Leaving Room (Part 1)
Much of the homemaking community has united its voice across various platforms and in various walks of life to create a united front against the pandemic of chronic franticness sweeping through our culture. Women are realizing that while they may have rejected an outside-the-home career, they’re still spending life largely in the car, carting around anxiety. It is easy to sign up your kids for a thousand things, to be out of the house every day, until suddenly you realize you are trying to manage a place you never are. The call to slow living is growing louder. Like meal planning and homemaking, the intangible benefits of saying no may not be visible at first, but over time they will become apparent. More time together, play, and imagination happen in the quieter times of life which franticness kills. The ability to say yes to emergencies and opportunities to serve can only happen if you say no to franticness. If you say no to a busy, busy life, you can say yes when there is trouble. Many of us agree on the value of saying no and stepping away from a chronically frantic life. I have recently realized there is another layer to saying no: Saying no INSIDE home!
Side Note: Ladies, a huge benefit to purposefully managing your home is you have a better sense of what you, your people, and your work can handle. This is such a blessing because it gives you calm and clear priorities.
The more you take the productivity of the home seriously, the more you see what the home can produce. This is the deep magic of homemaking. Production leads to deeper and greater production. But it can also be a siren song of busyness.
It feels good to be busy. It’s rewarding and visible. (Life is a never-ceasing battle of faith over sight.) Being busy is a good thing. Work is good for us. Hard things are good for us. New things are good for us. Deeper care of our people is good for us. Being busy makes us feel like our existence is justified in a world that thinks we do nothing, fills us with pride, gives us excuses, and makes us feel powerful. (It can also make us feel like we’re bringing something to our salvation, that we can end life and face the Lord saying look what I did.) Finding the golden mean, the middle ground, between chronic franticness and dull laziness takes practice, mistakes, and clear sight into the undercurrents of your home.
I have struggled with my health all my life, but most acutely starting in 2015. At the end of 2022 and into 2023, with the help of my chiropractor, I’ve made great improvements. From the beginning, I chose to take the long path of healing by working on my diet and relearning how to live within my four walls. I narrowed my life. I have gotten relatively good at saying no to things outside the home because I haven’t had any other option. What was necessary helped me create a less frantic and more breathable lifestyle. God uses all things for good.
As my health has improved, I’m learning where my new lines are. I have a pretty fierce “No” when it comes to things outside the home, but inside the home, I’m saying yes to all the things!
Yes to yogurt, fire cider, compost, gardens, homemade bone broth, deep cleaning, crafts, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I want to do all the homey things now! Please!
Queue the sense of being overwhelmed from within instead of without.
My productivity has turned into a spiraling whirlwind of trying to do all the things.
Having cut out the outside stressors, I have welcomed in inside stressors. I don’t have enough hours in the day, or realistically, enough energy and brain power to do everything. On a good day, I feel like I can do it all. On a bad day, I can’t water my plants. Some days start strong and bottom out far too quickly. Others start so poorly I’m concerned that I won’t get anything done but it gets better as I go. Because I’m never sure what a day will look like health-wise, I must layer new things in with great care. Sometimes, it goes well. Other times I realize I’ve overextended myself and must pull back. I give in to the constant temptation to make the things I’m doing, which are important, more important than the man I’m tending, leaving me no room to tend him or anyone else. People are always more important than the housekeeping, but we often take care of people by doing the housekeeping. (Do you see why finding the balance is a never-ending battle?)
I have learned fairly well the art of saying no to the outside world. I have not learned the art of saying no to my home production. Especially in the kitchen, but there’s a cross stitch pattern calling my name, and I want to garden so bad I could scream. All of this is good, healthy, wonderful work. It is all ways I can use what the Lord has given me for the well-being of my family, but I need to stop trying to do it all right now. I need to stop and make a list and prioritize. I need to think in quarters and years instead of days and months. I need to think about what my family’s actual needs are AND what I can handle without creating more health issues. I can’t get so busy inside my home that I never have time or energy to say yes to my extended family, church, and friends.
For instance, I want chickens, but it might be better to do the work of getting a cow (for the beef, not an actual cow) first. Why? Because I don’t have to maintain the cow or feed the cow. I find a good source, I get a freezer, and we have beef.
This is a big case of not getting the cart before the horse. Yes, I have more energy and yes, I have better brain function, but I still must decide what’s important. It’s like changing your diet. Don’t go full force the first day or you will cause a family-wide meltdown. Do this one thing this week. One. Next week, do that thing and one more. You may not have to space big changes that widely, or you may have to make one big change every two weeks. We all must honestly know ourselves and our families.
We can easily get overwhelmed with all that needs doing when we take our job as homemakers seriously, and we are all in on homeschooling and more. We can be chronically frantic inside the home too. We need to stay in control and not just run down every rabbit trail that pops up.
Maids: Even now start practicing slow living. I’m not saying this with a list. You must decide what slow living looks like to you, which means you must practice, test, judge, and weigh what you commit to and what your priorities are. Make a priority of your church membership now, and then go from there. If you start finding healthy limitations now, you will be better prepared for the next phase of life. Start setting boundaries on your exploration while also enjoying this vibrant time of life when you typically have more energy and a more open schedule. Offer to help others and start honing your home productivity skills while at the same time practicing the art of saying no inside and outside the home.
Matrons: Some of us must deal with the fact that we have way overextended ourselves and our people. We aren’t tending our homes, we aren’t able to be at church for the full day or all the services on Sunday, and everyone is a bit crotchety and worn down. Our homes have been surviving on the baseline for far too long. Maybe this is because we have allowed one too many things in the home. Maybe we have chickens, gardens, kombucha, kefir, sourdough, fermentation, and six different hobbies going on at the same time. It might be time to do the hard work of picking one or two of those things instead of all of them. If you don’t have any downtime in the home from sun up to sun down, and you want to cry if anyone asks you for anything, you might want to look at what you are doing in the home and realize your production is off. Rest, recreation, and time with your people are productive even if they are less tangible. We may need to work on this.
Crones: This is a great time of life to do some of those things you couldn’t do when you were in the thick of raising children. Use this to serve others. Learn to make kombucha and share it with a matron who may have had to stop doing that so she had room to talk to her husband. Teach the next generation how to sew. You may not retire on a golf course, but you still have a tremendous amount to offer to your homemaker community. But you also must balance things and accept that life hasn’t been filled with all the world tells you that you deserve. You are probably in the thick of caretaking right now. Again, manage yourself, guard and garden your soul so that you keep an eternal perspective during this time of realization that life has turned out quite differently than you expected. Say yes when and where you can, but you must still accept with merry durability the boundaries that your health and your circumstances have placed on you. Keep a trusting eternal perspective in a world that tells you you’re missing out. Say no when you must as an act of trust.
We are the homemakers. We make home. We are the producers. We use our homes to produce great good. This must always be balanced with our need to rest, have space to breathe, and have room to hold our people against our plump curves. This means that we must sometimes say no to good things within our home. We must keep a pulse on ourselves and our people so that we don’t batter our souls with constant adrenaline. This is a huge part of managing well: the ability to judge the intangible health and the tangible health of our homes and those we tend to.
