That's me in a nutshell. I want to be domesticated. I want to bounce fat chubby babies on my lap and cook and clean. I want to be tethered to the house rather than tethered to the workplace and its swirling pool of office politics and human grease. It is my conscious choice. And I want the chance to have that choice.

I am uncertain if this longing is just a passing fancy. After all, barely a year ago I was supposedly waxing lyrical about teaching a bunch of brats their ABCs. In retrospect, I persuaded myself that if I had to have a job in the conventional sense, I would be far happier as a teacher than anything else.

But the truth is, women don't have even have that choice right now, between choosing to work or stay at home and be a homemaker. At least not in Singapore, unless Daddy is rolling in lard (in vulgar parlance), or the husband is. The average couple has to work hard to keep their happy middle class life. They have to have their dream home, their dream children, their dream car, dream vacations and their dream existence as a average family. And all these on the axis of a double income.

Additionally, you hear all these scornful comments about women and their expressed longing for domesticity. The worse bugbear I have is the mentality of all those silly women who equate domestication with "taitai-hood". How many times have you overheard silly chit-chat among girls and women about "marrying a rich husband and becoming a tai-tai"? I find that silly notion abrasive and complicitous in the ongoing stereotyping of women.

And to add fuel to the fire, mention that you want to be a housewife, and people assume you mean a desire to be a "tai-tai", leading an indolent life in the home. It annoys me because a tai-tai is a sterotype as much as it does as a signifier of a group of women with rich husbands and lots of leisure time.

And that the idea is far from my ideal notion of home-life is not readily understandable by others.

In our way, we are as repressed as the 1950s American suburban life portrayed in recent movies. Instead of allowing for choice, we are inundated by the subliminal messages; misinterpretations of the feminist call for equality. To show a longing for domesticity, is to betray the struggle to shatter the glass ceiling and reclaim our rightful place in history.

I want to express my disillusionment and discontentment further, but that has to wait. Right now, I can't seem to organise my jumbled thoughts into a coherent whole, except to articulate my fancy for films like "Far From Heaven", "Mona Lisa Smile", and "Sylvia". And ponder on the narrative in "The Bell Jar".