When Do We Know?

Recently I had a chance to comment on a topic that is quite close to my heart. This post is an outcome of that unpleasantness.
Before that I just wanted to let you know that after the maid fiasco a few months ago, I finally landed with a reasonably good help last week.
I refer to her as help, because I don’t let her cook. She just helps me with the cutting, dish washing and cleaning. So far, touch wood; we are able to communicate well. It’s a miracle considering she speaks in Telugu and English and I speak in Malayalam, Tamil, English and Hindi. I have no idea why Tamil comes in between our conversation. But it does!
Anyways, one major problem of me going bonkers with housework, my “self employed” work, two teenagers and a travelling hubby, is almost solved. In two – three hours we together accomplish a lot of the housework. We are a team finally. Me and my maid that is.  I am too old to handle housework alone anyway! What will I do when I grow really old and have no money to hire a maid you ask? Well, at that point the hubby would be jobless too, kids would have left home and cooking for two old people can’t be that difficult. Can it?
As I was saying, I had commented recently on a post about how women who have a professional degree and end up doing ONLY housework are actually a loss to the country. Because their professional degree could have been got by some other person who would have used it better. To this, I am only in quarter agreement. I do think it’s a waste of a degree, but I don’t not think that working as housewives is actually a loss to the country.  To this I added that it takes experience to realize why many professional women with degrees sometimes have no option but to take care of home and kids. For this, in many cases, it requires abandoning the career. For a while at least.
To this, I got the reply, that I haven’t understood the gist of the post and that wastage of degree is a very big wastage indeed. And that these women should decide that they want to be a housewife and not go for any professional courses!
To be honest, I have no idea how to reply to this, so I decided not to continue the debate there.
I just wanted to know how many of you out there are doing exactly what you thought they would be doing after graduating?  When did you people decide that you would be a housewife, or a businessman or a professional of a certain kind?  And most important of all, at the age of 16- 19 ,which is when you decide what you want to do in life, did you really know so much about life , career and children? I surely didn’t.
While I was making Chilly Chicken today and just mixing the ingredients together, I was wondering, why didn’t anyone tell me what to mix into my life to make it perfect!