homemaker, a rose by any other name

Homemaker

Can we just talk about that word for a minute? I’m sure it’s been talked about ad nauseam in some places, but I actually haven’t seen a real, honest conversation about it.

Home maker is a words that’s been extremely overused and also, completely undersold. Overused in the sense that it’s become a bit of a diss, or a dishonor to a certain segment of the population. While some wear it as a badge of pride as an honor, some others consider it a downgrade from their biggest hopes and dreams.

While truthfully, it’s fundamental to society. It’s a non negotiable. But maybe not like you think?

I mean, we’re all homemakers aren’t we? Homemakers or home-wreckers really. We all build our homes, a little at a time.

Home making much less to do with keeping house, in my mind, than it does with making a house a home- and someplace worth coming home to.

I consider myself a homemaker. I did before I had kids, when I worked full time, when I had kids and continued to work and even now as I work part time from home and full time managing those wonderful kids and many household tasks. 

I also can look at other women around me and see that, even if they do it very differently than me, they are too. Full time working moms are homemakers. Part time working moms. Non moms. People, we are making a home where we are. Or are we?

(I’m considering as I write this whether to look up the definition of homemaker. But I fear it may be outdated or incorrect anyway. So I’m going to look around me first and see what being a homemaker looks like.)

My mom was a homemaker, even though she found herself a single mom and had to go work outside of the home. My mother-in-law was too, as she raised five boys, made the finest pies and kept the cleanest house. None of the details and tasks take away from the real truth of what each of them did. They both created a home out of love and time and the resources they had. They both made a home. (My mom also is an excellent pie baker, might I add. Even if I found out as an adult, making my first pie crust, that she didn’t make hers homemade like I thought. She does now though. Still, we all love.) 

While I’m a pretty good pie maker myself, I’m definitely not perfect, and I don’t keep things quite as spit spot as someone else maybe can. Maybe I’m better at certain things, or a bit cleaner than another, but that none of that defines me as a home maker of not. It doesn’t really define any of us or our home making powers as much as we think it does. 

The aptitude with which we approach some the finer details or tangibles of our home making don’t take away from the over- arching ones we do, and their deep importance. We are all making a house a home, and a family out of the people who live there. Chances are we are doing the very best we can manage today. Even on the less stellar days, we’re making a house a home. We’re building a life.

While it may include many menial and more laborious tasks, those aren’t the whole of it. What we do as humans living together and parents in a home goes beyond the housework, and it extends to heart of the work. To the people we “manage”, to the life skills we help build, to being the counselors, and pastors and true care takes. Perhaps one of the most important parts of our job as home makers is being a tone-setter. By deciding what’s most important, what’s worth arguing about or not, what we talk about, focus on and work for or towards together. We don’t always chose the direction especially as people get older and kids have things to decide for themselves, but we always do set the tone, choose what’s most important. Homemakers build a life based off our core values- realized or unrealized. 

While I don’t want to make it a genderless word, or take it from any mother who loves to use it, I do want us to reconsider what it is, what it means, and what each of our parts is.

We all build things. Or wreck them, as noted already.

We are building a home with every thought, action, inaction, interaction and exchange. Every task, from taking out the garbage to scrubbing stains out of clothes has a purpose behind it. This happens in the middle of the day, or late at night. You build up your home, you make it one. Whether you work in the home, outside the home, or you don’t work for a money anywhere. It’s what you are as a person, adding to the places where you exist. Let alone as parent in your home, as a mom with your husband and kids, or a husband with his family. 

Together we make it a home. We build. Brick by brick, day by day, thought by thought, act upon act.

Every interaction we have brings meaning with it. So we do. Every conversation, every day at work. Every buttered piece of bread, every towel that’s folded, every school drop off, every prayer and every hug.

It’s also in the neglected baseboards because you were too busy doing other things (usually with or for your people.) It’s in the hiring of help to clean those baseboards because of the same reasons. It’s in the stickers on your back seat window (that you swore you’d never allow.) It’s in the cracker crumbs at the bottom of your purse or on the seats or in your bed. It’s in the flowers picked, just for you, that you display so proudly. It’s in the practices and the games and the late night snacks and soccer uniforms and the plays on stage. The claps, the tears, the cries. 

It’s in everything. We are home makers when we build a life with the people we love. When we make something that can’t always been seen, but can so very much be felt.

Mothers, fathers, parents. We make a house a home, together.

We work. We build. We care.

It might as well be with love.

For if we don’t, we unravel the work of others, on different days, little by little, day by day, piece by piece. We don’t want to, but we’ll have to do that work a bit or all over again. But don’t worry, you just keep going, you keep building with love. Love alway makes things work, even if you don’t see the results right away. It always makes it work- that is, if you do the work, too.

So just keep right on doing that.

Yes, we build, we care. We make it a home, with Love.

If we go through seasons where keeping up like we think or we need to is hard, don’t worry too much. The messes wait- seen or unseen. We’ll get to them when we’re able.

But those people don’t always wait, so neither should you. They’re what makes a house a home anyway. “Those people”, that includes you. So make sure you treat them each with care. For making a house a home takes an awful lot of that.

We’re built for it. So build it, make it, all with Love.