It doesn’t happen often, but when I am asked I have to stop what I am doing and think. Occupation. Among all of the options, or fill-in-the-blank, there is a choice for me to wholly commit to this vocation I employ, or push it back further. Homemaker. It’s better than housewife, for sure. Or “housemom” which is what my brother-in-law’s ex-girlfriend once called it, and will henceforth never live down. It connotes visions of sugar babies to me - high-heeled, gym-going divas and also frumpy, apron-clad matrons.
It’s something I grapple with. Which is why I usually choose another option if given the choice. I still work 10-15 hours a week on “brand consulting” and marketing project for various clients, some start-ups, some established companies. But that really doesn’t sum up the bulk of my profession, which, I’m learning to say out loud to myself, is homemaking. I am a mother raising young children I stay home with, and I take care of our home and all that entails. It is a vocation rather than an occupation, I believe, since no one is paying me to do it. (And most of the time I can’t believe no one is paying me to do it.)
I don’t know why I struggle with the admission. My sisters, who both drive minivans were telling me when I admitted my reluctance to buy one, “Why? You’re not fooling anyone.”
Same, same. I’m not fooling anyone. I am not a high-powered executive. I do not have a “career” as it were. I am a homemaker. There, I said it.
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I didn’t choose the thug life, it chose me. At least that’s what I tell myself, usually around 4 PM on a Wednesday when I am already bone-tired and still need to make dinner, and fold two piles of laundry and the baby is sick and the playdate I arranged for my oldest is going longer than expected and there are legos and barbies flooding the house and I feel like I can’t breathe. It is then that I feel it necessary to remind myself that actually, I chose the thug life. I made the conscious decision to stay home with my children during their early years even though at times it is so boring and mind-numbing I sometimes stare at my keys and imagine all of the places my car could take me away from here.
But I did the working mom thing, the full-time, 8-5, daycare thing when Claire was a baby and it works for some families but it resoundingly did not work for us. I recognize what a gift and blessing it is to be able to afford to stay at home with my children (it hasn’t always been this way), while also acknowledging that sometimes I yearn for the days where I got cute text messages about the baby between meetings and spent blissful weekends thrilled to be around for nap time and feedings and walks. I hope I can write openly about my gratitude for being here, for being here right now while my children are small and still admit that there are times when I hate it. As my mom is prone to remind me, “Having kids is not for the faint of heart.” Neither, might I add, is being a “homemaker.”
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Growing up my mom used to attend our church’s version of “Girls Night Out”, aptly named “Homemaking.” (They’ve later changed the name to Enrichment.) I don’t know what she learned at homemaking night. Sometimes she would come home with a loaf of bread they made, but more often it was a printout of a spiritual thought or message. I attend “Enrichment”. We learn to meditate. Paint. We learn about emergency preparedness and how to survive Florida hurricanes. We made a quilt this year for a woman who lost a child. We play games. Have “Get-to-know-you” activities. I absolutely love it. There is always good food. My friends are there. It’s the perfect excuse to leave said home. I can feel good about attending because I’m “supporting” the women whose job it is to put it on. I have not learned one thing that has made me a better homemaker.
I have not found many things that have made me a better homemaker. I have, however, found ways to enjoy it more. Organization. Fancy cleaning products. Or even better - an occasional splurge for someone else to clean my house. A well-stocked fridge with plenty of treats for myself. An endless stash of books. Some on Audible, some on my nightstand. Others I accumulate on the side of the couch or bookshelf to leaf through during some tentative moment of peace. Enough hangers for my clothes. A robotic vacuum that Hazel has nicknamed Rosie. Fresh flowers on the table. Look, there are simple pleasures you seek out more often when you are home all day and those things are a treasure and should take priority over expensive handbags and nice shoes, no matter what any “influencer” might suggest otherwise.
Childcare tops the list, but maybe that is less about homemaking and more about motherhood. Although sometimes the two jobs, to me, feel inexplicably combined, although plenty of homemakers are not mothers and plenty of mothers are not homemakers. To me though, homemaking without the child-rearing sounds like a dream. Homemaking with the children is a whole different animal.
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I recently finished a book where a childless sister tells her sister with three children that she is worried about becoming a mother because she feels it will limit her. “Motherhood is the most expansive thing you can do,” her sister replied. I keep thinking about that.
Has it expanded me? Yes. And also, no. I am more capable than I used to be, five years ago before I had children I thought I was busy but I didn’t know. Now I manage to meet my children’s needs and most of mine and work and keep my house running (and by that I mean there is usually toilet paper on the rolls and sometimes milk in the fridge.) I feel expanded when I get an email from my daughter’s kindergarten teacher, telling me that she was kind that day. I feel expanded when I make my two-year-old laugh, because it sounds like actual magic and sometimes those laughs are hard-won. I feel expanded when I realize that I can do things that are hard because I have to - because it all falls on me so I quite literally have to.
Am I less expanded? Yes. I am home a lot, bound by nap time and a lack of an office and mostly fatigue, because being out all day is tiring with young children. I joke with Kevin that I wouldn’t be able to have an affair even if I wanted to because I don’t interact with any men or many people who aren’t mothers also. I feel stuck inside sometimes, even here in Florida where the sun shines 360 days a year and it’s always warm enough to go outside I feel trapped because even if I wanted a different life I would have to leave this one behind to get there and I’m unwilling to.
I recently reread Eat Pray Love and keep thinking about the part where her editor tells her that having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. Motherhood, as some might say in a hallmark card is more like a tattoo on your heart but sometimes it feels like the whole dragon, fire-breathing, snaking around my jaw down to my neck.
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Years ago I was in a sacrament meeting and an old man told a story about walking home from school on a winter day. He would trudge up the hill, his breath fogging the air in front of him. “As a boy,” he said, and I wrote in my journal that night, “I would love, when I would see smoke coming from the chimney of the house. Because it would mean that my mother was home.”
There is no home like your mother. Understanding that - living it, has been my life’s work.
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Barbara Kingsolver has a lot to say about homemaking. “When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence,” she writes in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. “But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”
Economic independence is a big deal. Worldly influence too, I guess. But I think she’s right that in terms of daily life, if you disregard the small annoyances like the forgotten backpack and canceled sitter and colds, it’s not a bad gig. I love to bake, I love to read to my kids, I love to buy their clothes and with the right book on my airpods I don’t hate cleaning. I do believe in nurturing routines, as she writes. That moment post-nap when you get a tiny head nestled into your neck is, in a word, beautiful. I love that Claire runs to me off of the bus and hugs me and then shrugs at every question I ask about her day. I love that I get to watch movies, sometimes when it is still light outside! I love that I can live in socks and sweatshirts.
But Barbara, what about the minivan and the Lunchable is so bad? What about those of us that are pro-childcare and screen-time and still love the aroma of warm bread rising? What about those of us who hire a babysitter just for our sanity and drive to Starbucks and play Candy Crush and shop online when we’re supposed to be working, because it feels good to just do whatever we want for a couple hours? What about the people who like Lunchables because they are easy even if they’re full of nitrates. Who would rather pay extra to buy the app. Who cringe when they hear the dishwasher finish up because that means it’s time to unload it again.
I’ve read a dozen articles about being a “Millennial Homemaker.” Nearly all of them annoyed me. Homemaking with young children does not have to be Amazon Prime and wine o’clock and dry shampoo. It does not have to be chickens in the back (gross), gardens and beekeeping. It is not about helicoptering or freedom. It is not about survival. It is something much bigger than that. It is colossal.
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But can we admit that at times, it’s shockingly boring?
My husband is an anesthesiologist. He comes home with wild stories. Things patients did coming out of their anesthesia, sweet moments he had with a patient. A lot of really gross things I wish I didn’t know about. I tell him about my workout at the gym. Leg day. What a bitch. Claire shows him the worksheets she brought home. Hazel refuses to sit down and falls off of her chair. There is peace, in our familiarity. But sometimes I wish I were pushing drugs through needles during a liver transplant instead of sitting on the floor watching Little Baby Bum for the 50000th time. Sometimes I wish I were heading to Guantanamo Bay like my cousin, who is a JAG officer instead of doing carpool. Sometimes I wish I were anywhere else. Because homemaking can be boring even for the most fun people. Don’t @ me.
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The Highwomen sing:
“Yeah I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone
Let us take on the world while we’re young and able
And bring us back together when the day is done
The door is always open
Your picture’s on my wall
Everyone’s a little broken
And everyone belongs
Yeah, everyone belongs”
Me too.
~
I wonder sometimes at the concept of having children. What is their purpose? It is no longer necessary to have them to help on the farm. We don’t need them to carry on a name. They are not necessary, I am realizing. I wonder at how many of them I should bring into their world, and the answer at the heart of why is that I want to have more. Is that selfish of me? I want the big family vacations and traditions. I want the summer reunions and a full house. I want them to have each other, most of all, perhaps because a meteor could end us all and wouldn’t you like to be near your sister when it does? I want them, because while they are not necessary in any practical sense, they are as vital to me as air or water.
This is homemaking to me. I am building something that I love and hoping it is something broad enough for my children and their huge selves and the lives they are and will lead. It is acceptance and it is grace and it is survival, yes, but also intelligence.
I’m tired of buying the version of womanhood and motherhood and homemaking I am sold. I’m so tired of feeling like my stomach should be flat and my house should be bigger and my car cleaner.
I want to read books and eat bread and take naps. I want to wear comfortable clothes and take long runs and tickle my babies. I want to write books and sell them too. I want to grow old with Kevin and watch him garden from the window while I read and play cards with friends and crawl into bed with my adult children and hold them the way I do now. I never want that to not be okay. I want to watch them have babies and build their own gardens. I want them to want what I want only bigger. I want them to wrestle with their own questions the way I have and think about me, age 30, in a hot house in Florida and wonder what I thought. I never want it to be too late for them to call me. I want them to have beautiful, heart-pounding sex with people they love. I want them to taste every dessert and always have a book in their bag.
I don’t know what awaits us in heaven but I hope it holds some of life’s pleasures and I hope it is one long sunset after another with cards and salsa on the porch. I hope it is more homemaking on a grander scale.
I hope it is the most crowded table there is.