The First Ladies unpaid "Women's Work"

Please check out this fascinating article (to me anyway) about the role of the Chief Wife, Babymaker, Director of Internal Affairs, etc, etc of our country. Do you think this needs to change? How do you see our lives and roles as women, mothers, wives, etc, reflected or as compared to the First Lady's?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20081209/pl_politico/16308

Ode to Nanny

Doing “Sunday morning things” like getting up early, earlier than everyone else, and cleaning the kitchen or cooking a meal for the family or both, bring me such peace of mind and beauty. I feel like my granny(we called her "nanny"), who would do those things when she came to visit, waking up at dawn and preparing the dough to rise for the dinner rolls she was making for Sunday dinner. She’d make sugar cookies and raisin bread too. And when I got up early with her, awakened by not feeling her presence in the room she shared with me when she came to visit, as much as her quiet singing and moving about in the kitchen that I heard., she’d show me how to coat the top of the cookies with white sugar, or cut out breakfast biscuits with a glass..

Maybe its the apron too. I find myself wearing an apron when i'm in the kitchen for long hauls, it just makes so much sense when you're really getting down and dirty in there. However, never saw myself as an "apron girl". That was what older ladies like my grandmothers wore, and now, here I am, wearing the apron and caring for my family, like my grandmommas did. Never really knowing until now, the power they quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) held. Not really knowing till now, the power of that apron, the power of those hands that cooked and cleaned and prepared the meals, the power of their love shining through in all of those acts.