There’s something I have to come clean about. I feel like an embarrassment to feminists everywhere, or at least to my younger self. But here it is: I want to be a housewife.

I’ve been a feminist as long as I can remember. I always believed that I could do anything, be anything in life, even President of the United States (I no longer believe I can be that.) Some of my favorite imaginative games as a kid involved me pretending to have a career of some sort (teacher, architect, real estate agent…yeah, I was a strange one). Throughout my twenties I disavowed the idea of having children, and wasn’t even sure I ever wanted to be married. I’ve always been ambitious, and those ambitions have always been shuttled toward “career,” even when the notion of the career I wanted to have shifted. I never wanted to be taken care of by anyone else.

I still don’t want to be “taken care of.” As my partner and I plan our wedding, and think about what our marriage means to us, nowhere in those promises do I want anything to do with being taken care of or supported. That is no one’s responsibility but my own. Or rather, ours, together. We take care of each other, as a unit. As equals.

But part of that taking care does mean taking care of our home, and our home life. It will eventually mean taking care of our child, and our family. As it is, we both work, and we both take care of our home life, and that is wonderful and as it should be. For us. Right now. But over the past few years, I’ve realized how much I love taking care of home life. That I love it more than I love my job. I don’t necessarily feel fulfilled or satisfied by my work, even when I enjoy it. I don’t feel like my work defines me, and when I leave the office at the end of the day, I shut down the work part of myself (most of the time), and I focus on other things that I love more, like cooking, sewing, cleaning, reading, knitting. I concentrate on my family, my partner, my friends.

I always imagined myself as someone who would be invested in her work, not just a nine-to-fiver. If I’m going to work, I want it to be with determination and passion. Maybe that’s unrealistic, and maybe it’s healthier to be a person who shuts off the work part at the end of the day and focuses on other things. Be that as it may, many women of my generation want to be dedicated, hard working professionals.

It feels like a betrayal, of myself and my fellow ladies, but when I think about the possibility of leaving my job and being a full time homemaker, that thought is really pleasing to me. I feel jealous of people who are able to do it, and sad in the recognition that, these days, being a one income family is nearly impossible, especially in the Bay Area, where we live. These thoughts of giving up my job and being a stay-at-home partner/mother are alien to me, and to my younger self, but there they are.

Many people might want to blame feminism for removing the full-time homemaker option from the family, whether it’s the man or the woman who wants that role. I don’t blame feminism, not even a little bit. I blame an economic system that leaches off of the population, paying them less and less for more and more work, and constantly upping the ante on consumerism and the cost of living. These days, women often aren’t full-time homemakers because there is no way their families could financially survive that way. That’s certainly how I feel about our burgeoning family.

And I’m pleased when I read that a majority of women would rather be single mothers than married to someone who’d rather they stay home. Maybe it’s in the phrasing. I’d rather be single than married to a man who would prefer I stay at home. Because my husband should only prefer that I do what makes me happy, and that we make decisions about our family together.

But sometimes I do wonder if I didn’t suddenly regress a million years in my personal outlook. Because suddenly I’m thinking that I’d be very happy if I could stay home and take care of my family all day. And I think it’s curious that when feminists fought for women’s rights to do work they loved, we somehow managed lose what was once the only valid option.

Does anyone else feel this way? Do you think I’d change my mind quickly once I left my professional life behind? Do you think being a housewife causes imbalances in the power dynamic of the home? Do you think it’s ok for women to want to be housewives even if they have no children? How do you feel about balancing work and home life?