The Umbrella of Homemaking (Part 1)

Even though I rarely use one because I’m so klutzy, I love umbrellas. They just have a Studio Ghibli magic about them. I love rain. I love the aesthetic of people on city streets all gathered under their black umbrellas. I love exploring rambling country roads under an umbrella in my galoshes. I love the sound of the rain and the wild idea of the wind catching the umbrella and blowing it—and you—away. There is a Mary Poppins magic about umbrellas. A strange mix of orderliness—stay dry in your small bubble—and wildness—tapping, tamping, and wind gusts—and intimacy—gather close.

Umbrella.

Homemaking is a huge umbrella under which we can snuggle order, wildness, and intimacy. It is a vast space under which all the different types of homemakers can gather. 

Feminists would have you believe that being a tender of your hearth chains you in a tiny basement, wings clipped, cut off from the world and the light. This is a lie they’re gaslighting us with.

Homemaking is vast and wide open.

Sometimes this is scary. It’s scary not to have black and white lists of rules and regulations that tell us exactly and specifically what to do. Freedom means you have to regulate yourself and you have no one to blame if you fail. That’s terrifying. Exhausting. Hard.

It’s easy, having a list of rules. You don’t have to think. You’re safe and secure. When the rules are Ten Commandments and a handful of ‘keep your home and obey your husband’ passages, life is uncomfortably free. Things become a matter of the heart instead of a black and white list. Instead of defining femininity as always having long hair, wearing a dress, and never setting foot outside the home except for church, femininity becomes a matter of the heart—being gentle and quiet in spirit and helpers to our husbands—with diverse expressions.

Enter fear: What if I’m doing it wrong?

If femininity isn’t defined strictly, what if I’m not being feminine? Welcome to freedom. Freedom is a heart matter. Freedom requires you to judge yourself and not your neighbor, and oh how we hate this. We would so much rather not judge ourselves and gleefully judge our neighbor.

Freedom says you make your home according to your husband’s leading, coupled with your gifts, sensibilities, and tastes, within the bounds of providence.

“But, but, but, that means I can work outside the home and still be a homemaker!” Yep. “And that means I can never work outside the home and fail at homemaking!!!” Yep. And every possible iteration in-between.

See, the umbrella of HearthKeeping is vast, and doing it right and well starts in your heart. It starts with understanding and embracing this as our calling, or someday calling, being a dwelling for our husbands, creating, tending, nurturing. Choosing to love this work just like we choose to love our husbands and our imperfect churches. It is a choice to embrace homemaking, and then allowing that choice to inform our emotions and attitudes and priorities. HearthKeeping is about our hearts and minds first, and then what we do.

From that choice, from hearts and minds all in on HearthKeeping, comes options. A wide umbrella of options.

We make our homes first and foremost as an act of trusting obedience to the Lord. Homemaking is an expression of our love for Jesus Christ and the love we have for our husbands and our children, if so blessed. It’s the intangible made tangible!

HearthKeeping from the heart is as vast as the number of men times the number of women times the circumstances they find themselves in. (I’ll let Leslie do the math.)

Homemaking can be done in the city, in the country, in the suburbs. It can be done in tiny studio apartments and vast mansions. It can be done by the wealthy and by the poor. It can be done by the high-energy extrovert and the chronically-ill introvert, public school or homeschool, childless or child-blessed. It can be homesteading, 1950s-esque, or modern. Homemaking can be simple (food, bills, decorating) or vast (deep cleaning, decanting, canning, gardens, home improvement, businesses, co-ops, science, grammar, the arts.) If this isn’t a huge, wide woodland realm of work, I couldn’t write article after article, there wouldn’t be podcasts and books and videos beyond our ability to ever listen or read or watch them all.

Homemaking can flex for what you need, simple or vast. It can expand or contract as you need. If you’re busy with children, or in a season that requires more time away than in the home, homemaking can handle that. Or, if you’re at a time when you can be home more and want to expand your work, it can do that, too.

You’re only limited and bored by homemaking when you are limiting yourself and letting yourself be bored.

The idea that you can only clean so much is a lie. There is always something to clean, something to fix, something to research, something to learn. A woman invested in her home, a homemaker in her heart, has to carve out rest time, has to set boundaries. Once you step off the path of the basics, you’re in the wild-wooly, dangerous forest of endless possibilities. Don’t believe me? Pick up one book on cleaning, nutrition, maintenance, decorating, or yard work and a whole world of endless labor will open up to you.

And this is just the ‘work’. It doesn’t even include hobbies (good for us and our souls) or helping with our husbands’ careers (which is a whole other vast subject) or educating our children or caring for elderly relatives.

All these things nestle under the umbrella of homemaking!

Working a paying job is a good thing, a great thing, but it isn’t the only way to be a productive member of society. Our income isn't the only way to measure our value, and it’s not the only viable use of our lives. We’ve been so indoctrinated that a woman having a more-important-than-home career is the only viable way to be a valuable human being and to be accomplished, that we live frantic, competitive lives of unrest. I’ve worked with the women sobbing in bathrooms and back rooms as they’ve yet again sacrificed their families on the altars of their jobs because that is what they think they have to do. It’s sad and heartbreaking. They’ve been gaslit to believe that homemaking is slavery and obscurity and boredom.

They can’t see the vast world nestled under the umbrella of homemaking. They’ve been told that the umbrella is tiny and filled with dripping holes.

If we bravely stand under that umbrella holding it up to all and showing the wonder of order, wildness, and intimacy, if homemaking is in our hearts first, then we can be as diverse as the world. We can work outside the home if it serves our home. We can have side gigs that let us use our gifts to bring in some income. We can teach our children the value of diligence, hard work, and sacrifice. We can set boundaries, but move them as our phases need.

HearthKeeping starts in the heart by choosing to follow Christ and trust that He is good and does good when He calls us to tend this place and be busy with this place and these people. It’s choosing to love the people, place, and work every day—when you get up and welcome the morning and hungry people, and every night when you close out the darkness and sleep.

Homemaking is a vast umbrella of never-ending work, education, and change. We should embrace it for Christ’s sake, the church’s sake, and our own good. God wouldn’t call us to it if it wasn’t good. Once our hearts are in the right place, we open ourselves to the vast gift that is ours.