If I go out with my family then I don’t want my family divided like that.  I also don’t like it when the men enjoy themselves for the entire duration of the outing and the women end up feeding the kids, running after them, making a million bathroom dashes and getting ketchup all over their nice shirts while helping the kid clean his hands.  It is not fair that even the family outing becomes another chore for the woman while the man is as free as a bird.  In fact I am so sick of it that I almost completely stopped going out in groups.  Instead of a nice fun relaxing evening it becomes a nightmare.

This is completely new to me ever since I came to Kuwait. My family in Egypt and family friends and the people I worked with never did that. We have always been a huge mishmash of people, loud voices and heated discussions.

Oh and that is just half of the story.  One of my lovely twitter friends Louya_ said this: “Because the ladies won’t / can’t be interested in serious man talk, get with the backward times.”

I had never really thought of it that way.  Two hours later I was still thinking about it.  How on earth can a man feel comfortable with his wife raising his child if he does not think she is smart/intellectual/worldly enough or whatever it is?  Because if she is not interested in serious talk, she is not going to raise a child who is either?  And then sometimes they will overtly make fun of women’s discussions because they are silly.  It is not fair, many women don’t talk about silly stuff, granted many women do talk about shopping, diapers and make up, but we can also talk about other stuff, just like they talk about football and cars.

Did you hear my blood pressure hitting the roof?

Because it seriously just did.

________________________________________

Yes I am serious, you may call me a lot of things but don’t you dare call me a housewife, that lands you in black list forever.  Don’t make fun of the things I do, or I will either stop talking to you or will find a way to get back at you.

I am not a housewife, I am not a meek woman with no opinions, I do not enjoy doing housework or keeping the house spotless.  Staying at home raising a child was not really what I wanted to do with my life, and if I could go back and change things I probably would.  I am not the kind of woman who will dreamily tell you that raising kids is hard and that I wouldn’t change it for the world.  I don’t do crap and I don’t do bullshit.  Yes, I knit, I sew, I crochet, I can make pizza from scratch and don’t bake a cake using cake mix.  But that is not what defines me.  For your information, I can also write code, I can disassemble electronic toys and put them back again.  I can fix basic plumbing and wiring problems.  I used to be a systems analyst and I used to be a software developer.

I don’t have a 9 to 5 job, but I run my own design business and it is hard work.  I have to do work just like everyone else but don’t have the luxury of having protected work time to get it all done.  I do it while running errands and taking care of a 4 year old.

Oh and back to that 4 year old.  I am not that awesome at getting rid of the stains from her white t shirts or at cooking vegetables and forcing her to eat them.  I let her draw on her body with felt tip pens, lick the glue stick and glue paper to the wall.  Her room is messy more often than not, with art supplies all over the place.  When she needs help I don’t rush to her side and help her every time, I step back and watch while she struggles until she can do it on her own.  I don’t do it because I am an evil mother, I do it because I am teaching the basic skill of carrying her own weight, which she will need for the rest of her life.  I throw imaginary tea parties to imaginary friends just because I can.  I am not raising a sissy.  I also throw fits when people call her a 3arussa (Egyptian for doll/bride it is usually meant as a term of endearment) because I don’t want her thinking that marriage is a goal in life, it is just a means of life.  I throw fits when people try to tell her she can’t do boy stuff because she is a girl.  She can play with cars and build stuff if that is what floats her boat, no one has the right to tell her what to like and what not to like because of her gender.

I get irritated when people don’t get what I do and instead of asking me to elaborate, they just assume I am a lazy woman who doesn’t want to work. So to them I say SCREW YOU.  To the people who think I drop my daughter off at school and then go home and watch tv all day or sleep until I have to pick her up again.  I get up every day at 5 am, just to get in an hour of work done before she is up.  I get back and do some more work, while juggling laundry, lunch and whatever else needs to be done.

Am I perfect at doing it? No I am not, I struggle every step of the way, but no one is every sympathetic with me.  Oh no, the sympathies are all reserved to the working mother.  I am not bashing the working mother, on the contrary, I just wish people would stop bashing me.

I help my husband with some of his own work, but that’s never really recognized as work either. Because I am just a bloody house wife.

I don’t fit in with the housewives and I don’t fit in with the working women.

The story of my life

I just don’t fit in.

I have my own opinions, ideas, hopes and dreams.  I am not an extension of a child or a husband.  I am my own person.  I don’t understand why that is so hard to understand for some people.  I have never made ma7shi and I don’t intend to.  I won’t waste time in the kitchen that can be better spent elsewhere.

The assumption that I am stupid because I don’t have a 9 to 5 job is the one that infuriates me the most.  When people talk down to me I want to poke their eyes out with a fork.  And when people tell me I am lucky I don’t have to wake up early and go to work every day drives me insane.  I was at an outing yesterday with people I met for the first time, and when I mentioned that I got up at 5 am, they asked me if I worked and when I said no, they asked why would anyone wake up so early if they didn’t have a job. Well that is just it, I do have a job, I work two jobs actually, a full time parent and running my own business. I would get up at 4 if I could, and I just might end up doing that soon because I can’t find enough time in the day to do all the things I want and need to do.  I understand why some people assume that housewives are stupid, I have met many of the stupid ones.  Ones that have no identity, opinions or basic knowledge of a lot of stuff.  And I usually want to kick them into fixing all that because they are going to raise idiot children who will plague us with their idiocy.  I have also met working women who are just as stupid.  Who complain all the time that they are exhausted and that they are swamped with work and that they have no life, some of them too have no opinions and if you listened to them you would assume they just came from under a rock.

To be honest, I don’t really care what other women want to do with their lives, that is their decision, and I don’t think I have any right to judge them.

I just don’t think anyone else has the right to judge me.

In one sentence describe your blog

Egyptian food blogger with a special interest in health-ifying fun new dishes as well as old favourites.

In one sentence describe your own personal blogging style

I don’t stick to a schedule and only post recipes I’m super excited about.

What inspired you to first start a blog and what keeps you blogging?

I followed other food blogs for years before I realized that hey, I can do that too! I’ve always loved writing down random musings and more recently started trying to get in touch with my inner Martha Stewart, so blogging about food has been the perfect way for me to do both.

Where do you find inspiration?

I’m usually inspired by other food blogs especially those with beautiful photography (Oh, how I envy those bloggers!). My other major source of inspiration is my grandmother, who is the one who got me interested in all things kitchen related in the first place.

What did you learn the hard way that you really wish someone had told you when you first started blogging?

I wish someone had told me how difficult it was to write down the specific measurements for a recipe. I usually work haphazardly in the kitchen and add a pinch of this and a dash of that. Dealing with how many tablespoons to add and what tenth of a cup equals in grams is driving me crazy.

Which of your posts is your absolute favorite and why?

I like my Moussaka post best because it was the first Egyptian dish I added to the blog.

I like ‘Buttered Up‘ and have recently discovered ‘Chocolate Mints in a Jar’;)

I had heard about the Sherlock series a couple of times but never actually watched it until yesterday morning.  I watched half of the first episode of the first season and totally loved it and thought he would find it cool too.  After all it is still  technically a guy kind of series with murders, some action and doesn’t have any romance or chicks that cry over their boyfriends who dumped them.

Oh boy, oh boy, he loved it. We watched the first two episodes together and since it is a long weekend in Kuwait we hope to get through the rest of them.  I might even get him watching the Mentalist.  Basically they are really similar but Sherlock is definitely more British.  It is based on Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle’s famous protagonist Sherlock Holmes but is set in modern day London.  I love the character development, there is a lot of depth to the characters.  I also love all the shots of London. And all the London cabs they get to ride in.

What I find most interesting about it, is how he deduces the things he does. He takes in all the details and just puts two and two together and bam!  It is also interesting to think how much we miss while we go about life that a more focused person can see.  The little details about a person that tell so much about them that we just never really see or notice.  I recently read Quirckology ( which I thought I had posted about but apparently haven’t) it actually gives you a lot of examples of seemingly random things that can tell a lot about a person and can predict some behavior.  Really interesting stuff. Well I had better run off and look for more interesting stuff to watch or I will end up watching another action movie of the really bad kind.

I found this Alphabet Tracing Sheet there.  I printed it on thick card stock and had it laminated and got a nice bright red whiteboard marker for it too.

And she loves it.

It is such a simple idea that keeps her entertained for a couple of minutes at a time ( 4 year olds have attention span issues ). I have read about busy bags before which are basically just bags or boxes filled with things to do, color, count or whatever; but after trying out this idea I think I need to put a couple of them together and keep one in the car and one at home and one in my handbag so there is always something fun for her to do when she gets bored.

But for some reason I don’t stop telling her that she needs to sleep early.

And it is not because I don’t think she is smart enough to figure it out on her own, because she can.  I usually let her make her own mistakes so she can learn how to fix them or learn from them.  Like how she spent a week with permanent marker make up on her face so she could learn the fact that markers are for paper and no drawing on your face.  I am not really sure she learned that lesson because yesterday she painted her toe nails with her markers again.

But are human beings logical enough to learn from all of their mistakes?

I make that same mistake of not getting enough sleep nearly every day.  Logic tells me I need to be in bed by 10 because I am up at 5 am.  Yet I am consistently late to bed.  I am not stupid, I am quite sure of that.  But in my head I tell myself that an extra hour of work will do me good and I can function on one hour less of sleep, sadly I end up in bed by midnight and I don’t think 5 hours of sleep is enough, actually I am pretty sure it isn’t enough because I am cranky most days.  It would make more sense for me to get more sleep and be more productive during less hours of the day.

This is why parenting is so hard.  We mostly almost always know the right answers, but we don’t always do the right thing.  We also know that children see, children do and that the best way to teach a child something is by example, but we can’t always lead them in the right direction so we nag incessantly.

Every little thing we do, is something they will see and learn. For example, generally when my daughter is cranky, I have noticed that 9 out of 10 times I am too and she is just mirroring my own cranky behavior right back at me.  And no matter how many times I tell her to be nice when I am not being a nice person, it just doesn’t work.

So should I just give up on telling her the things she should be doing? Well, I thought about this one long and hard and my conclusion is no, I am going to keep telling her, because maybe just maybe I will actually listen to what I am telling her to do.  What I am going to do different is try to do more of the right thing so  I am also showing her what she should be doing.  And who knows, maybe I will eventually follow my own advice and actually go to bed early tonight.

** Coincidentally today she turns four.