"The more you do, the more you can do."

So last night, Prince Consort and I watched The 1940s House, which had just arrived from Netflix.  It's one of those shows created by PBS where they stick a modern day family (or two or three) into a setting from the past and make it as realistic as possible.  Sort of a social experiment, or living history.  PBS hates that the series has been referred to as "the thinking person's reality tv," but it kind of is.

This particular PBS "House" documentary takes place in Britain, and as we all know, I am an Anglophreak, so I was obviously fascinated.  And as a bit of a history buff (a bit: my dad is a retired history professor, and more than a bit rubbed off on me), I found it very interesting to learn about the things I didn't know.  Such as that in England, rations were much worse than they were here in America.  And that people had to black out their windows every night for fear the enemy would see lighted neighborhoods and bomb the city.  And that if the windows were not blacked out severely enough or at all times (even opening the back door with the lights on during a bomb raid to get everyone out to the shelter was an offence), very hefty fines would ensue.

But what really struck me was how resourceful this family became and how much we take for granted today.  Money was tight and rations were strict, and you never knew what you would be allowed or able to afford to buy at the grocery store.  Soap ran out.  Shampoo was gone almost immediately.  Sugar? Virtually non-existent, and it might take the entire family's rations for the week to buy too tiny an amount of sugar to use in a recipe.  Victory gardens were required if the family wanted to eat.  The family experimented with homemade household supplies and even hair dye with the few ingredients they could come by.  And all this took place in the greater London area during bomb raids most of us can't begin to imagine.  At one point, the sirens went off, signalling more bombing, 17 times in a day.  And during the London Blitz, there were bomb raids for 57 consecutive nights.  I don't think I would have bothered to come out of the shelter! 

Yet the British people went on with their daily lives.  They didn't have time to wait for the next round of bombing or to freak out or to feel sorry for themselves.  In addition to all of the housework that had to be done (and cooking on minimal rations would have been challenge enough!), the women were expected to both work outside the house for the war effort (much like our American Rosie the Riveter) and volunteer with groups like the Women's Voluntary Service.  As the woman in the tv series says at one point, she is lucky if she gets five hours of sleep a night.

As I was watching this program, I was wondering how on earth the women had the energy to do everything.  Work, which was building planes, not answering phones at a desk; volunteer work, which in this case was feeding the residents of a retirement home and essentially running a kitchen and dining hall; cleaning the house with no cleaners or appliances; raising your children in an environment where there were no televisions, computers, video games, or even lights outside as they rode their bikes in the evening; and trying to make yourself look presentable to the standards of the 1940s with no razors, soap, or hair dye, much less make up, would have been exhausting, to say the least.  Add into this equation the fact that not only was there little food for everyone, but the women were expected to give up most of their shares to the children and men.  I don't know how they did it.

Keep young and beautiful, girls!

But one of the most interesting statements a women in the program made was, "The more you do, the more you can do."  Now that got me to thinking.  And feeling a bit guilty.  Here I have access to a dishwasher, a washer and dryer, a car, and so on, and I feel like I have barely anything to show for myself at the end of the day.  So I let the 1940s House women inspire me a bit today.  I recently planted tomatoes from seed as well as basil, but now I'm thinking we should grow so much more of our food.  Last year was the first time we had a garden in LA, minimal though it was, and those tomatoes were so much better tasting than even the expensive organic tomatoes on the vine from Whole Foods!  We should be re-using things as much as possible and not just recycling after one use.  (The dreaded plastic bags of this world come to mind. I've been working harder to remember to take my cloth bags to the store each time.)  And if people in my parents' own generation could make it through rationing and so on, I can certainly get off the couch and walk downstairs and do my laundry... in a machine.  I don't have to wash it by hand and run it through a ringer and then hang it up to dry!  I can let machines do all of that for me!

So I did.  Today, I did 3 loads of laundry.  I got the dishes done (in the dishwasher, which doesn't have much water pressure, so you still kind of have to wash them by hand first, but not as thoroughly as you'd have to without a dishwasher).  I ran to the grocery store with my cloth bags.  I even broke out the weedwacker and cut the weeds by the sidewalk along the length of my apartment building.  I haven't used the garden weasel to really dig the weeds out yet, but I spent a good part of the afternoon just getting the weeds down to manageable size.  And I think the woman in the show was right: the more you do, the more you can do.  And while I'll never know how people with kids manage to do everything in a day, I didn't fall asleep on the couch; nor did I spend the entire day in front of the computer.  I got things done. And I could probably do some more.

But it is Cinco de Mayo.  And there is a vegan Cinco de Mayo party tonight.  It's even here in the Valley, which means I'm 800 times more likely to actually go.  So I will take the inspiration from the 1940s House and keep the education it gave me and go celebrate another victorious battle.  Salud!