Room by Room: Routine

Just like last year, my March and April seem to be a bit psychotic. Four or five weeks in a row, events and adventures on Friday and Saturday have reduced my week to three or four days. Just a few days in which to do chores, cook, manage my normal work deadlines, and attempt to keep a large family project going. This is keeping me on a basics-of-basics level of housekeeping. Thankfully, my detoxes seem to be paying off as I feel like I have more spoons, haven’t gotten sick, and my anxiety is staying level instead of spiking. There’s always something to be thankful for!

What all this has made me sit up and notice is the comfort of routine. Being away from home for one or two nights has made me oh so thankful for home. Even more rewarding, my husband has communicated his desire for me to be home or to be home himself. This tells me that I’m doing a good job because we like being here. One of the biggest aspects of making all the rooms in the house our rooms, in creating a family culture, a place to call home, is routine.

I know, I know. It is supremely uncool to love routine. But give me a moment to hold up this gift and proclaim its beauty.

Routine is loyalty and faithfulness made sight, given firm, given tangible expression, and action. We’ve over-saturated our culture with the idea of self-centered happiness and a “remove all that is toxic in your life” attitude to such a depth that we’re left floundering. We demand perfection from relationships and always give ourselves excuses and exit strategies if things should become less than ideal. We scream that less-than-perfect relationships are abuse and I’m the obvious victim. And what does that leave us? A high divorce rate, a rejection of marriage, rejection of family, and a raising up of Found Family to a ridiculous level coupled with the not-so-subtle message that where you work is your dwelling. Now, watch the stories we tell. What are we looking for?

Home.

We’re searching for a place where we must be accepted regardless of our failings, where we will be safe and can find rest.

Side Note: I would like to go on the record as a firm believer in the beauty of Found Family. Is there anything more Christian than the idea of finding your true and eternal family through a shared bond over shared blood? Is marriage anything more than making a vow to build a Found Family? All of my favorite books, movies, and shows are about found family. The church is our truest found family. What I dislike is the Found Family being showcased as the only healthy or authentic type of family. Your blood family has certain claims on you that are good. You owe your parents a certain level of respect even if it is just for bringing you into the world. Blood families have great beauty in them because these are the people you grew up with. My mom told me once that the reason they insisted we be kind to each other when we were growing up is that a day will come when these are the only people who have shared it all with me—my siblings. That is something my found family can’t say. And so yes, I adore the Found Family, but not to the loss of the love of Blood Family. My favorite stories have both. Christianity has both, found and blood. Marriage becomes both, found and blood. Done now.

Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Our whole culture is unmoored and is looking for that place where they have to let us in.

Home.

Home is the place where routine dwells. And what is routine? An expression of safety and acceptance. How? This is the place of favorite mugs, customized health care, comfort meals, our things, our memories, and our place of indefensible sleep. Routine is us, together, accepted, and safe. Routine is why (if it is well managed) we want to be home. Routine is the familiar, and familiar is restful.

Routine is so much more than when we go to sleep. It is also about how we sleep. Our pillows, our sheets, our blankets, our rooms, our familiar home noises, our level of ambient light. All that is familiar and regular and rhythmed is the routine that lets us sleep well. This level of routine expands out into different rooms in the house. It is what fills your cabinets and where it is stored. Spend a day in another woman’s kitchen and you will long for the familiarity of your own space. Eat food you didn’t cook for a few meals and you will long for familiar flavors.

Side Note: I’m beginning to realize there are huge swaths of people who eat out for almost every meal. Huge numbers who don’t know how to cook even the most basic of things. I mean among a million other reasons, no wonder we’re all sick. I’m not talking about a community that lives on the poverty level and shares communal kitchens. I’m talking about young people in cities that don’t ever cook their own food. It makes my heart hurt. All the women who were told that bondage was found in a kitchen are living in tiny apartments and eating out all the time. That sounds like bondage to me, being dependent upon others for your food because you don’t know how to cook. There’s no health, home, or happiness to be found there. The kitchen isn’t your ball and chain, and neither is your family needing three square meals a day! (Another wonderful routine.)

There is a very tangible magic in the hands of the one who does most of the meal prep. It’s just often discounted until you’re not eating their food. Then you notice. Nothing tastes right, everything is too much, too rich. Your digestion is all out of whack. You begin to long for the taste of your home, the taste that you bring to your family.

Routine is how we make the bed, how we reset the house, what throws we cuddle under, and what books, shows, movies, and games are used to recreate. Our pillows and favorite shoes and favorite burner on the stove. Routine is individual. Each home, each family, will employ a different routine unique to their size, time, place, and hobbies. Routine is customizable and flexible.

Routine goes from room to room with a calming hand of acceptance, peace, rest, and safety. Look, it is death to a nation to have a nanny-state. Talk about loss of freedom. Women are naturally prone to hovering over everyone to make sure they stay safe. You don’t want a bunch of fearful, hand-wringing, helicoptering women in charge of your country. Next thing you know everything will be monitored. But our desire for safety and rest does have a good expression, a wise manifestation in our homes if we keep it in control. Nanny-stating our homes isn’t any better than nanny-stating our countries, but our desire for a safe place is…safely expressed in the home and routine is the best way we can do that. Not with a tight fist, but gently, calmly, slowly building and beautifying the natural currents of our homes. If we do this right, we can create a place of good acceptance, peace, rest, and safety. Pay attention. We have the power to build up strong fortresses filled with life or dark mansions haunted by terror and abuse. We, homemakers, have that power. Guard and garden your tending.

Though often villainized as the worst of doldrums, the antithesis of adventure, the ruiner of fun, the stick in the mud, routine quietly carries on. Even beloved Bilbo Baggins longed for his chair, his books, his tea, and his home. Routine is the soothing hand on the fevered brow that says, be still, you’re home.

Oh, dear Keepers of homes, don’t disregard routine. Use her to tend. Use her to build a family culture and traditions into your house to make it a home. Use her in each room of your house. Have you ever considered that the routines we establish in our homes will be passed down generationally? Maybe only bits and pieces, but like a beloved Christmas ornament, the routines we establish become part of our children and our children’s children. They’re the ghosts of our pasts peeking through the veil in recipes, bedtimes, gardens, organization, and color schemes. They are the nurtured part of what makes us us.

Don’t belittle this beautiful tool! She is there, whether you like her or not. Let’s put her to good work, room to room, person to person.

Routine is a regular way to communicate love to your husband. Favorite meals, customary time together, the things you handle week in and week out to help him, traditions you make sure he’s part of. Routine is often love made tangible. It is home made touchable and visible.

It is the desserts, the music, the weekly ebb and flow, and the Lord’s Day. Routines are good for us and a good thing to put to use. Let’s exult her, not snub her.