A new beginning

Recently, I turned my life completely upside-down.

A month and a half ago, I went from being a full-time graphic artist living alone in an inner-city flat and eating takeaway food every night, to living with my fiancée, her daughter, and our two cats in a suburban house; she goes off to work every day, and I'm at home keeping the house and garden in order and putting dinner on the table.

For the last fifteen years I've lived alone. I tidied up every few months for inspections, and after brief attempts to cook for myself decided that it would be much easier to simply eat out every night, especially since I had a healthy disposable income and lived a block away from one of the city's best restaurant and eatery strips.

But then, I fell in love with a woman who lived at the other end of the state.

We dated for a little over a year, taking a four-hour bus journey every couple of weeks to see each other on the weekends. Both of us had good, solid jobs and comfortably established home situations, but eventually being apart was too much - with every trip, a thread being stitched between us was inexorably drawing us closer together. On the eve of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, I popped the question and we were engaged. A month later, with the help of a wonderful friend, I moved house and merged my life with hers.

Now, I'm in the position of homemaker while she's hard at work earning our family's income. It's a complete role reversal from the old-fashioned "ideal" family of last century, and it's a situation I'm enjoying and embracing.

I know this lifestyle is familiar to many women (and some men) already, and for a while I wasn't sure if I should bother writing down my experiences - after all, what makes me special when so many others are dealing with the same things and being taken for granted? I hope my gender-reversed perspective provides some entertainment at least, and gets the message out there that it's OK to challenge gender roles no matter how ingrained they are in our society.

This blog will chronicle my progress as a budding homemaker, gardener, handyman, and cook. We're also a crafty and geeky household, so I may share some of our projects and other things. We're a gaming household too, although it's board games and roleplaying games more than computer games. My other blog - The Game Mechanic - focusses the gaming side of things.

This blog's name is a roleplaying game reference, too; I'm starting out as a Level 1 Homemaker with no Experience Points, but I'm sure my skills will level up in time!

I'm going to try to post something every day, but I have the feeling that I may not get the chance sometimes! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you back here soon.