Lost Knowledge, Part 2

This idea of lost knowledge has been pinging around in my brain for a long time, always on the periphery, more intuition than anything concrete. I want to draw it out of the shadows and into the light, into something a bit firmer and more conclusive. I want to weave it into the tapestry of my philosophy of homemaking instead of having it sit on the side in a jumbled knot of brightly colored thread. In the last article, I worked to define it. In this one, I try to find ways to properly regain it.

If you hang around the broader homemaking community at all, you will run into a large number of women inspired to take on this massive job by their grandmothers, not their mothers. You have to go back a generation or more now to find a woman who tended her home full-time, took home economics classes, and was taught the value of home. Some of the women coming home have been actively taught to avoid homemaking, and some simply weren’t taught anything at all. Those of us blessed with moms who loved us, their homes, and their work still find pockets of ignorance in our training because our finite moms also had gaps in their generational training. Add to that the world’s constant encouragement and praise of rebellion against tradition and gender, a generation with so many conveniences built into our lives that we don’t know how to do things, and we end up with a whole bunch of women in an uphill battle to regain lost knowledge.

I’m a solid believer in the older women teaching the younger women, but what do you do when our available older women worked a career outside the home, shipped their kids off to be educated and babysat by the state shortly after birth, got divorced or never married, and saw tending the home as only housekeeping on the weekend, if that? What do you do when that has been happening for two or three generations now? What do you do when that is the norm instead of a rarity? How do we come back home and rediscover what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew?

The situation we find ourselves in as homemakers requires humility, teachability, and intentionality.

Humility: We must reject our pride on a certain level when approaching older women and asking for their help. But where pride really takes a hit is when you have to ask for help from a younger woman, a man, pagans, Catholics, and others. It’s relatively easy to humbly look up for help. It’s much harder to look sideways or even behind. We need to start pooling our knowledge. We don’t reject the older woman. Absolutely not. That is the path to pride and destruction. Older women have perspective and experience. We can’t lose that. But what they might be missing is some of the boots-on-the-ground practicality. A new mom may find herself alone with no knowledge of how to manage a baby or toddler. The older women in her life can’t help her because their kids grew up in daycare. So she turns to a childless woman of any age who has nannied children. She turns to someone who spent her days with small children of various ages. That is her older woman in this example. It may be that she is talking to a woman without kids about childrearing. A married woman may turn to an unmarried woman to harvest knowledge about delighting in the home because the unmarried woman has the perspective and skills that she lacks. Plus, people outside your trench can have helpful insights and encouragement exactly because they’re not in your trench.

Our Lost Knowledge situation requires creative humility.

Humility is also required on the part of both the experienced and inexperienced women being approached for information. Older women know that giving advice is always fraught with danger. Giving advice should terrify you. If it doesn’t, you probably shouldn’t be giving any. We must check our pride at the door when we’re giving advice, humbly acknowledge we don’t have all the answers, and that the advice we are giving might be damaging instead of helpful. All advice, from nutrition to cleaning the bathroom to decorating should be approached with discernment and respect. If you are young, in age or experience, distrust yourself. Practice humility. Our world acts as though truth and enlightenment are bound in the heart of a child, but the Scriptures tell us the exact opposite. Have some humility. When you do have something to add to the pile of Lost Knowledge, don’t shout it from the rooftops as if it is the gospel. Humbly offer it when and where you can, with grace and a certain level of distrust. The same goes for the older woman. Offer advice with grace and a certain distrust of yourself. Don’t bully and don’t assume you know it all. If you see someone you think you can help but they don’t want to listen, let it go and pray for them. Grace and humility.

Teachability: Recovering Lost Knowledge about homemaking requires all of us to be teachable. We must listen to each other. This isn’t about who is the loudest. Loud is often a hallmark of ignorance. Recovering lost knowledge is about our knitting circles gathering our collective know-how and wisdom for the benefit of the whole group. We start by recognizing how woefully ignorant we are when it comes to homemaking. Then we start listening and soaking in the truth, help, encouragement, and practical information from a teen who makes kombucha, new homemakers who set up good cleaning schedules, old homemakers (there are some of those out there) who can speak to mistakes, Christians—even those outside our denominations—pagans who have a love of home, even a gay man who knows a lot about doing laundry more efficiently and healthily. Education from multiple sources is vital to recovering lost knowledge. Yes, we practice discernment and sift the truth from the lies, but we should also seek wisdom and truth from every corner. RC Sproul said, “All truth is God’s truth.” Unfortunately, we live in a day and age when the practicing witch around the corner may have a better grasp of proper and loving home management than the older ladies in our churches or our moms. To our shame, a Roman Catholic may have a better grasp of the value of childless women and single women than we of the Reformed tradition do.

It is vital to this process that we firmly arm our shield walls with theological and doctrinal truth while not rejecting worldly sources of practical and intangible help in the management of our homes.

Intentionality: Dealing with a situation of lost knowledge means you and me and we as a whole must actively engage in educating ourselves. We are working without all our necessary resources. We have gaping holes in our understanding of nutrition, nourishment, rest, and joy. We have practical holes and philosophical holes. We are trying to do it all and only beginning to realize that means we’re not doing anything well. We’re not standing on the shoulders of our foremothers; we’re standing alone at the starting line. We can’t treat this as something that will just magically happen because we want it to. We must actively, on purpose, look for holes and fill them with knowledge and wisdom. This will require us to pay attention, engage, and buy into our work. This will mean engaging in our knitting circles. We must read, watch, listen, test, practice, and then share what we learned.

I cannot stress enough, HearthKeepers, the need to be intentional with our daughters. We no longer live in a time where it can be assumed that our daughters will follow in our footsteps as conservative homeschooling believers. The world is so loud. It is not at the door; it is in our homes. It is telling us that we don’t discipline our daughters, we let them run free. We don’t teach them the delights of homemaking because that’s slavery. We empower them by making them men, literally. Chop, chop. We are no longer the hands ruling the world by rocking the cradle. We are actively murdering, ripping limb from limb, the babe in the cradle and calling that rulership. You can’t expect your daughters to learn by osmosis about being homemakers. You must become real warrior women, not by stepping out into the world, but by training your daughters at home, on purpose, with intention, talking to them, making it a part of their active education like math, teaching your sons how to let their future wives have the space to learn their craft, giving our daughters as much of a head start on the domestic arts as possible, teaching both our sons and daughters the importance of the homemaker. None of us should expect this to just happen because we love homemaking. We must pour that love intentionally into our sons (as the providers and leaders) and daughters.

If you ever feel behind, like you should know these things, or you wonder how grandma did it all but you’re shooting in the dark, you are suffering from lost knowledge. We’ve lost the knowledge of discipline, self-sacrifice, prudence, and courage. We live in a culture actively calling good bad and bad good and we’re paying for the consequences of that with men becoming women, women becoming men, while no one knows what a woman is. We live in a world actively telling girls to sleep around as much as humanly possible and then murder their babies. Women aren’t taught the real empowerment of teaming up with their husbands, training up their children, and delighting in their homemaking. Homemaking is viewed as slavery, abuse, and belittling when it is freeing, healing, and mighty. We must get over ourselves and start combining our knowledge of homemaking even if that knowledge comes from unlikely sources or younger sources with a mismatch of experience and inexperience. There are young women coming up with a stronger heart for the home than the last two generations. We need to encourage them and help them, and maybe even learn a trick or two from them. Older is becoming a matter of experience as well as actual years lived. Humility, teachability, and intentionality.