Good homemaking and the Feminist Me

A while back I stumbled across this blog post about the proverbial woman. She is a woman I have generally disliked, associating her with flower print dresses with white socks and general niceness. I am a cranky person; I do not mix well with nice. And I am a feminist (so take that flower-dress lady)! But this post was by somebody whose writing I respect, who appears to have a strong, clear head on her shoulders and sound theology. So, I started thinking and reflecting on myself and what does it mean to me to be a mother, wife and feminist (can those things coexist in a christian culture?).

For the past year or so I have been itching to move out of our little house. It’s tiny, we both need work spaces and we all like to have a little quiet space. We also have a lot of junk that is homeless. It’s crowded and cluttered (did I mention small?) and it just doesn’t feel homey. One day on a walk to the coffee house, I passed the perfect “grow into” home for us. 4 bedrooms, 2 1/2 floors, 2 car garage, basement, hard wood floors, a porch, urban living, great neighborhood, blah, blah, blah. $289,000.00. I started lusting. I started praying, “God if you wanted us to have that house, you could make it happen!” And one day as I was walking past the same house for the hundredth time (in two weeks!) I realized that I was so completely spoiled. We have a good home. By our standards, we live pretty luxuriously. The problem was not with our house but within me. I realized that I had no respect for my house. It was not home because I had not made it home.

I grew up in a family that divided all household chores. Everyone took a turn at everything; we lived communally. My husband did not. My expectations of married life (clearly stated BEFORE marriage) were that dh would learn to do chores and that we would divide them (except the cooking because, honestly, I like my food!). This is not my reality. My reality is that my husband has no interest in anything domestic. I really do think that he could live with stuff piled high in columns around him so long as he could reach the computer, toilet and food! And his movies, of course! But I do enjoy domestic life. Not just the nostalgic domesticity (canning, crafting, etc) but day-to-day maintenance of a home. I enjoy a tidy well-organized home (without clutter and without homeless STUFF). That said, there is no place for the enjoyment of homemaking within a feminist spectrum. So, I find myself beginning to feel ashamed of admitting that I enjoy keeping house; that it challenges me and that it blesses my family. And I believe those to be good things.

Where does this get me? I’m not sure. I’ve been feeling God working in my heart a lot as I consider the enormous blessings of our lives. And I am forced to admit that I have been neglectful of those blessing. No, I have been contemptuous of those blessings, allowing myself to slip into a model of “gimme, gimme. gimme.” So, I am trying to struggle through reconciling respect for and stewardship of the gifts in our life and the ideals I thought I carried. I think my ideals are in the process of being overthrown.