. She stays at home... well, she cooks, keeps the house clean, but she hasn't got a real job…" this is how my son answered his friend's question: "What does your mom do?". I was nearby and heard this conversation. At that moment, I felt like a slacker and wondered what makes up my everyday life? If this life, which sometimes seems to consume me completely, is not a job, then what? Yes, I don't go to the office, I don't get an official salary. Not so long ago, my maternity leave with my third child ended, and now I am a housewife. I‘m embarrassed to say that I‘m a housewife and in my defense, I always clarify that I have three children and that I have a lot of worries with them. But at what time does the housewife‘s working day start and end? I don‘t know. According to my feelings, in a house where children live, it never ends. There’s always some work awaiting for you to be done. Those actions that are done on autopilot, in which a woman seems to dissolve into the house, so that everything seems to be done by itself. That’s why my heroine’s face is unseen. You can‘t even always find her in a photograph at first glance. All the housework women do is often considered by the other members of a household as an invisible attribute that a home naturally possesses, not labor worth being recognized or appreciated.