Attitude is Everything
Coffee, hot and warming, to start the day. Wine, smooth and relaxing, to end it. Between the cups clasped in gentle hands, the day rolls out. The day rolls out between the start and finish filled with plans, people, meals, cleaning, managing, dreaming, laughing, crying, needs and wants and unwanted needs. Simple. Small. Ordinary. Singing softly to ourselves. Each day much the same. Each day always different.
One thing after another came until my soul felt raw, strained, cracking. I’m a creature of routine. I’m an introvert. For weeks early this summer, it felt like those two things kept getting disregarded. Upheaval, breaking, things piling on top of one another. It was all very, very too much.
98% of HearthKeeping is attitude.
Can we stay calm? Can we smile? Can we tend?
Attitude is everything.
Notice how many of the Proverbs addressed to women are about our attitudes. Not being contentious is repeated over and over. We’re tempted to cause strife and be argumentative. What does a home never need? Argument and strife. Those things are the opposite of tending our hearth. Laundry has to be done, but laundry done cheerfully is so much better than laundry done with a whine and a bitter heart.
A good attitude can overcome and hide a multitude of mistakes and a lack of skill. A willingness to get in and do the work instead of mutter and murmur and complain will not make the work go away, but it will spread an atmosphere of happiness in your home. Not to get mystical, but we are spiritual creatures and that isn’t something we as homemakers get to ignore. Yes, we deal with the tangible things of life, but we also deal with the intangible. We shouldn’t lose sight of the one over the other. Scrubbing toilets, scrubbing dishes, cooking meals, doing laundry affect the souls of those around you largely through your attitude about them. Sometimes we are downright irritated at doing them again, and sometimes we are just flat lined about them, not thinking at all about the work, just going through the motions. An element of attitude is staying engaged in the work. This doesn’t mean keeping ourselves in some state of emotional high as we fold clothes and sweep floors. Those jobs can be a great time to talk, day dream, think through other problems, plan, or even listen to an audio book. What we want to watch is our engagement and our general attitude.
Are we calm? Do we understand the physical and spiritual good of what we’re doing? Are we cheerful in our work? Or are we distracted, angry, rebellious, mean, snapping, or bored? How do we handle interruption? Do we find elements of homemaking, not necessarily all of them, but elements of homemaking soothing? Can we tell when our family is anxious and distraught and calm things down by our wise work? Are we creating a space around us that is both personal and welcoming to others? Are we examining our systems and sharpening them? Are we engaged?
There are many ways to help our attitudes, our investment of ourselves in our homes:
● Homemaker Books: not just spiritual ones but practical ones. This is a great way to do some self-examination to see ways we can tighten or loosen our work. It helps to see why other women do what they do. It shakes things up, gives us new ideas, and can encourage us to go at the work. YouTube can be a resource as well. Either way, we should further our education.
● Artistic Expression: I write these articles because writing is how I process. It’s how I think through things. So writing them helps me watch my attitude, work through different things, plan, grow, and test. Find your artistic expression and figure out how to use it in your home. Gardening, quilting, painting, crafting, building, and thousands of other artistic expressions should be harnessed for our homes and to share with others. Using what we’re passionate about for our homes will bring delight to our work.
● Buy into Homemaking: refuse to listen or indulge the whining so prevalent in fellow homemakers. Buy 100% into the fact that this is a good work, wholesome, necessary, and ours. Take ownership of homemaking. We don’t indulge in fantasies of being ‘free’ someday to do what we want. We don’t sacrifice this work for other work. This isn’t ‘don’t work outside the home,’ but don’t be shamed into seeing this work as nothing and what we do outside the home as the only significant thing. Buy into the idea that we are tending hearts and souls as well as bodies when we keep our homes. We don’t allow ourselves to think this is a waste or something invaluable. Don’t swing the other direction either. Outside-the-home work is profitable because work is good! But, we must stay hearth-centered in our hearts and attitudes… and our work outside the home.
● See HearthKeepers: train yourself to see HearthKeeping in stories. Look for the women who are tending even if they’re not in their homes specifically. This can be anything from Hawkeye’s wife in the Marvel films, Ripley in Aliens, the women in Fury Road, to Mina Harker in Dracula and Jane Eyre. Look deep. Look for the analogy and the metaphor. Stories often employ exaggerations to highlight the ordinary. If we look for that, we will find encouragement. Try as the world might, God’s Truth resonates with us and when stories are told we often find inescapable truth told whether the world likes it or not because God made us and is the ultimate storyteller. We wear our Christian colored glasses and find encouragement in stories of brave women who tend their homes, not leave them.
● Fellowship with HearthKeepers: surround yourself with like-minded women. Sisterhoods can be a source of great encouragement. Not every conversation has to be about homemaking. We aren’t one-dimensional creatures. But develop friendships with women who love their work. Open up about your struggles and your delight. Encourage conversations about not only cleaning tips and tricks, but the deeper, spiritual elements of keeping home.
● Hobbies and Interests: enjoy non-homemaking hobbies and interests. We are all unique individuals with different skills and gifts and passions. Developing those sides of ourselves won’t steal from our homemaking unless we make them our idols. Kept in the proper bounds, they will enrich our homemaking. Being well-rounded human beings fills life with delight. It sparks conversation within a home. It helps us bond with our homemaking. It builds up others. I love modern military history. How does that help me be a better homemaker? It helps me relate to and understand my husband so that I don’t react in fear when he is aggressive. It has produced some long and wonderful conversations. It has provided a skeleton for me to hang my understanding of history on which helps me keep a big picture perspective. It is useful as a metaphor for the Christian life which helps me engage in my husband’s work. It metaphorically reminds me of why I keep a home. All those men who went to war left women behind. It takes great courage to tend the home fires when you don’t know if your father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew is coming home. That encourages me in my work. I firmly believe that no matter how diverse our interests are, there are ways that it enriches our homemaking, even if it is just making us a more interesting person.
● Church Attendance: one of the best ways we can work on our attitudes is by making life choices that allow us to fully engage in our church on Sunday, that allows us to attend the prayer meetings, the main Preaching session, Sunday School/Catechetical Teaching, and fellowship times. These providentially provided times of spiritual rest will encourage us, convict us, and guide us in our work. Our homemaking is done unto the Lord. We are so very often Martha in our lives, running here and there trying to do it all. We need to remember to be Mary in our hearts, sitting at the feet of the Lord. This, my dear ladies, must be a priority for us. We must sacrifice whatever is necessary to be in church, on time, ready to listen, engaged. This means starting our week with Sunday, not ending it with Sunday. This means starting with being in church and building our lives out from there. This means sacrifice. But it is here that we will find richness and eternity in the middle of our very temporary work. Nothing will impact our attitudes like the means of grace.
There are many other ways to encourage ourselves to have happy calm hearts in our homes. Building our marriages and disciplining our children are both huge elements of this. Attitude is a choice. It is something we control, not something we are victims of. We control our attitudes.
Maids, work on this now no matter what work you do. This isn’t a Pollyanna, power of positive thoughts program. This is choosing to love, choosing calm, choosing happiness, choosing trust because you know God is in control, He’s good, and He loves you. This is one of the best ways you can prepare for marriage and homemaking. Train yourself now to not be swallowed up by small upsets, to stay in control of your heart when the world is shaking, to enjoy the small, ordinary, temporary things. Engage in your church now. Don’t set that off as something you’ll do when you have a family. Start now. All of the things listed above you can do. All of them will pay big dividends in your life even if you never get married. Learning self-control will keep you from many horrible consequences. Start now.
Matrons, why do we struggle so much with complaining about our work? Whine and complain. Whine and complain. We act like no other work in the world is a drudgery. Only this work. Only laundry, diapers, dishes, toilets are a drudgery. Everyone else is having fun but us. We must not buy into that lie. We need to embrace all the beautiful simple ordinary things in our little pockets of this world. That’s why every week we talk about ordinary beauty. Reminding ourselves that food, flowers, and fabrics are valuable helps us manage our attitude. I think a lot of our struggles come from not buying into the power of homemaking, the magic of homemaking. It’s easy to get discouraged, to feel isolated, and to feel like nothing is important. We long for significance. Look to our work! How much more significant do we want to be? We can’t have praising at the gates without going to work first. That doesn’t happen when we leave our posts or when we do nothing. Let’s get to work and leave our significance with the Lord. We need to plant our feet and man our shield wall. Let’s be in church, engaged, and let’s do the laundry, engaged.
Crones, look for ways to tangibly help. Dress your work in years of experience that makes it attractive. Adopt homemakers. Help where you can. Babysit, provide breaks, be a safe person to talk to, and if nothing else, pray for the women around you. As you get older and older and your body fails more, pray. You know what the biggest legacy my Grandma left behind? She was in church every Sunday she could be. With every physical failure, her first question to her doctor was always when she could be back at church. Church is where I miss her. Church is where I expect to see her come shuffling in the door. Dear ladies, you have no idea the influence you exert by your faithfulness down through the weary years. It may seem small, and you may feel insignificant as the rest of the world rushes around you, but please know, your faithfulness in attendance is a magnificent gift.
Attitude is everything.
Attitude is one of the hardest elements of our work. Our every step is haunted by a desire to complain, nag, worry, belittle, mentally abandon, and argue. Attitude has the ability to make the most mundane, routine elements of our work abusive and harmful to our churches, husbands, and children. Attitude has the ability to make the most mundane, routine elements of our work magical, nourishing, beautiful, and to fill our churches, husbands, and children with delight. We are the wielders of this power. Take it seriously and engage in practicing self-control. Let’s let the beauty and delight of the sun on sheets, a boiling pot of soup, clean bathrooms, mopped floors, pressed shirts, PBJs, pajamas, stories, gardens, and places of warm fellowship fill us to bursting. Let’s light the way back home.
