A New Homemaker

I didn’t think I would become a stay-at-home mom at age 23. As I finished high school and began my college career, I tried not to focus on my desire for marriage and motherhood, my “dream job.” My reasoning was simple: I didn’t want to waste my single years pining after a husband and children. And I honestly didn’t think a godly man would find me and pursue me anytime soon.

So instead, I concentrated on my options as a single woman after college graduation, unaware that I would be meeting my future husband less than a month after commencement.

Fast forward one year (exactly!), and my new husband and I were finding out about our first baby on the way (already!). I had just cut my hours back from 40 to 30 a week at the daycare so I would have time to look for another job. This turned out to be an unexpected blessing as all-day “morning” sickness began to assail me. Eventually, my husband and my boss were kind enough to let me reduce my hours to 10 a week while I was dealing with nausea. I’ve continued that schedule since then.

While getting used to marriage and pregnancy, I was also getting used to being responsible for my own house. It didn’t come as naturally as I’d hoped. I was still pretty unorganized from our move in, far from a pro at cooking and meal planning, and beset with constant nausea and fatigue. Being an “all-or-nothing” girl, it was hard for me to even know where to begin, and in between my daily popsicle for breakfast and my husband cooking his own dinner at night, I felt like a failure. How did stay-at-home moms do it? I wasn’t even a stay-at-home mom yet, and I was already falling behind.

As the weeks passed and I finally began to feel better, I realized just how terrible I’d felt for all that time, and I stopped being so hard on myself for being behind. My struggle became knowing how to get a handle on all of the stuff filling our two spare rooms, and finding a system for cleaning and cooking. I really wanted to make headway on these two things before I became a real stay-at-home mom with much less discretionary time.

Here are some things I’ve learned about homemaking over the past several months. I am trying to form good habits in them now so that I will have a good foundation when the baby is born. They really address my particular weaknesses, so I don’t know whether they’ll be relevant to you or not. But I’m sharing nonetheless.

1. Have a system for cleaning. This means a system that works for you. If your “system” is to fly by the seat of your pants and clean what you can when you can, that’s great, as long as you get it all accomplished. I just figured out which tasks I need to accomplish every week, and I divided them up among the weekdays. I do laundry and vacuuming on Mondays, for instance. This doesn’t include deep cleaning, but it does give me a guide for getting the basics done. Having a plan is so much better for me than vaguely hoping I’ll get the house clean.
2. Make dishes a priority. Every time I let the dishes pile up (we don’t have a working dishwasher), my entire house seems messier. I would want to clean up the entire house and then do the dishes, but I’m learning that even if I haven’t had time to do anything else, if the kitchen is neat and clean, the whole house seems cleaner and more peaceful. And washing three or four dishes at a time is much less daunting than washing fifteen or twenty.
3. Get ready for the day. I still struggle with this one. It was worst during the first trimester. But even if I don’t have anywhere to go right away, I don’t want to lounge around in my pj’s half the day. Even if I’m feeling sick and I sit down on the couch afterwards, getting ready makes me feel a little more prepared for the day.
4. It’s much easier to maintain than to catch up. If everything has a place, it’s so much easier to tidy up the house – just return things to their places. If the breakfast dishes were washed and put away hours ago, it’s much more pleasant to get the supper dishes out of the way right after we eat. If the bathroom is cleaned every week, keeping it looking fresh every day is much easier.
5. Don’t be a perfectionist; just do something. I get overwhelmed by clutter really easily. If my whole house isn’t organized (when will it ever be?), I convince myself it’s not worth trying. But how will anything ever get done if I don’t work on it a little at a time? And if I can’t live with imperfection now, while it’s just my husband and me, how will I ever be a peaceful mother? I don’t want to drive my kids crazy by being obsessed with tidiness. I don’t want to feel guilty every time I’m too sick to scrub the toilets. I just want to keep things running smoothly, and that takes daily small efforts.

A Scripture passage that convicted me about laziness at home was the description of a godly widow in 1 Timothy 5: “She who is truly a widow, left all alone, has set her hope on God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day, but she who is self-indulgent is dead even while she lives” (vv. 5-6). Paul goes on to describe some of the actions of a widow who has lived a godly life: bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the saints’ feet, caring for the afflicted, and devoting herself to good works (v. 10). I have a natural inclination to laziness, but how true it is that living for my own ease and pleasure isn’t living at all.

And I’m also learning that if I’m following my little homemaking “tips and tricks” for my own pleasure and peace of mind, I’m not glorifying God. The fruits of hard work are pleasurable, true. God is a God of order and peace, and when we imitate Him in that, I think it always blesses us too. But I should want to be a good homemaker for my family’s sake, not my own. This means I want home to be as homey as possible. It’s meant to be lived in, and I don’t ever want to make my husband and children feel like 1) they can’t relax at home because I want it to look perfect all the time, or 2) they can’t enjoy being home because it’s a place of disorder and chaos. I hope to find the happy medium!

I’m such a novice at this, and I love hearing advice from those more experienced than I. I’ve also spent quite enough time typing out this blog entry, and I need to go finish some things before the day is over. Hmm… perhaps #6 on my list should be “Don’t blog until you’ve accomplished all your other goals for the day.”