Accomplishing Something

A friend of mine who has recently quit her job and become a full time homemaker gave me the idea to write about the world's concept of accomplishing something.

When a woman first begins to tackle the work at home, she will discover that it is like walking on a treadmill, and that it takes a different sort of managment than a job with an employer in a company. It may look like she is failing in her work while the women who work outside of the home have it all together.

Let us take a look, though at what they are doing. During the day, the woman who works out, does only one job: the one she was hired for. Hospital workers, for example, do the job they are hired for. Around them is other staff hired to do things like cleaning services, deliveries, messaging, and cafeteria work. An woman working in the admissions office would probably not go to the cafeteria and start cooking her own food and then wash her dishes and put away the cooking pans. Neither would she sweep and mop the floor, or wash the bedding of the patients. If she did all those things, she would not get a fraction of the record-keeping done during the day that she currently does.

Now let us take a look at the homemaker. During the day she has many tasks. If she were just being a companion to her husband and nothing else, she might only accompany him during the day and sit next to him, have tea with him, and be present at all his meetings or beside him handing him tools while he constructed a building. However, she has more to do than hang around her husband all day. For the good of them both, someone must manage the home, and the best time to do it is when her husband is away.

She is so multi-faceted that it does not seem like she is accomplishing anything. But wait! There is a lot more to homemaking than meets the eye. All the little things that she does that go unnoticed, are little things that the working women pay other people to do: food preparation, care of children, (which is another book in itself), laundry, cleaning, mending, shopping, and errands such as paying bills, and correspondence. Besides all this, she is social organizer of the family for major events and celebrations.

It happens that at the end of the day it might not look like she is very accomplished, but let us have a look at basic child care. If she has several children, she is going to be fixing little toys and finding things, tying shoes, and buttoning up jackets. She is going to be keeping track of hats and mittens in winter and trying to find the beach toys in the summer.

She will see that their evening baths are given, that they are dressed in fresh night clothes and that their prayers are said. She will take a flashlight into the bedroom later on that night and check on each of the children. She may even get up several times in the middle of the night to check on them and see that no cover is wrapped around their necks or smothering them, or that they are not too hot or too cold, or wet. If they are wet, she might change them and their clothes and then put a new set of sheets and bedding on the bed. No one sees these things. No one sees her doing them. If the man who is working to support the family had to do this, he would hardly be in any shape to be alert at work the next day or to drive.

The woman at home may feel tired and people do not understand the reason. They understand only what they see. Those who have this opinion ought to take over a young woman's home for one week. They will find that there is so much to be done, and even the little unnoticed details like picking up clutter, can drain a lot of energy.

She will be keeping albums and scrapbooks of her families progress and growth. She is creating a history. It might not show up right now, but in years to come it will be "seen." Her house will accumulate clutter that will need to be constantly monitored. A woman with a husband and 4 children who provides meals at home, will wash 12 place settings a day and one set of cooking pots 3 times.

She will probably do her laundry every third day, but if she has a baby in the house she will wash every day and then on top of that, do her regular family washing. After it is washed it may need to be hung out on a line or put in a dryer. After it is dried it has to be put back in the places that it belongs--the clothes, the dishtowels, the bath towels, and so forth. Keeping a house is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: when one end is finished, the other end is needing repair.

Some people may say "What is the use? It only gets messed up again. Why not hire someone to do it?" If you hire someone to keep house, the housekeeper will know what happened to everything, but you will not. The homemaker needs to have a feeling for her home. When she puts time into taking care of it, she will be more likely to value it.

You, the homemaker, will be the one who will go through the out grown and old clothes and send them to a second-hand shop. You are the one who will know what is in everyone's closets. You are the one who will know where the problem areas of your house are. If you clean your own bathroom, you will discover things about it that will aid you in being a better house keeper. If someone else does it, you will not have the same love and feeling for the house that you could have. It is your place and you have to put your heart into it in order to give it the atmosphere that you like.

I am sure that people did not think that George Washington "accomplished" anything during his life, but here we are so many decades later and long history books are being written about him.

The homemaker may not think that she is accomplishing anything, but, day by day, she is making some progress here and there in little things that she formerly let someone else do for her. If she is teaching her own children at home, she gets to listen to their personal observations and discoveries. She knows personally their strengths and weaknesses, which formerly would have been noticed more by teachers and staff. Now, she gets to personally mold her child's personality and really invest in his/her future with her sayings, her stories, and her instruction.

By now, many people have read the book we had on the LAF bookstore section, called "Mother," about a girl who thought her mother was not much and had not accomplished anything because she was "just a homemaker." Later on, through some trials, she discovered that her mother had given up selfish pursuits in order to mold the destinies of 5 other people in the family, and that in doing so, had actually accomplished much more than they.

Occasionally I get emails from young feministic girls who think that women at home do not "do" anything. I always tell them to try being married 35 years and raising several children before they make this rash judgment. Many young girls are critical of their mothers. I ask them, "Have you been married as long as your mother? Have you successfully raised children? Have you kept house as well as your mother?"

Having had a slight cold over the holidays, I decided to lie down and see if I could find a good television show. I have not watched tv for some time, but tried to see if I could get any reception. On a particular day, only one program bled through, but it was clear enough that I could decipher it. It was a court show. A man was suing his wife for divorce because she would not find employment outside the home.

The wife did not want a divorce and had explained that as a wife and mother, her job was to see that the meals and the laundry and the house were cared for, and was trying to make him comfortable and enable him to get to work. He said, "Yes, but that won't pay the bills." She explained that she was trying to be a help-meet or help-mate to her husband. His interpretation of that was that she should help him pay the bills by getting a job outside the home. He wanted her all dressed up looking like the professional women he admired, and he still wanted the lovely meals and the ironed shirts she provided for him.

We have entered a sad part of our history, where men have no shame in sending their wives outside the home to work. Many homes remain empty and neighborhoods are lonely, and for what? That the family might have a nice car and a vacation? Most of these families lose the very thing that they got married for: the home and the children that they love. Sometimes these men will say they want their women to be like the women on the covers of the magazines they see at the checkout in the grocery stores. Yet every single one of the women on the covers have had broken marriages, troubled children, and mental problems of some kind.

The women at home may feel they are going crazy sometimes, but they are free from the demands and stresses and worries of the workplace and the world. They need to find nobility in the smallest of things, whether it be buttoning up a little boy's shirt, or putting a centerpiece on a table. While she is buttoning that little boy's shirt she looks into his eyes to connect to her own dear son. She may brush aside his hair with her hand or feel his cheeks and forhead to see if he is well or has a temperature. If she outsources this, someone else will get all the pleasure and feel the connection.There is more importance to this than anything that could be accomplished in the outside world.When the family is discouraged or lonely, they don't need a corporate president, rocket scientist or an opera singer--they need a wife and a mother.

I often look at the paintings of the 18th and 19th century, and notice there were a lot painted of women doing very domestic things. They seemed to have time for things like a leisurely tea with their mothers and sisters at home. This is one of the things that the full time homemaker can do, that her working counter-part will have trouble fitting in to her schedule. The more you are at home and getting things under control, the more leisurely time you will have to share with others in your realm.