You are not Behind, Part 1

This is a soft exploration of a few ideas that are collecting like autumn leaves in my mind. I’m trying to rustle through them for a coherent concept, but I’m not 100% sure I’m clearly seeing them yet. So this is a soft exploration that I would love to have your thoughts on.

1) We live in a world where the idea of corporate ladder climbing infuses every aspect of our lives.

2) We live in a world where feminism hates men while also basically telling us to be men.

These two things are silently drifting across the landscape, a yellow poisonous cloud. They’re being breathed deeply into our homes. They’re hard to put your finger on. They drift around just at the edge of sight. When you turn, they’re gone. Shifting, sneaky, stinking. They infect us on a cellular level. We don’t see the infection. We just feel the weight of it in our souls. We haven’t lost limbs, but there’s a subtle ache just under our ribs.

First, Corporate Ladder Climbing Mentalities: There are some great lessons and skills the corporate world can give to us homemakers. Systems, project management, communication, team mentalities. All these things can be really helpful to weave into your homemaking. But managing a home is a unique calling. It’s not the same as running a company or even working a job. This hit me when I was drooling over a date book recently. Every pretty date book is geared towards the corporate career women. I’ve tried using them, filling out every little box of plans and goals for each month only to reach the month's end and realize none of that happened.

Why?

Because HearthKeeping is both fluid and routine. It’s not a corporate job. It is constantly interrupted by others, it moves slowly, it breathes, it has room, it is the same and constantly changes.

A company is focused on a goal and has different departments and crews and teams focused on projects and goals. Some of these teams are highly specialized. Some are massive and need multiple managers. Some are short-term and some are long-term.

You, homemaker, aren’t in that situation. You may have several kids to help you, great, but you may also be a fairly solo operation, or even have kids who seem to be thwarting you at every turn. And just when you feel like that’s going smoothly…everything changes. Kids grow up and move out, people need long-term care, and the next generation comes along.

We housekeepers, tenders, makers of home are more like Jacks-of-all-trade all the time. If we try to pretend we're managing a company, we’ll feel like an anxious failure all the time. We aren’t behind on folding the laundry because folding the laundry doesn’t end as long as we have other humans to tend to. We aren’t behind on the dishes because we’re in the business of feeding others and they all want to eat again soon. We aren’t behind on the cleaning because we’re one woman making a home and home is a perpetual cycle.

We aren’t behind. As long as we’re still going and we haven’t given up on our family leaving them to dwell in squalor, then everything is where it should be.

Take a deep breath.

We’re homemakers, not climbers of corporate ladders. We’re homemakers. We have goals for our homes, yes, but our work is both more mundane and more nuanced than any goal-oriented date book can capture.

So much of our lives are impacted by a corporate mentality, a mentality that is good in the workforce, but you are a homemaker and that is so different.

Do I have to do the laundry? Yes!

But I have to ask myself what is happening here. If my only goal is to rush through and things get missed, I’m not being a homemaker. It would be better for me to have unfolded laundry a few days and make sure our clothing is tended with love and care than just “done.” (This is why women can raise children and train them how to do laundry: our goal isn’t always some magical done point because our work isn’t ever done. So you can patiently train a fumbling child to do different jobs. The dishes are always there, you may as well train your kids how to do them even if it takes them lo, these many hours.)

Love and care. That’s so different than working at a job. The standards for our work and the management of our work are so different than a corporate career. We aren’t behind if we’re carefully tending with love, cheering strength, and merry durability. And that takes moving slower, calmly, and with purpose and intentionality.

Side Note: I think this subtle sense that a corporate mentality doesn’t belong in the home may be why some women think that they’ll be able to be a homemaker if we were all communists instead of capitalists. I think that’s a huge misunderstanding of communism and capitalism, but I wonder if the mistake comes from our whole world being consumed and translated into the concepts of the corporate career. (Push! Competition! Stay Relevant! Climb!) Once you start to see it, it’s everywhere. Everything is about our careers in the corporate world. Every story, fictional or real, every game, and every form of recreation and entertainment uses the corporate world as its scaffolding, which makes us think about home that way too.

Side Note, 2: I do think that while we must be very careful to keep homemaking and corporate ladder climbing separate in our minds, those business-world-thought-patterns might be very helpful in homeschooling. Homeschooling isn’t homemaking. Keep them separate even though they often flow and mix as they should. But they are two very different things. Homeschooling is more akin to a woman running a business in her home. It will have many more of those strategies, goals, and measures of progress that a business must employ.

Home should be flexible enough and long-term enough in its mentality that it is able to tend to the sick, even if the sick is you. That means pausing and doing this thing then back to other things. When someone gets sick, even if that is you, the home should be able to pause to allow you or others to recover.

Home should be strong enough and well managed enough to homeschool your children, to consider a field and buy it, to do what your husband and your family needs. This isn’t building a career like climbing a corporate ladder. This is constant and continual work. It’s the work of loving people being done by a person. It’s sometimes restarting your day three times over because Task A took much longer than expected and Task B took much less time than anticipated and your child threw up.

Projects will be woven in amongst the everyday cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Some will be quick or seasonal projects, and some will be bigger and life-changing projects. We enjoy charcoal grilling and so a project is to clean and prep the grill. We are teaching ourselves how to care for our huge lawn and how to do double entry accounting. Those are both big projects. They have to be nestled in amongst the need for food, clothing, hygiene, and the need for rest, health limitations, and companionship. Being a home manager, a housekeeper, is keeping a long-term perspective because you are a manager, but a manager of a home, not a company. The management of a Chick-fil-a is going to be different than the management of a lifelong science project. The management of the home is different than the management of a company.

Be aware of the good you can glean from corporate mindsets, but also the wrong mental dialog you can fill your mind with if you act like you’re running a corporation not homemaking: You are not Behind!

The “you are not behind” mentality isn’t an excuse for laziness, don’t use it that way. It is here to relieve false burdens. Don’t beat yourself up with fake laws and rules. This will require you to do some self-examination. How have you bought into home management being the same as corporate management? Are you looking at your home with false expectations because you think it should have a ‘done’ point? How do you think about project management and the basics of home management?

These are all things we should take seriously and wrestle with in our own minds.

Do you see the problem I see? Have you been able to successfully avoid the traps of trying to apply corporate mentalities in the home? Have you ever even stopped to notice how that might be putting a false burden or expectation on you?

Let’s explore together.