An Open Letter

To the person who first uttered the phrase: "A woman's work is never done".

I hate you.

Why would I harbor such venom toward someone I've never met? Because your stupid saying reverberates through my mind every time I walk through my house and behold the chaos. It renders me hopeless that my work will indeed ever be done and is often verified by the fact that I have literally just finished laundering the entire family's wardrobe, and yet there are piles of dirty laundry growing like mold in every hidden corner. I can never see where it comes from, it just appears.

I hate you because you are right. And I wish you weren't. But the truth remains: for every day I spend scrubbing the house until it is spotless, there will be 3 more days worth of grocery list-writing, appointment-making, and cookie-baking. For every hour I use for a quick tidy of the bathroom, the rest of the house will have been used as a substitute and will require many more hours to disinfect and deodorize. For every moment I simply sit down and rest, alas, it is not only a moment's worth of dirt that accumulates. Somehow, there's a hidden force responsible for the constant dirtying of my environment that has nothing whatsoever to do with my children's actions, since they are never messy and they always pick up their things.

Dear sayer of the clever quotation above: I still hate you.