I am your typical stay-at-home-mom. I manage the household while my husband works, and I find it difficult to live within, let alone beneath, our means. My primary focus is my daughter and try as I might, the house is inevitably a complete wreck on a weekly basis. Bills, mailings and birthday cards often slip through the cracks. I find myself absorbed in television shows and then wonder where the time went.
Somedays, I am lucky if I have myself and daughter dressed by the time my husband gets home from work. Somedays, we stay in sweats all day. I do not do my makeup everyday; my hair typically thrown up into a ponytail. I long for more romance in my life, but I spend all my energy loving my child and then wonder why I have no more energy to love my husband.
Getting dinner ready is stressful: balancing a baby in one arm, cooking still frozen meat in the other. I admit that I resent cleaning up from dinner, baby on my hip while my husband sits idly in his chair, relaxing after a hard day at work, and it tries my patience at times to hear him recount every interaction that he had during that day. What about my day?
Call me crazy, but I want better then this sad excuse of a housewife for my family; but then, I am not a housewife am I? I am a stay-at-home mom and the description above depicts the lives of SAHMs like me everywhere. If I can be so presumptuous as to state the obvious truth to me, most SAHMs don't want this for themselves or their families, but this is how our mothers did it, and sadly, we carry on the tradition. Well, not me.
So, as part of my Catholic Homemaking blog, I have decided to challenge myself, and my readers, to become better homemakers. Every week I am going to put a homemaking principle into action. I invite you to do the same. Some challenges will be easy: Keep your sink dry and shiny clean. Some weeks will be hard: I am including the infamous guidelines from that 1950's article about how to be a 'good' housewife.
To find these principles I will look to my Granny, who embodies, I believe, the stereotypical 1950's housewife; that 1950's Good Housekeeping article that today seems so utterly absurd that few people take the time to examine its merit, the homemaking websites of other modern, but traditional housewives, and of course, God's word, which has a lot to say about the subject if we will take a minute to listen.
I invite you to follow this blog with an open mind and heart, and, when you are ready to go from Stay-at-home wife/mom to housewife, take on these challenges yourself. What will it do for you? You'll never know if you dont give it a try! Good Luck and God Bless.
