Wonder women – in praise of the original multi-taskers

I am constantly surprised by the number of things that I don’t know. I don’t mean that in the sense of ‘the older I get, the less I know’, though that is also true, but rather practical knowledge, of which I know next to nothing. The people who highlight this lack in myself usually do so completely unknowingly and unintentionally. Most often they are my mother and my mother-in-law, but can be aunties and older friends too.

The knowledge they refer to, usually in passing and rarely regarded by them as anything particularly worth knowing, are invariably things that are incredibly useful. My mother and my mother-in-law both married and raised children young. Each had three children under three by their early twenties. Naturally, they know things about babies, development, childhood illnesses and that type of thing. They also have outstanding skills in all sorts of other things too. These women can literally do anything…

They can paint and decorate – not just lobbing on paint and ‘cutting in’ (the extent of my skills) but understand the need for keying (?), sugar soap, steaming of wallpaper, pasting tables and methods to trim wallpaper around light switches. They can wallpaper ceilings and stairwells, using chairs and ladders.

They know, off the top of their heads, the different proportions of eggs to milk to flour for pancakes, yorkshire pudding, and dumplings. They can bake fairy cakes and Victoria sponges by knowing an equation reminiscent of a football formation (4:4:4:2), likewise the pastry for apple tarts and can whip up icing ‘by eye’ without any measurements at all. They bandy around phrases like ‘first you make a roux’, and things like ‘blanch’, ‘brine’ and ‘dredge’. They know that you need to boil certain pulses for ten minutes or they’re toxic and that you should steep peas with bicarbonate of soda. My mother once told me to ‘make a custard’ for my daughter who was ill and off her food. It was only much later that I realised she didn’t mean Bird’s custard.

I feel quite accomplished to know how many inches in a foot (well okay, maybe not that accomplished) and how many pounds to a kilo (2.2lbs!). But they know how many ounces in a pound (lb), feet in a yard, fluid ounces in a pint, pints in a gallon – not to mention the intricacies of pounds, shillings, farthings, crowns and half crowns in ‘old money’.

They can, and do, make and alter clothes, using sewing machines, pinking shears and patterns. They can knit or crochet when the mood takes them. My mother made clothes for me, and did the wedding and bridesmaids dresses for my brother’s wedding. My mother-in-law can make and hang curtains and blinds from scratch from a bolt of fabric, with pleats and gathers that take complicated equations to work out and which look far better than the arrangements you’d find in the poshest of posh hotels.

These women know how to get all sorts of stains out of all kinds of materials, using things I would only know to put on my chips. If they were to ever turn to a life of crime, god help the police.

Neither my mother nor my mother-in-law were purely housewives or ‘home-makers’ (though that incorporates so many different jobs and skills that if we paid individual employees to do, we would need a full staff). They also worked doing different things at different times – taking in sewing and picking potatoes in the fields – in addition to raising their children, running their households, minding their parents, checking on elderly neighbours, doing things for the wider community. They turned their hands to other work in later years – social work, office work, accounting. There is nothing that they cannot do, it seems. Yet they don’t consider themselves exceptional, or skilled, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

I am genuinely in awe of them. I aspire to be more like them. I have the benefit of YouTube and Google to figure out this stuff, even if, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld “..there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” And I don’t know them, but I would like to!