I need a change.

Further reflections on the title of my blog.

Once you’ve been blogging for a good while, you can’t really change your blog’s name.
The current title just came to me one day when I was reflecting on how difficult it was for me to write on my original knitting blog, The Shaggy Dog Story. Once the name popped into my head, I couldn’t shake it. It gave me a sort of theme to focus my writing, but it was broader than knitting and would allow for me to write things I wasn’t sure belonged on a knitting blog.

I had at one time started a secret journal called Selective Blindness For Joy. I loved that title, but I was starting to outgrow its bleak message. “Selective Blindness For Joy” is what afflicts me during bouts of depression. It’s how I think I’ve lived a lot of my life, but as I found myself married and turning 30, that was beginning to change. My husband has taught me how to see joy in life and I guess I wanted to reflect that new outlook in the title of my blog.

So, not wanting to continue in the negative vein of Selective Blindness, I suddenly felt that I wanted my life to encompass joy. Along with that I had just learned that there was a name for the situation that I grew up in – hoarding. I now have misgivings about that unfortunate name, compulsive hoarding, but at the time, when my mom admitted to me that she was a hoarder, I finally felt that this vague dysfunction that had plagued me and made me feel different my whole life was more solidified. It was defined by boundaries. I’m not a defective person, I’m not permanently damaged and doomed to suffer depression, I’m just the product of a parent who is severely chronically disorganized.

But, why Housewife? Once I realized that I wanted to write about my struggle to become domestically successful given my upbringing, I couldn’t get the phrase Joyful Housewife out of my head. Housewife as a concept encompasses everything I’m passionate about in life good and bad. It isn’t that I fully support the use of the word to describe women, it’s that I am okay with my ambiguity about that word and all of the issues it conjures up. I’m obsessed with the search for what it means to be a self-actualized woman. I’m obsessed with the quest to balance work life, home life, and motherhood. Seeing the word housewife every time I write urges me to examine these feelings, questions, and issues.

I want to drop the word from the title of my blog daily, but what should I replace it with?

I’d kind of like to revert to Selective Blindness For Joy adding the tagline Domestic Bliss, Eventually.