SAHMs Read

I think my book group suspects I’m a reading slouch.
That’s because I don't always have the book finished on time every month. But, I swear, the opposite is true. I may or may not finish my book group book because either I can’t get a copy on time or I am fully immersed in a book of my own choosing and do not want stop in midstream.
Actually I’m a book-a-holic. I read about 4 books a month. Some of my non-SAHM friends may very well attribute, the volume of material I manage to read, to the idea that I must idle away my domestic hours curled up in a comfy chair, nose in a book, while the dishes pile up and the kids starve. But that is where they are wrong (well, except for the dishes part). I actually ingest 3 out of those 4 books via audio books (the 4th one is actually read with my eyes). “But that’s not really reading!” one might say. But I say that, indeed, it is. Intellectually it all gets absorbed in the exact same way. Often, when I try to recall one of the many books I’ve read, I have a very hard time differentiating whether I had heard it or read it.

Now, think of all the mindless activities many SAHMs are saddled with in a typical day. What an audio book can do is, free up your hands to attend to those mindless things, while your brain is happily bathed a literary miasma because you are plugged into some amazing piece of fiction! This makes for a happier, more productive SAHM –although plugged in SAHMs risk starting to resent any daytime phone calls that might interrupt their stories, “Sorry honey, can you call back? I’m in the middle of an Elizabethan execution...”

Here is a list of the typically dreary activities that I now enjoy because of audio books: all housework (goes without saying!), cooking, long car trips, gardening, crafting, working out at the gym, dog walking, etc, etc. I bet, if I read more, I’d have a pristine home (but not bloody likely).

There are couple times in a SAHM’s life when “audio-reading” is hard to manage; when your kids are still small and not yet in school, and when they are on school holidays. It’s then when you feel obliged to pause your audio book or take your headphones off to actually listen to the little darlings -and sometimes your husband too (sigh, the sacrifices we make!).