Lost Knowledge, Part 3

“Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;

break forth into singing and cry aloud,

you who have not been in labor!

For the children of the desolate one

will be more than the children of her who is married,”

says the LORD.

Isaiah 54:1

I’m writing this article specifically to encourage the childless, the single, the daughterless, and those with broken familial relationships. Those of you who don’t find yourself in this situation, please don’t skip this article. You may have a plethora of daughters, but your knitting circle includes homemakers who don’t. I hope this article will help you to encourage them and remind you to be thankful for what you have. It is difficult to be childless, single, daughterless, or struggle through the consequences of sin that have destroyed your family, but homemaking, the domestic arts give us an opportunity to bind up some of those wounds in our communities.

We’ve been discussing the idea of Lost Knowledge, of reforging the chains of information that bound each generation of women—the heart of tending and the delight in our work that should be built upon with each new daughter joining our ranks. These chains of knowledge have been broken. For some of us, they’ve been sundered for several generations. One of our grandmothers cast off what she thought were shackles but was actually the chain of an anchor that kept her safe in good harbors. Some of us have been anchorless boats for far too long. Others of us have a grip on the chain, but it’s not as robust as it should be. It’s a good chain, but it needs to be thicker, stronger, more solid.

We have also talked about one of the defining characteristics of femininity—motherhood. Regardless of whether you have physical children or not, all women are mothers, nurturers.

So, holding the reforging of the anchor chain and the natural motherhood of all women cupped in our hands, I want to encourage all of us to work on being the bridge back to our spiritual daughters.

There is this promise given to faithful women that they will have spiritual offspring in the church. Abraham’s offspring aren’t the nations with his blood in their veins, but believers. Paul calls Timothy his son. The Bible has this concept of a family of faith, not a genetic gene pool.

“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

Taking this beautiful and high idea, I’m going to put it in a more earthly, natural setting with no necessarily eternal value but with great temporal blessings: a big part of regaining lost knowledge, ladies, is adopting daughters of all ages into our fold of womanhood.

Being childless in our modern society is an odd thing because our culture encourages childlessness, accepts it, and holds it up as the best thing. It does this even more so with singleness. While it honors those two situations publicly, it hides the deep pain brought on by being childless and single. It hides the danger to women that comes from the lack of a support structure. It hides the empty loneliness, all while encouraging selfishness. Our culture acts as if life is far more profitable without children, while pretending it still thinks children are important.

In the middle of all that is the pain of childlessness and singleness. Our culture tries to ignore the suffering of these states, but it’s hardwired into us as created beings to want a family. This is life in our fallen world: trying to pretend there is no pain when there is actually deep-seated pain. But! God is good. No matter how the nations rage, God often creates families for the family-less.

Look for the Mothers: Women of all ages, but especially young women need to look for mothers. If you are separated from your mother either by the consequences of sin, geographically, or simply by experience and life choices, look for a mother. If your mom decided to have a career and you have decided to stay home, adopt an older homemaker to be your extra-mom. Not only will it keep you from being overwhelmed and discouraged, it will encourage the woman you adopt.

We all long to pass down knowledge and experience. We all long to be significant to someone. By adopting a mother or mothers, you may be healing deep wounds, ending loneliness, or even giving a woman a reason to keep going.

Look for Daughters: Without forcing your way into another woman’s life, look for young women to adopt. I don’t know a single human being who isn’t looking for an adultier adult. We all thought our parents had it all together, until we became the grown-ups. Nope. We don’t know what we’re doing just like they didn’t know what they were doing. It helps young women to have someone speak calm into their lives.

Adopt young women and cheer them on, encourage, and pray for them.

The problem we face is the number of daughters needing mothers far outweighs the number of available mothers. There just aren’t that many older homemakers in our communities. Most of our older women had careers and homemade on the side, the weekend, or not at all. Many of them retired just like the men, but still aren’t homemakers. They either think it strange that we are all in on this, or they’re starting out themselves. We have sad oodles of motherless-daughters. Many of us in the middle stage, not really old, certainly not young, are only just now learning some of these things. We’re being called to teach what we just sort of figured out. The very small number of us who had moms and grandmas who took their homemaking seriously are drastically outnumbered. The only way through this, the only course that can help set things right, is to search out the mothers to our daughterhood and the daughters to our motherhood, regardless of blood ties. I mean, we must do this more openly. Yes, there is a subtle organicness to this, that these adoptions happen as friendships form and grow, but we must be willing to be more purposed about this – purposed with our biological daughters and purposed in our knitting circles. We need to bring in young women from our lives on purpose. It will take work. It will take stepping out of our comfort zone. But the work has to be done.

Side Note: I wish I had more practical knowledge on how to actually go about this. It’s something I think about often. Should we get some women together and write some homeschool curriculum? Should we start doing workshops? How do we become more purposed about reforging the knowledge chain, because right now the feminists are purposefully destroying our homes and families? We can’t just sit idly by and hope the next generation of girls sort of gets the hint about homemaking.

If you have a hole where you expected a daughter, but you are single, childless, daughterless, or separated, open yourself to adopting any number of young women in your family, church, or community. You might have a sibling with lots of kids, sisters or sisters-in-law with health issues, where an extra mom figure might help. There may be single women who need an honest mentor, and there may be young homemakers and moms who would absolutely love to be adopted.

Why? Because we have lost so much knowledge. We all need to set our hands to reforging our knowledge-chains. We may as well heal some trauma as we get the forge going.

Now, what we don’t want is to become fearful, like the reforging depends entirely on us. We don’t want to become pushy, getting all up in people’s business, but we do want to be as purposed as we can to adopt daughters from the struggling and adopt mothers from the lonely. If we do that, we can not only start to regain knowledge for the next generation, but we can be a means the Lord uses to bind up wounds and instill hope. Mother to daughter, mother to daughter, bound not by blood but by choice.