The Patience of the New Matron and the Perseverance of the Mature Matron
In a healthy knitting circle, or any community, you have those who have been at the work long and those who are new, you have those with experience and those with eagerness, you have those with callused hands and those ready to work. A breadth of different years, habits, hobbies, and walks of life keeps our homes, churches, and communities vibrant, supported, and supplied with workers. We want the young women and the old. Maid, matron, crone. With such a vibrant circle it’s important to remind each other of particular truths. Young to the old, and old to the young.
New Matron:
Anytime we face something new, we face a world of the unknown, failures, fumbles, and mistakes. We face being a toddler again, only we’re no longer that cute. We quickly lose heart in the newness because we are frustrated with our inability to do something well the first time. We have no muscle memory and no calming habits. Everything feels gangly. Too big, too long, bumping into everything, have I hit puberty again?, gangly. When you’re a new homemaker, you must do the hard thing of patiently learning your craft. And I’m here to tell you, this craft isn’t just any old craft. This isn’t teaching yourself how to crochet or cross stitch. It is learning and then excelling (to the best of our abilities) in everything from chemistry to weaving to hygiene to interior decorating and more.
Do not expect that simply having a home to make equals instant know-how, and do not think you will have it all down within a few months or years. (Marriage, pastoring, and childrearing are similar. They take years, decades to master.)
Big Job: Growth in our career as a homemaker is like the growth of an acorn into a mighty oak. It is slow work. Keep a long-term perspective. We will not get good at this job overnight, over days, over months, over years. Every time we think we have something down, we find a deeper rabbit hole to plunge into. Every time we have things running smoothly, life changes. The more quickly we can get it into our heads that this is the broadest of callings, the calmer we’ll be. We may start with doing the laundry—lights, darks, delicates, towels, sheets—and the next thing we know we’re making starch, leaving the iron out so it’s always handy, and learning to sew. We took responsibility for the laundry and then discovered clothing, textiles, and fabrics are a much bigger concept than not washing that red shirt with whites. We cracked the door and fell into a world history of weaving. Send help. Or maybe we started with hamburger helper and microwave meals, and the next thing we know we’re ordering Einkorn flour, taking a cooking class, buying yet another platter (I promise, I needed this one), creating an inventory, and buying a cow. Do you get a sense of how massive this job is and can be? Even if you stay only at the shallow end of the pool, it is still an incredible amount of work to cook, clean, and do laundry well and with a cheerful heart.
Take a deep breath. Don’t let this overwhelm you, let it calm you. Start in the puddles, don’t leap into the ocean. Mother yourself. Speak kind truth about your work to yourself while pushing yourself. A mother never grows frustrated with a toddler learning to walk. She encourages and challenges the toddler. She isn’t frustrated because she knows that it is good and necessary to go through the stage of bumps and bruises to gain the delight of upright forward movement. Do this for yourself. (It is okay if it does sound exactly like your mother in your head.)
Long Learning Stage: Don’t give into the temptation to think that a woman has it easy because she makes it look easy. Making things look easy is the downhill side of a mountain climb. A woman who makes housekeeping seem always under control is a woman who first tamed herself. Taming ourselves takes time. This means you may not have much to add to the conversation at first except questions. Ask your questions and listen, listen, listen. Understand that you aren’t the maid who comes every two weeks to clean, you’re the homemaker, the maker of the home. The queen, the lady of the house, the wife, the mother. These are titles we gain in a moment but that take a lifetime to learn. Don’t fret. Don’t fret when you start in the shallows. If you don’t endure the shallows you may drown in the depths. Take a deep breath, set your goals, tame your heart first, and manage your home.
One of the big parts of this is practice. Practice, practice, practice. Pick a book and work through it. Try a shopping app, meal planning app, scheduling app, and cleaning app. Test and try and pay attention to what works and why. Have a friend over with skills you want to grow and pick their brain. If you see an area you lack natural skill or desire, don’t make an excuse, get help. I am not naturally a good cook. I’m not. But I have made it a part of my life to get better at cooking. Sometimes I’ll get an idea of something I think might taste good. In the past, those meals usually went in the trash. Now, they’re at least edible. I’m always going to struggle with cooking, but that’s not an excuse to shortcut, or fatalistically settle. It’s just an area I have to keep working at. If you’re new at this job, give yourself time and space to learn it. You won’t be good at it instantly, but you can get good at it if you take the time to do it.
Mature Matron:
Because of what I said to the New Matrons, the biggest struggle we have is stagnation. We all wake up one morning and wonder if there is more to life than doing one more load of laundry. We all wake up one morning and wonder if life really will end if we don’t fix dinner today. We can get worn down, filed down, bent over with the day-in and day-out labors of keeping and tending a home. We can become blinded by the repetitive nature of our lifelong work. One day we just stop seeing the intangible and tangible benefits and wonder if there isn’t something more exciting we could be doing.
All big jobs have these moments. Marriages, families, and even church membership and our faith have these moments. We just get ground down into the dust and what was once a comforting routine becomes a soul-killing mundane-ness. The world would have you believe this is when you stop believing in God, get a divorce, and go wild. See the world wants you to do anything other than stay committed to your people, your vows, and your work. Do anything but that.
Mental Renewal: We must treat our work like the big job it is. If we are feeling this… dare I say… boredom we may have failed to stay engaged in the work. We stopped thinking about what we were doing and started just doing things out of muscle memory. We’re doing things like paid help instead of the manager of the home. We’ve failed to keep a long-term perspective and refresh our goals as life changes and grows. We all need to take some time to stop and look at ourselves and our homes. It's time to start some re-education. Change up our styles. Renew our love of our lives by looking at our lives and our thoughts about it. Get thee to a Library and grab books on home management, decorating, cooking, and cleaning. It’s time to shake up all our systems and try something new. Just get some new cleaning products. Like the New Matron, we must tame our hearts but by waking them up. They’ve become dull and listless. Wake up to the value of what we do. Engage with young matrons. Let’s let their excitement reinvigorate us. But, before we do anything major, we must work on our hearts and minds. Develop, renew, and encourage the love of our work. We must remember the good and delight and magic of home so we can unbend.
Space Renewal: As we work on our minds and relearn to love our home and our work as the managers of it, think about ways you can renew your space. Sometimes a fair amount of management brain-fog and boredom comes from the stagnation of our spaces. As we can, and getting help if needed, let’s move furniture, move rooms, set some big saving goals, and learn some new skills. What’s a craft that’s always called your name? Cello? Ceramics? Blowing glass? All of these can be used to beautify our homes and make them shine. Maybe decorating cakes and cookies is something you’ve always wanted to try. Now is the time! A great thing to do is take pictures of our hearths and homes and figure out what’s not working. All this space renewal will renew our minds and our love.
Get Help and Give Help: As more mature matrons, sometimes our bodies aren’t as gung-ho as they once were. Enlist some of the new matrons to help you. Gardening, furniture moving, remodeling, painting, planting, crafting, shopping, and more can be done with the help of women of all ages. And just as we all must learn to ask for help, we also often need to remember to give it. We were once new to all of this, struggling with simply learning to clean the home, dealing with inexperienced husbands, and possibly babies. We more mature matrons struggling with stagnation may find ourselves renewed by helping other women. Bake bread, make a bouquet, pick up two wonderful-smelling candles or cleaners and pass one on. The smallest thing can encourage a new homemaker. Let’s hold out a hand to the next generation and not forget those struggles. Their enthusiasm can lift us while our experience can ground them.
New Matrons are going to be tempted by discouragement because everything feels so unfamiliar and overwhelming while Mature Matrons will be tempted to boredom and stagnation because everything has become too routine and comfortable. We can help each other out of these troubles if we work together and engage each other in the grand work of homemaking. This is exactly what a healthy knitting circle does for all of us! It keeps us going and in the game. Engage, HearthKeepers, with each other to keep the home fires burning and the hearthlight aflame.
