ABOUT HAUSFRAU
HAUSFRAU muthah-zine is
Here's what the critics have to say:
"The Hausfrau is like The Onion + Erma Bombeck on acid. With comics!" --Jessica Porter, author of The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics
"Nicole Chaison is a brave, soulful, and side-splittingly funny voice of modern motherhood. In Hausfrau, she manages to tell the deep truth about parenting with a spirit that keeps even the most jaded moms smiling." --Ariel Gore, author of How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead
"Hausfrau muthah-zine is a punchy parenting zine out of Portland, Maine." --The Utne Reader, May 2006
ABOUT THE HAUSFRAU
Nicole Chaison chronicles the roller coaster of passion that is parenting in her self-published comic book Hausfrau muthah-zine, which has generated a cult following among the lactating and radically sleep deprived. She wrote the James Beard Award-nominated Spice (ReganBooks, 2006) and The Passion of the Hausfrau (Villard, 2009), a graphic novel. Her stories and comics have appeared in Parent and Family, Mamaphiles, The Bad Mother Chronicles, Fertile Ground, and the collection Forty Things to Do When You Turn Forty (Sellers, 2007). The Passion of the Hausfrau, a one-woman show starring Bess Welden and based on her stories, garnered raves at its premier at Portland Stage Company in March 2009. 
HOW IT CAME TO BE THAT I STARTED HAUSFRAU MUTHAH-ZINE Hausfrau was born because I wanted to make a zine for gals with kids and it all came together when my friend Grace--who is, among other things, a mother of two children--told me about the time her mother-in-law said the following about a friend who was putting her energy into raising her children: “She was an intellectual and a really gifted writer, but now she’s just a hausfrau.”
Oof!
What was that about? Was the comment a personal dis to Grace, who herself is a gifted writer but spends most of her time catering to the needs of two children under five? Or was it a manifestation of the mother-in-law’s own fear of insignificance in her struggle for identity? Or was it a shrewd reflection of the way we belittle mothers in our society, no matter which path we choose? It doesn’t matter, because whatever the answer is--and I suspect it’s a combination of all of the above—it just plain sucks. It sucks because it implies that by making the sacrifices demanded of motherhood, the friend simultaneously lost her intellect and her gift for writing. What a brazen, insulting leap in logic! It doesn’t make any sense! And yet, we walk around with this sentiment nestled snugly in our consciousness.
Being a hausfrau has come to mean something despicable in our culture. It’s something shameful, something less-than. I consulted my American Heritage Dictionary, and it said this: a housewife, from the German, haus (house) + frau (wife), used as a courtesy title before a surname or professional title of a married woman. Seems straight-forward enough. So how did it come to be that calling someone a hausfrau sinks her to the status of a piece of doo-doo?
The fact remains: Grace’s mother-in-law is herself a woman who raised two kids in the 60s and 70s without a husband. And she had to give up her career as a college professor to do it. Surely, she must have experienced the daily roller coaster of passion (complete adoration of your offspring one instant, abject hatred the next), the exhausting drudgery (here, let’s put that snow boot on again, little one, so we can then struggle into your hat, mittens, and coat and then get your brother ready in the same fashion so that we can then trudge out to the car and nearly kill ourselves on the ice in the driveway while I wrassle you into your car seats and then drive to the grocery store where I will attempt to make mindful food choices for my family while you pull items off the shelves and scream for your sippy cup, which of course I have left in the car), and the daily conundrums (should I let my one-year old happily eat those crayons there for a moment—it does say non-toxic on the box, after all--so that I can attend to my five-year old’s hysteria for having gotten a poop smear on his Red Power Ranger costume?).
So how could Grace’s mother-in-law have said such a thing? Thought such a thing of a fellow hausfrau? How could she forget that every single minute of a hausfrau’s day is a tangled web of intense thought and emotion? How could she belittle someone else’s experience as less important or meaningful or deep than her own?
I think it’s because there is a hausfrau amnesia—some magical mind-eraser that blots out the struggles we experience on a daily basis. I believe it’s the only way we can get out of bed in the morning and do it all over again. It’s also why our species survives. But those struggles are precisely what we need to keep in mind, because our voices are lost when we don’t tell the stories that make up our days.
Oof!
Being a hausfrau has come to mean something despicable in our culture. It’s something shameful, something less-than. I consulted my American Heritage Dictionary, and it said this: a housewife, from the German, haus (house) + frau (wife), used as a courtesy title before a surname or professional title of a married woman. Seems straight-forward enough. So how did it come to be that calling someone a hausfrau sinks her to the status of a piece of doo-doo?
The fact remains: Grace’s mother-in-law is herself a woman who raised two kids in the 60s and 70s without a husband. And she had to give up her career as a college professor to do it. Surely, she must have experienced the daily roller coaster of passion (complete adoration of your offspring one instant, abject hatred the next), the exhausting drudgery (here, let’s put that snow boot on again, little one, so we can then struggle into your hat, mittens, and coat and then get your brother ready in the same fashion so that we can then trudge out to the car and nearly kill ourselves on the ice in the driveway while I wrassle you into your car seats and then drive to the grocery store where I will attempt to make mindful food choices for my family while you pull items off the shelves and scream for your sippy cup, which of course I have left in the car), and the daily conundrums (should I let my one-year old happily eat those crayons there for a moment—it does say non-toxic on the box, after all--so that I can attend to my five-year old’s hysteria for having gotten a poop smear on his Red Power Ranger costume?).
So how could Grace’s mother-in-law have said such a thing? Thought such a thing of a fellow hausfrau? How could she forget that every single minute of a hausfrau’s day is a tangled web of intense thought and emotion? How could she belittle someone else’s experience as less important or meaningful or deep than her own?
Hausfrau is about those stories. It’s about that roller coaster I’m on every day. It’s not going to last forever, I know it, but this is the way my life is right now. And this is how I’m trying to cope.
<< Home