Housewife, Sans House or Husband

As my brownies-from-a-mix were baking (sub olive oil for vegetable oil, add peppermint bark chips) just an hour ago, a thought occured to me:

Perhaps I am not meant to have a career per se. Perhaps all this beating my head against the wall, all this existential ennui is just silliness, like women in the middle of the last century getting Home Ec degrees at Brown to pass time until they got a husband. Maybe I'm just biding my time until marriage.

Of course, this is complete rubbish. Well, except for the minutiae which are not. Facts:

I am an incredible cook.
I keep a clean home.
I am organised, and detail oriented.
I am terrific with children.

In short, I could quite excel at being a housewife.

That is, were it not for a persistent gnawing at my gut for change, for personal control, and the fact that I know ennui, existential or no, would not fully abate, then I could quite excel at being a housewife.

What I could be, though, is a woman who works from home in the sort of job that would not need to be relied upon wholly for stability, or to do something in which I was relatively autonomous. Carpentry, I think, could fulfill this need, both as personal fulfillment, as well as providing finances to the home.

I think a lot about marriage. I just got out of a serious relationship, or at least a relationship which seemed more serious than any I'd been in previously, and most definitely one I'd wanted to turn toward marriage, and thus am currently in no position to be handing over that level of commitment to anyone. And yet, when I am out and about, I'm looking at people no longer as potential playmates, but as partners. Given my lifestyle, there is a dearth of options.

A friend joked last week, "You're going to have to spend a lot more time at Target Field."