Hi, I’m Teresa, also known in the blogosphere as Safirasilv. I’m a writer and a homemaker in training– a constant work in progress.
If someone had told me fifteen years ago I’d identify as a homemaker, I’d have had a good laugh. When I moved in with the Cat-Herder (otherwise known as my husband), my ex warned that I didn’t do dishes. I took this as a compliment. Like many women who came of age in the early 80s, I saw the home as a trap and a career as my salvation. And never mind that the career in question wasn’t writing, which was the only vocation I’d dreamed of. I needed to be out in the world! Right? Except I was literally making myself ill because I was so miserable.
Even four or five years ago, after I’d admitted that the happiest times of my life had been ones when I was “unemployed” and busy writing and taking care of the home and garden, I wasn’t ready to claim my inner domestic goddess. When I voluntarily left the outside workforce to focus on writing and found myself becoming more and more domestic, I didn’t admit my domesticity right away. Sure, since I was home, and since the Cat-Herder was generous enough to support my crazy fiction-writing adventure, I’d make sure home was a comfortable place. Our income had taken a cut and we both love good food, so I’d better start making yummy, frugal dinners. And baking? Baking’s fun.
But a homemaker? No way!
I don’t think I admitted my domestic goddess status until circumstances forced me to take a part-time job again and I realized how much I missed not just the writing time, but the domestic aspects of working from home.
Now I wear the title proudly. I’m a homemaking fiction writer, or a fiction-writing homemaker. OK, I guess at the moment I’m a writer-homemaker-payroll clerk (not that I really identify as a payroll clerk, but it takes up 30 hours a week of my precious time, so I need to acknowledge it’s part of my life.)
And that makes me really busy. I’m editing a novel and putting in a huge garden while we’re doing a major software conversion at work. I’ll be doing promo for said novel’s release (more on that at my main blog if you’re interested; it’s a naughty romance!) about the time the summer’s beans and tomatoes want to be processed, which is the same time our private-school clients do their seasonal hiring. And somewhere in there I need to write the next book in the series. And sew and knit. And occasionally relax with the Cat-Herder and the cats and my friends. And I won’t always keep up with housework, or write as much as I’d like, and the garden will be weedy, and some days I’ll have so many balls in the air that I’ll drop them all and want to cry from frustration.
But it’s my life and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
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