Confessions of a Midlife Housewife Newbie

As you all know, I was never a homemaker type of woman. I worked full time at a really taxing (no pun intended) corporate finance job for 25 years. I was telling a good friend last month that I'm learning how to do things around the house and it's actually really satisfying. In the last six months, I've learned to cook new things, made meals for entire weeks (OMG!!), adhered to scheduled laundry days, and learned general housekeeping skills. It may seem antiquated or mundane to some people, but it's given me life skills and satisfaction. It's much different than my corporate job, but satisfying in this stage of my life. I think the takeaway lesson is that we don't have to be one thing in our life. You can be different things at different times, or multiple things all the time. It's just important to grow, learn, and be satisfied, whatever you do.

Also, I've learned to never go to the grocery store next to the elementary school at 2:55pm.

Todd and I have always split up household tasks in the 24 years that we’ve been married.  However, I’ll be the first to admit that he did more than me.  He cooked dinners for most of our married life.  It started because when we were first married, I was in a long-hours stressful job and he wasn’t.  Then I was working full time and going to graduate school at night to get my MBA.  He got better and better at cooking, so he just kept doing it.  In the last few years, I’ve learned to cook quite a few things myself.  TV cooking shows and Pinterest has helped with that.  In 2015 I cooked a new recipe every week for 6-7 months.  You can find all the “What I Cooked” posts on my blog here.  You can also see them all in one place on my “Stuff I Cooked” Pinterest board! 

More recently, Todd has been really busy at work with his project going live, so I’ve been trying to do more cooking.  The first picture in this post was a Chili Glazed Tofu dish that I made last week.  It always takes me way longer to cook anything than I think it does.  I didn’t follow the recipe exactly and just kind of winged it.  It turned out rather well. 

One of my favorite ways to cook dinner is in the Instant Pot, or a pressure cooker.  I’ve made this Tex Mex Chili Mac a few times and it’s a winner.  It’s from the America’s Test Kitchen Pressure Cooker cookbook.  But this recipe seems similar. 

I’ve also made various versions of chicken & dumplings, because it’s one of my favorite things to eat.  I think this version is from The Kitchen.

Todd and I split up the various house-cleaning duties.  I’ve taken over laundry the last two years, mainly because I’ve been very particular about the way my clothes are folded, LOL.  I adopted the Marie Kondo style of clothes-folding so that I could put my clothes away vertically into my drawers.  That involves different folding and folding into smaller but sturdier structure.  I really couldn’t expect Todd to do that, so I took over the laundry. 

For the 24 years when we both worked outside the home, we did all the laundry and cleaning on the weekends.  Now I can do a lot of chores and errands during the weekdays, which frees up our weekend time together for more fun.  That was actually one of the goals we had as a couple when we decided that I would resign from my job, and we’ve been able to achieve that.

I guess what I would consider a very important job that has been my domain ever since we’ve been married is money management.  I have been managing our money and paying bills since the beginning.  It’s because that’s where my expertise was.  Accounting and finance was my jam.  That fact actually brings me to my current housewifeing situation… I guess I’ve managed our money well enough over the years, that I could resign from my job and stay home now.  I managed all our savings, investments, 401k, mutual funds, asset allocation, insurance, mortgage, refinancing, other loans, etc. for 24 years.  Sometimes I wonder if Todd even knows how much money we have, or where our accounts are.  Oh I kid.  He knows.  We cross-train each other on our tasks from time to time, just in case.

So that’s kind of where I’m at in the role of housewife the last six months.  I thought by now I’d be itching to go find a part-time job in finance again.  But no.  Between my business Pacifica Grace Studio and running our house, I’m quite busy and fulfilled!

I’ve been thinking of blogging more about personal finance topics, since that’s an area where I have a lot of knowledge that I could share.  What do you think?  Is it something you would be interested in reading here at listgirl.com?