Mends Up Her Wounded

A boy dreams with a sword in his hand. A girl gives him reason to draw it from its scabbard, and she infuses him with the power to charge into battle. This book is for every boy, even those who are now wrinkled and gray, who feels his heart race and his spine tingle every time a sword is drawn to conquer an enemy. Although many of us often feel weak, when our women and children are in danger, we transform into mighty warriors. This book is for every girl, even those who have given birth to boys and girls of their own, who feels her heart swell when she mends up her wounded man and sends him back out, fully charged and ready to battle for the sake of righteousness. Without you, our swords would rust in their scabbards.

Bryan Davis

I stumbled across this quote the other day and my heart gave a feminine “Oorah!” Everything about it made me cheer, made me feel empowered, made me feel a deep, strong joy. I will never not be moved by the warrior with a strong woman at his back.

Side Note: I didn’t really like the book this dedication is in. It was a middle-grade fantasy that I felt was middle-grade because it lacked depth. It was the kind of story one enjoyed reading as a kid, but not as an adult. 

The idea of being the Menders has become a drumbeat in my mind as I’ve grown as a homemaker and slowly adjusted to the weight of my responsibilities. I went into a lot of this process in my first article on health here. What I want to talk more about here is the interesting stage I find myself in. Since I’m here, I feel it safe to assume at least some of you are as well. If you aren’t, you probably will be some day, and if you’re past this stage, bear with me.

First, an important nuance everyone must keep in mind—not only in this article, but in every article shared on this blog—whenever I say responsibility, please don’t read that as a usurpation of your husband’s leadership in the home. Where and how he marks the lines of responsibility is his right. Each and every family will be distinct in how it allocates responsibilities based upon wisdom, providence, and skills. I used the strong word of responsibility because I don’t like namby-pamby language that gives me an excuse for laziness and neglect. I’ve seen many a woman shrug off the care of her home using her husband’s leadership as an excuse. That doesn’t help him, and it’s ugly on our part. It is important for us to take responsibility within the bounds of his leadership.

I’m at a point in my HearthKeeping where I’m reclaiming my responsibility to tend to the physical health of my home from the medical industry, the insurance companies, and the government. I watched my beloved father-in-law and others suffer under medical care, often needlessly. I’m reading Nourishing Traditions, Nourishing Fats. I did an interview with a naturopathic doctor for the magazine I write for. I’ve done my own work on my health issues with chiropractors. Add to all that the travesty of the Covid situation, a surgery for my husband that we paid for out of pocket, and the Apothecary Episode of Bright Hearth, and I feel like someone (probably God) is underlining repeatedly to me that health care isn’t the government's job. It’s not even firstly the doctors and nurses and hospitals, but mine. In fact, because of all the things listed here, I’m realizing that when it comes to the medical profession, my job is to ask lots and lots and lots of questions with a high rate of suspicion. (Follow the money!)

Side Note: I can only recommend the Bright Hearth podcast with about a billion caveats, so I don’t really recommend it, maybe just this episode.

As I come into my responsibility to practice real healthcare in my home, I need to broaden myself. I need to become an amateur nurse (the word amateur literally means “a lover of something”). Not a nurse who makes sure she’s supporting Big Pharma, but one who understands basic wound care, herbal remedies, nutrition, and care of colds, flu, allergies, and such. I need to question things, do more research, and be willing to let go of my assumptions. We live in a day and age when scientists and doctors can’t be blindly trusted. They are too quick to give us a prescription, cut us open, charge us for things so that insurance will pay them more, and their data is often faulty and paid for.

One of the hard parts about reclaiming this responsibility as homemakers is dealing with the guilt of accidentally causing health issues in your home. I realized recently that I had unintentionally put my family on a low-fat diet which was slowly destroying us. As I’ve re-introduced animal fats into our meals a lot of our “chronic” health issues and physical complaints have disappeared or drastically lessened. Now I have guilt. I was quite literally killing us. This is when we remind ourselves of God's forgiveness for both sins of commission (laziness) and omission (being unaware). We repent, put the past in the past, renew our trust in God’s timing, providence, and goodness, and move forward.

It is vital, dear ladies, that we educate ourselves. We should share resources, while understanding that no one knows our family’s needs better than us. Not the government. Not the doctors. We must stop abdicating the responsibility for our people to those who don’t know our people. We must stop being intimidated by degrees and scientists. There is no miracle cure-all. We need to know our people and learn how to mend them. We must do the hard work of taking in a world of knowledge and practically and specifically applying it in our homes to our families.

Maids: Please start studying now and questioning now. Not only will it help you be a good steward of your health, it will help you serve your people, your church, and any future husband and children the Lord provides. Ask around for good books that will encourage you to look beyond traditional Western medicine. Look for books that will educate you on how the female body works. We are a complicated creation and there is a lot to know, track, and keep up with if you want to be a good steward. Learning about nutrition will not only help you, it will make you a better cook and provide wonderful opportunities to serve those around you. Start small. You don’t need a medical degree. Just start learning about yourself and how to manage your health.

Matrons: Some of us may feel behind. We may feel like we let this responsibility lie fallow far too long and our family is paying for it. We may see that we have truly been lazy when it came to the responsibility to be a good steward of what God gave us. If this is you, join me in beating back feeling overwhelmed and intimidated. Let’s start by acknowledging our laziness, repenting, and then move on to questioning the common narratives, doing more research, and building our apothecaries and first-aid kits. (Maids, you can do this too! And yes, I said to start buying small glass jars and putting herbs in them!)

Crones: Some of you are far beyond the rest of us in understanding how to manage health care in the home. Make yourself an available resource. Don’t beat us. Don’t pounce on us with medical knowledge all the time. But be available. Speak up with discernment. Build a library you can share with us. Keep learning so you can keep sharing, especially as you pass through the different stages of womanhood and care for others.

Via Carrie Gress and the End of Woman, I was introduced to the term “bureaugamy” to describe our current cultural marriage to the state instead of a husband. Women look to the government to provide and protect them. They look to the state to raise their children, and they expect the state to manage their health care. When we do this, we suddenly find ourselves in a culture that demands we all get the same vaccines, the same treatments regardless of our different and unique bodies and health situations. This is what universal healthcare looks like. This is what healthcare looks like when you take it out of the home. This is what it looks like when we abdicate our role and responsibilities to manage the mending of wounds.

Let’s take this back, ladies. Let’s bring healing to our homes and our people, and from that build up our husbands and sons and nephews to wield their swords because they know we have their backs.