Merry Durability
This was one of those happenstance things.
I was working on this article on Comfort and Happiness both as passing feelings and as deeper elements and cornerstones of our homemaking, when I used the phrase “Merry Durability” to further explore these concepts. Just like that, Merry Durability became a fundamental concept in our group. We use it all the time on the podcast and in articles. It resonates with women and the work we do. Since Season 3 of the HearthKeeper Podcast is about burnout, I thought it might be a good time to develop a better understanding of this necessary homemaker virtue.
As is often our practice, let’s start with some definitions.
Merry: Via the American Heritage Dictionary, merry is “full of cheerfulness, liveliness, and good feelings, marked by or offering fun; festive, brisk.” According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, merry is “full of gaiety or high spirits, delightful.”
Merriness is all about our attitude. It’s about the habits of our hearts. Like so much of our work, it’s not so much about what we do but our attitude while doing it. Our mindset and our demeanor are our real battlefield. They are what we most strongly guard and garden in our hearts and hearths. And we talk about them a lot around here, don’t we?
Those are simply the top three that come to mind, but almost every article and episode touches on our disposition towards our people and our work. I counted 34 articles about Attitude specifically or that heavily touch on it. Merriness is the positive side of this great work. We easily see what we don’t want to be, but what do we want to be? We’ve weeded out bitterness and complaining and discontentment, but what do we plant in its place? HearthKeepers, let’s plant merriness! Let’s fill our hearts and hearths with cheer, fun, delight, and yes, briskness. We don’t want to be frantic, but we can bustle in a good way, in a way that communicates laughter and warmth. We all love the festive time of year, but what if we find small ways to be convivial all year round? Ladies, what if—gather in, gather in—what if we were happy the majority of the time? Not that we’re living in a bubble, ignoring things, but there is no virtue in a dour-sour-woe-is-me stance. There are no rewards passed out for Number 1 Complainer: her life is obviously harder than everyone else's. But there are vast unimaginable rewards to being merry, beginning simply with the fact that it is nicer to be happy than to be irritated.
There is no denying that being a homemaker is challenging. We must be “experts” in so many fields, and manage many lives, many wants and needs with wisdom. Often all this work comes with little of what the world labels as reward and praise. Typically, our work goes unnoticed except for by a handful of people. Our work is repetitive and laborious and lonely and often overlooked. No one wants to do a job that they view as inglorious.
What do we do? Do we leave? Abandon the hearth for more “praiseworthy” work? Maybe we choose to stay, but we drudge through the day? We scowl and frown and snap and snip. We allow bitterness to sneak in behind us and fester in our inner gardens. We listen to the lie that we could do something more, and we stop buying into the importance of what we do. Maybe we abandon our hearths in our souls even while we’re physically present.
When we do this, we injure ourselves. We feel burnt out. No one wants to go through life in a state of constant irritation. No one wants to do a job with no glory.
When we do this, we injure our people. No one wants to feel like they’re a constant source of irritation. Our people will flee.
When we do this, we undo all our hard work. Housekeeping without love isn’t true housekeeping.
How do we stand against all this ruin? How do we remain faithful in body and soul?
We embrace merriness!
We fill our hearts and hearths with gaiety!
How do we expect our daughters to desire to be wives, mothers, and homemakers if our hearth isn’t lively and fun? Merry Durability is how we light the way back home for our men and our women.
This isn’t a manufactured, mechanical merriness. It isn’t fake. It is a tended, fed state of being in our hearts. It is a 100% belief that what we do in our homes for our people has lasting value. It is a 100% belief that this is our place, calling, and glory! It comes from confidence that what happens here, the work we set our hands to, affects generations. It is like love. It is a choice. It is a choice to be Merry! Choose merriness and watch not only yourself but your whole world blossom regardless of and often despite any darkness around you and yours.
Durability: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines durability as “able to exist for a long time without significant deterioration in quality or value, to last, permanent, stable.”
We live in a disposable age. An age of planned obsolescence where things are designed to be replaced, not to last and not to be passed down. We stock our closets with fast fashion and wear cheap jewelry. We cringe at the price of artisan goods with no understanding of the labor and love poured into them. We inherit little to nothing from parents and grandparents, and we have nothing to pass down to daughters and granddaughters. Washers and dryers that at one time lasted 20-40 years die in less than 10. Repairs are more costly than getting new appliances, and vehicles must be repaired by professionals because of the number of computer parts in cars. We live in a world addicted and enslaved to new and quick and short-lived. Don’t even get me started on how we are starting to treat people this way via abortion and schools that don’t let out until late, late in the day. The homemaker is a semi-acceptable field of work if you have little kids. We make it clear by calling ourselves stay-at-home moms, implying that once the mom part is done in a few short years we’re planning to leave our homes. (It’s not wrong to call yourself a SAHM, I just think that there is some planned obsolescence there instead of being all in.) I’m trying so hard not to soapbox or speculate on all the knots that form the “why” of the way our world is. That can be and will be debated long after we’re all in the grave.
The point, the point is, that to be durable is to be someone who can be counted on. It means our children, husbands, neighbors, family, and friends can count on us to be home. Being durable isn’t constantly being out and about but being home in our four walls engaged in the work at hand. This gives our people confidence. Emotional and mental security is supplied to our people when they know that food is available, clothes are clean, sickness is tended, and beds are safe for sleeping. Even deeper, our people know that favorite comfort foods, holiday traditions, and an ear ready to listen are all ready for them, supplied by someone happily anticipating their needs. HearthKeepers, when we are durable, we fill our people with security and confidence as they go out into the world. Why is home so desired by our world? Because it is where we feel loved and safe and accepted. That doesn’t just happen. That is a woman at the helm, enduring darkness, difficulty, and hardship without abandoning her ship. This happens when as maids, matrons, and crones we apply ourselves to the work—training, educating, and challenging ourselves to do better and better and better.
Ladies, being homemakers starts with a lot of God-given feminine intuition and natural gifting. I’ve never yet met a woman who isn’t naturally inclined to some aspect of homemaking. But we can’t rest there. We won’t be durable based on our intuition only. We have to grow. We need to grow our minds, harness our emotions, train our hands, learn new skills, learn new reasons why, sharpen our love, and buy into our work. This is how we stay durable.
Now, defined, let’s stick the two together: Merry Durability.
Durable in our Merriness: Our people should be able to count on us to persist and abide in a delightful, cheerful attitude. We should have stable attitudes, not wishy-washy or unpredictable ones. This means we’re not forcing our families to walk around on eggshells unsure if they will find welcome or rebuff. This is challenging, but we must rise to the challenge. Our hormones, pregnancy, post-partum weeks, and general female hysteria (don’t be offended, acknowledge the hysteria we are prone to – encourage your husband and friends to confidently and gently tell you to calm down) make it tough, sometimes impossible, to be durable in our emotions. Buy into the importance of not indulging the emotional rollercoasters and into the aid it is to our people to be reliably cheerful. Just like we believe we HearthKeepers can make any house a home, we need to believe we can provide merriness to ourselves and our people.
Merry in our Durability: Feminine magic happens when we’re not simply durable like a well-cared-for shovel, tool, or toilet, but when our durability is draped with beauty. Not just the beauty of what we wear, which is important, and how we decorate our homes, also important, but internal beauty. Internal beauty is where lasting potency and might come from. When we grow flowers of laughing merriness that bloom and reseed and reseed and reseed instead of emotional instability or bitter doldrums, our homes, regardless of trouble, will endure and not just endure but thrive!
Merry Durability.
When I think more deeply about this, I can be a bit overwhelmed. How can we ever do this? It is a task and calling far above our abilities. We’re small people, so unskilled, and so full of selfishness.
Break free of all doubt, HearthKeeper. This is our goal, not our slave-driving master. It might take a lifetime to learn how to be truly and deeply Merry Durable, but it’s worth striving for. So pray. Set your heart before our gracious and good Lord and then set your hand to the plow. We will fail. We will be snippy. We’ll complain, be easily offended, overcome with fear, and allow drama in our hearts, hearths, and homes. But the failure doesn’t mean we quit trying. Three steps forward and two steps back is still one slow-gaining step. We all fail to remember that our work is valuable. We all fail to speak of it with other HearthKeepers and the young women coming up behind us, but we endure. We keep trying because it is worth the effort. It is not a waste of our lives to learn to be merrily durable in our homes.
Merry Durability is our watchword and our foundation. Let’s learn her lessons well!
If you’d like to check out the HearthKeeper knitting circle, click on the picture!
