By Patricia "Patty" Pendleton
Somehow over the last twelve years I have joined the ranks of the living dead. I am not talking about your flesh eating, stinking corpse types, which may have automatically come to mind. No, I speak of something even worse. Something real that exists in every town, state, and I would surmise it occurs even at the global level. I speak of zombie housewives.
Zombie housewives are not created over night. It take years of mindless and mundane day-to-day events to transform a perfectly normal woman into a monster. The brain slowly turns into the consistency of oatmeal after hanging out with infants and toddlers all day, everyday, at home. The first signs of zombification are the inability to complete a sentence, and speaking with a sing-song cadence. The watching of daytime television has been shown to speed up the process. The amount of exposure to chemicals found in cleaning products may be the determining factor to who will succumb to this terrible fate.
An ideal candidate is a stay at home mom with young children and a freakishly clean house. This will eventually change after the metamorphosis is complete and when all of the children are in school full-time. Cleaning will take the backseat to going to the gym and wandering around aimlessly at Target. We become experts in killing…killing time that is. In bookstores we congregate in the romance novel section and can be seen flipping through the entertainment and fashion magazines trying to remember what it was like to be alive. Malls and coffee shops are crawling with us, too.
Zombie housewives, like myself, can pass off as functioning human beings from time to time. This usually occurs when we are interacting with some sort of professional on the behalf of our children’s well being. Pediatricians, teachers, coaches…you get the picture. Even our husbands can be fooled. Our children, especially the girls, tend to see us for what we really are around the age of eleven. Only to our doctors and each other can we find comfort. The doctors’ promise to bring us back from the dead with drugs like Prozac, Welbutrin, Effexor, and Celexa gives us hope. Our fellow zombies let us know we are not alone . That is why we tend to hang out together in small groups.
Some housewives probably will take offense being compared to zombies. I am well aware of perfectly normal homemakers that intermingle with us sub-human moms. The likes of them are readily found at the Parent Teacher Organization meetings and community building functions. Their eagerness to be involved and informed motivates them to take action. They roll up their sleeves with a can-do attitude and lend a helping hand when needed. They even manage to return to work. Me and my kind admire and hate them at the same time.
In the end, all I am trying to say is there are many of us zombie housewives out there staggering through life lost. Personally speaking, I never wanted to end up like this. To many we seem lazy and self absorbed. In reality, during our pursuit to raise happy, healthy children and creating a home, part of us died. I am not trying to garner pity; rather, I wanted to educate the unknowing masses who we are and how we came to be.
Somehow over the last twelve years I have joined the ranks of the living dead. I am not talking about your flesh eating, stinking corpse types, which may have automatically come to mind. No, I speak of something even worse. Something real that exists in every town, state, and I would surmise it occurs even at the global level. I speak of zombie housewives.
Zombie housewives are not created over night. It take years of mindless and mundane day-to-day events to transform a perfectly normal woman into a monster. The brain slowly turns into the consistency of oatmeal after hanging out with infants and toddlers all day, everyday, at home. The first signs of zombification are the inability to complete a sentence, and speaking with a sing-song cadence. The watching of daytime television has been shown to speed up the process. The amount of exposure to chemicals found in cleaning products may be the determining factor to who will succumb to this terrible fate.
An ideal candidate is a stay at home mom with young children and a freakishly clean house. This will eventually change after the metamorphosis is complete and when all of the children are in school full-time. Cleaning will take the backseat to going to the gym and wandering around aimlessly at Target. We become experts in killing…killing time that is. In bookstores we congregate in the romance novel section and can be seen flipping through the entertainment and fashion magazines trying to remember what it was like to be alive. Malls and coffee shops are crawling with us, too.
Zombie housewives, like myself, can pass off as functioning human beings from time to time. This usually occurs when we are interacting with some sort of professional on the behalf of our children’s well being. Pediatricians, teachers, coaches…you get the picture. Even our husbands can be fooled. Our children, especially the girls, tend to see us for what we really are around the age of eleven. Only to our doctors and each other can we find comfort. The doctors’ promise to bring us back from the dead with drugs like Prozac, Welbutrin, Effexor, and Celexa gives us hope. Our fellow zombies let us know we are not alone . That is why we tend to hang out together in small groups.
Some housewives probably will take offense being compared to zombies. I am well aware of perfectly normal homemakers that intermingle with us sub-human moms. The likes of them are readily found at the Parent Teacher Organization meetings and community building functions. Their eagerness to be involved and informed motivates them to take action. They roll up their sleeves with a can-do attitude and lend a helping hand when needed. They even manage to return to work. Me and my kind admire and hate them at the same time.
In the end, all I am trying to say is there are many of us zombie housewives out there staggering through life lost. Personally speaking, I never wanted to end up like this. To many we seem lazy and self absorbed. In reality, during our pursuit to raise happy, healthy children and creating a home, part of us died. I am not trying to garner pity; rather, I wanted to educate the unknowing masses who we are and how we came to be.
