In the spirit of equal opportunity sarcasm—and in fairness to Hubby—after last week’s blog about needing a husband, it’s only right that I now admit we also desperately need a wife.

“We need a wife,” I grumbled to Hubby as I hoisted a heavy laundry basket full of clean clothes onto the bed.

Surprisingly, he actually understood what I meant. This understanding comes from being married long enough to finish each other’s complaints. Obviously, I was talking about the kind of wife who magically folds laundry, keeps the house Southern Living worthy, and serves hot, balanced meals that didn’t start out as “whatever’s about to expire in the fridge.”

I’m not sure he realized at the time he married me that I was not a domestic goddess. Goddess, yes, domestic, no. Not only did he not quite comprehend what he was getting into with a partnership with me, but he also came from a home where his mother could have starred in her own 1950s homemaking documentary. My mother-in-law was a great cook, homemaker, seamstress, decorator, hostess, and every other superlative domestic duty one can name. In other words, an unrealistic role model for women such as myself.

But to his credit, he rarely complains, even when he wears wrinkled clothes or eats nuked leftovers three nights in a row. Still, I figure if the wrinkled clothes bother him too much, he can NOT iron them just as well as I don’t iron them. And if the thought of eating leftovers yet another night is too unpalatable, he can whip up some Hamburger Helper just as easily as I can. (Actually, he does it better than I do. It’s his signature dish.) Or he can always say those five magic words, “Let’s go out for dinner.”

So what if I’m not the perfect homemaker? I have plenty of other good qualities, such as . . . well, I’m really good at Wheel of Fortune. And I can draw blood from a parakeet. I can also recite all the books of the Bible in order. One never knows when those skills will come in handy.

In many parts of the world, people have live-in maids to perform all the undesirable domestic chores, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and even caring for the children. I got a taste of what it’s like to have domestic help when we lived in Indonesia and had our first live-in helper. I thought I had died and gone to Heaven—for about two days. She was a lousy cook, but we didn’t mind all that much as long as we didn’t have to do it. She spoke no English, which made for some interesting moments in the beginning, like the time she frantically ran into the room yelling, “May O Neese!” I thought the house was on fire. Turns out, we were just out of mayonnaise.

But all in all, we were happy with her. She was sweet and enthusiastic to learn new things until her family forced her to marry an abusive man who made her quit—but not before landing us in the middle of their domestic problems, a family soap opera we didn’t audition for.

The second helper was a woman in her fifties with four grown sons. “Great,” I thought. “A mature, experienced woman, who’s not on the prowl for a husband.” Uh, no. She had the common sense of a screen door on a submarine, the personal hygiene of a medieval goat herder, and a gift for interrupting at the worst possible moment—usually at the climax of a TV show we’d been watching for an hour.

She also thought she spoke English. I begged her to stick to Indonesian when she wrote things like “bif” on my grocery shopping list. (Beef, in case you didn’t quite catch that.) She once let our five-year-old son take a lit candle to bed when she was supposed to be babysitting. When we called to check on him, he answered the phone (several hours after he should have been asleep) and told us he was playing with a lit candle under his blankets. When we confronted her, she said, “But he WANTED to.” Apparently, in their culture, the child of your employer is your boss, even if he wants to play dodge cars in traffic or set the curtains on fire for ambiance.

She also stole my broccoli, but that’s another story.

So, yes, the idea of a domestic helper sounds dreamy. But like many other things in life, the fantasy often outshines the reality. So until they invent a robotic wife, I’ll just keep muddling through. So far, nobody has died from my less-than-perfect housekeeping. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go gripe and fold laundry.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO MY AMAZINE HUSBAND!