That's How Mom Did It

(It's exactly halfway through March, and I have failed miserably at my goal of blogging more. Here's one to hopefully kick things off.)

I guess you could say that, for the most part, David and I have fallen into the traditional male-female roles in our relationship. I clean the house: he mows the yard. I do the laundry; he makes the necessary repairs to things around the house. I decide to hang pictures, and he dutifully follows me around with hammer in hand.

Most of my duties, I learned how to do from my mother. Growing up, I was lucky enough to have my own bathroom. My sisters shared a bathroom, and my parents had their own. We three girls were responsible for keeping our respective bathrooms clean. Mom taught us how to do this. She didn't expect us to do a lot of actual cooking, but we were expected to set the table, fix drinks, refill the ice trays, and then clean the kitchen up when supper was over. So, we were very present during the actual preparing of meals. As we each began to desire to learn how to cook and bake (mostly bake, we all have a sweet tooth) Mom was there to teach us the basics. I still tend to do things like my Mom always did.

However, nowhere do I feel that my experience of being "the lady of the house" is more different than my mother's than when I go to the grocery store. I use reusable grocery bags...something I'm sure my mother would have thought very strange when we were young. So, every time I go to the store, I have to make sure I didn't leave them sitting in one of the kitchen chairs the last time I went to the store. I have to guesstimate about how many bags I'm going to need...something my Mom NEVER had to think about. My Mom also never had to load her own groceries in her vehicle...at least not when we were very small. I guess that's another thing we can thank Wal-Mart for. When we got a Wal-Mart Supercenter they didn't do that...and people stopped expecting it. However, today I actually went to Publix instead of my normal Kroger, and it wasn't for just a couple of things. I had a case of water and three bags of groceries. The bag boy asked if I would like help out, and I know Publix will do this. My Kroger will do this, too. BUT...I wouldn't even know how to act while some stranger loaded my groceries into my car. When I was young, it was no big deal that some random boy was putting the groceries in our trunk. Mom could get us all loaded in the car and buckled up, but what would I do while he was loading up my car...sit in the front seat and return calls on my cell phone like some kind of duchess or something?

So, I really would have liked help out, adorable, freckled, 17-year old boy, but it was too awkward. Sorry.