The Power of One

My daughter is expecting a baby any day now and I am "on call." This is her 3rd baby being born at home and her fourth with a midwife! Already the midwives are taking over their hospital equipment and getting ready. I would like to thank Mrs. Alexandra in Europe for her research and insight. As she has stated before, she grew up under a totalitarian government and a communist society. That is one reason why I value her opinion so much on this blog. She sees things happening in trends and in policy that I, having grown up in the free world, would not even suspect as being a threat to the freedom to be a homemaker! She understands how it comes to be, that the Biblical role of women as wives, mothers and homemakers, will be threatened. Mrs. A. speaks a host of different languages, and although English is not her native tongue, she writes it and speaks it impeccibly.

We want to thank all the people who post, and tell you that we appreciate even those who do not agree with us. Not everything will be agreeable to everyone, but most reading should be done with that in mind. I've always been able to discern between what applied to me and what applied to someone else, so there was no need to get offended.

Working women are really feeling the need to come home and take care of things. We are in a crisis with our marriages and our families. It is hard to believe, but there is power in one person. I read an article many years ago called "The Power of One," which told about how one vote in Congress made our national language English and not German, and how one person changed this or that, etc. There was a long list of men and women who changed things for the better.

Our homes and families and marriages are in a crisis, which effects the over all strength of our nation and our freedom, but it can be changed by the simple act of letting the women come home to have greater power over the family. The home must be guarded against things that divide loyalties internally as well: things like friends, television, movies, music, reading material have to be monitored by the mother. Our enemies are jealous of our freedom and our country. They know that the easiest way to defeat us and put us under totalitarian rule is to divide family loyalties. This is done when husbands and wives and children go in different directions with their lives, not having a common family goal. In the morning, everyone gets up and goes somewhere else, separate and apart from one another. It is bad enough that the husband has to work, without everyone else being so fragmented during the day.

One of the biggest threats to our national security is disloyalty and dishonor to parents. This can all be changed by making our nation family-centered, and that can begin with the women at home, influencing the way money is spent, the way life is lived, the way children are raised.

One belief I used to have, was that I could not home school my children or stay at home and be a housewife unless everyone else did it. I decided that if I waited til everyone else woke up and did it, I would lose precious time with my family, and my children would be among those numbers of children who went through life without a strong purpose.

Although I stayed home and homeschooled them in the early 80's, it felt very lonely, as no one on my street or any other streets was home. I used to put the children in the stroller and go for walks and see all the empty houses, thinking, "The women have gone to work so they can have these grand houses, which remain empty most of the time." No little tricycles in front of the houses, and no children's swimming pools. It all seemed as bare as the top of the moon.

After reading Helen Andelin's book, "All About Raising Children," I was fascinated with the concept of molding and influencing the lives of our own children, that she wrote about. In it, she had a section called "What's Wrong With School," in which she wrote about school not being sufficient to build good character in children, school taking too long away from home, etc. I wrote one letter to Helen Andelin and told her why I was homeschooling and gave her the addresses where some good teaching materials could be found. This was in the days before computers. She copied the letter 8 times and send it to each of her grown children. All but one of these children immediately began to homeschool their children, and did homeschool them throughout the years. One of her daughters even phoned me to get some ideas. I was an amateur at the time, yet the small bit that I did know about it, was important to her. Each of those children had an average of 6 children of their own, who are now grown, and married and teaching their own children.

Just one letter influenced 8, and who knows how many those 8 have influenced? There is a saying that the pen is more powerful than the sword. We can influence a lot of people through blogging and through doing the thing right in the presence of our friends and families. When you become a homemaker, it will surprise you how many people will want to do what you are doing.

One day there was a knock at my door and a woman who was a complete stranger stood there with her two children. She said, "I heard you were homeschooling your children. Can you tell me how I can do that, too?" I showed her some books and gave her some materials to read. She had a sister to whom she took these materials and right away the husband said he wanted his children homeschooled.

I was also a housewife, and one day a woman who lived at the end of the road phoned me. It was Saturday and she was not working. She expressed a desire to stay home but she said she wanted to wait and watch me and see how it ended up. She was going to miss out on many years of enjoying her home and her family. There are lots of people who will wait and see, and there are those who will go ahead and do something. The wait and see people will wait so long to do something, that the opportunity will be gone. I was just one person, and even though this one woman did not become a homemaker, she was influenced by it.

Another woman wanted to stay home and she said I was the only person she knew that was home so she wanted to come and visit me.During that time, she followed me around the house while I tended to all the things that needed to be done. She said she thought she could do that, so she quit her job and is home to this day.

I said all that to show how just one person can spread an influence without even trying. People notice what you do. The influence of one person can actually spread faster than telephone, tabloids, television or email.

It would be nice if homemakers could get together regularly and reinforce each other with ideas, and learn to how to live abundantly while saving money, and maybe that kind of thing will happen once again. Husbands could help reinforce their wives at home by being the provider and freeing them from other responsiblities, so that they can put their minds fully into managing the home.

Not everything can be learned in a school or a course of study. Some things, like home living, have to be figured out just by being there and observing from day to day what the jobs are. It takes some actual home living to figure out what you must do at any given time of day. You know for example, that people will need a meal at a certain time, clean clothes at another time, or certain paper work that they must have for something. These things can't be shown in a course of study, as well as they can just by experience.

So it is, that as time goes by, the homemaker can become better at what she is doing. If she spends the early years of her marriage at work, she misses a lot of the preparation that those early years give her.

Sometimes women come home for good after their first baby, and find that they cannot manage. Not only are they taking care of a baby, they are taking care of a house and a husband. If they stay home from the beginning of their marriage, they can use the time to get used to the way things run in their own home, before other responsibilities are added.

Because of the new baby, I probably will not be able to write as much, but I do have a new article coming up on www.ladiesagainstfeminism.org in the LadyLydiaSpeaks column when it is updated. There are lots of other blogs mentioned throughout the comments and other articles, that show good examples of how to manage at home.

We have had several exciting things to happen becasue of this blog. I have made some new friends and been able to telphone them. We had a homemaking school for one day, in my home, in which 15 ladies of all ages attended and contributed lessons about the home! And, we were given the distinction along with other blogs like ours, of being banned in India by the Indian government. It has been a great year!!

Again, we appreciate the time each of you takes to make a comment.