"She poured her heart and soul into their three bedroom ranch, spent her days raising babies and ironing his pants..."

We all have our own “hurdles” to overcome, for me it is the “good mormon wife” stereotype. Have you ever met the “perfect mormon wife”? You know who I am talking about, she has quite a few kids, all of which are well dressed and well behaved, she loves to cook (she bakes fresh bread), clean and sew, “from the box” is a dirty word in her house (jared she has obviously never tried your amazing box brownies, really they are the way to go, I am not a huge fan of homemade brownies, they are too… dry), she is always on time, wears pearls (well maybe not but you get the idea), always happy, always ready with a casserole when the neighbor has a baby, and on top of that she is really spiritual… well you get the point. So I have a confession to make, I am not the “prefect mormon wife”, I am not even close. I love box brownies, microwave popcorn, and cheeseburgers, I hate cleaning the bathroom , I have to confess that sometimes I tune out a little bit (just a little tiny bit) in Sunday school, I have been known to wear the same jeans two days the same week, send my husband off to work without lunch, and pearls really aren’t my thing. This school year I have really been slacking in the good mormon wife area, and so I am getting even further away from achieving my goal. I ask Brian to help me with dinner, he does the dishes almost every night (thanks!), and sometimes he does the laundry without me. I am just too busy (that might not be entirely true but I feel that way) and some things really aren’t that realistic (who makes homemade bread on a Tuesday?). The other day someone sent me this article and I had to laugh, I feel this way all the time, I thought that some of you would appreciate it, those of you that don’t… I am not sure what to tell you… I have included the excerpts I thought were the most poignant and the link incase you would like to see more.

I wondered if my wife had a kind of Joan Crawford thing going on when she told me, about six years into our marriage, that she could not live with the idea of my taking my shirts to a professional laundry.
You think I'm some kind of monster."
"No," I said. "I don't. I think you're a very busy woman, doing things that the whole family needs you to do."
The list of what she was doing really was quite remarkable.\ When it came to my shirts, though, I ran into a wall of irrationality.
Because, you see, my wife had internalized the idea that a good Mormon wife irons her husband's shirts.
"So let me see if I understand this," I said. "You can't let me take my shirts to the cleaners, even though we can easily afford it, because if I do, it will mean you're a bad wife."
"Yes," she said unhappily.
"So the shirts pile up in the laundry room until there are 30 shirts there and I have to buy a new one. Or iron them myself. My mother taught me how. I have the skill. Only I don't want to iron them, I want to take them to the cleaners. Why won't you let me?"
"But if you take your shirts to the cleaners, it will mean that I've failed as a wife!"
"To whom will it mean this?" I asked. "Not to me. Not to the kids. Who else will know?"
"It'll mean that to me!" she wailed. "I know I'm being irrational, but that's how it feels."
"It also feels like a colossal waste of your time to iron them, and that's why you don't do it," I said, "because at any given moment on any day of any week of any year, you have something better to do than iron any shirts of mine." But if the other women in the ward found out that I ... "
And in that moment, she knew and I knew that I had won. I gloated immediately.

I grew up on homemade bread. There was no better food in all the world — no, not even a spice cake with penuche icing for my birthday, not even pistachio ice cream in Brazil or France or Italy — than my mother's bread, white or wheat, when it was still so fresh out of the oven you could barely slice it, eaten in thick slabs full of melting butter.
My wife knew this. But she is not a bread baker.
Don't misunderstand. Kristine is a great cook. She makes perfect pie crust every time. Her gravy always tastes perfect and never has lumps. And she never serves me Jell-O or anything involving Cool Whip. But for one reason or another, she never learned to make bread. So when, in the late 1980s, I turned up with a breadmaker, she didn't view it as a cool piece of cutting edge technology. She saw it as an insult to her Mormon wifehood.
Because, just as Mormon wives had to iron their husband's shirts, they apparently also had to bake bread for their families.
"But you don't bake bread," I pointed out helpfully.
"Because I'm a terrible wife!"
I think the machine has made two loaves of bread since 1989. Why? Because we both know that when the breadmaker comes out of the corner of the kitchen counter, my wife feels like a failure.

Here's what a good Mormon wife does: Whatever must be done for the good of her family.
Here's what a good Mormon wife does not do: Beat herself up because she can't do every good thing that she's seen other Mormon wives do. There is no article of faith or temple recommend interview question dealing with shirt-ironing or bread-baking or even money-managing.

http://deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,700261229,00.html?pg=3

So my dear readers, smile it’s okay that you cant do it all, maybe you learn to make bread next year, maybe dust is okay sometimes, and maybe its okay that the shirts go to the cleaners. Mybe I shift my goal away from being the perfect mormon wife to graduating with my MPH and to being happy with what I am actually able to do. The world wont end if you don’t get it all done, and if you ever need to feel better come to our house on a Tuesday and see the mess… you will feel so much better.