Being A Homemaker

What do you think about when you hear the term “homemaker”? I think of some physical and some spiritual things.

While there is more to making a good home than putting up physical decorations, I have a lot of great memories of decorating our house for holidays. My mom and I would excitedly open boxes that contained our familiar decorations: a laughing witch for Halloween, a cornucopia for Thanksgiving, and candles and a countdown calendar for Christmas. My dad had a life-threatening tradition of putting lights on our large pine tree, sometimes putting a ladder on top of our van. Perhaps my favorite family tradition was decorating our Christmas tree while listening to Hanson’s “Snowed In” album, laughing with my siblings about our ridiculous hand-made ornaments.

I also think of some of my favorite dinners that my mom would make: thick soups, heavenly chicken, and Hawaiian Haystacks. And I loved my dad’s Saturday morning breakfasts, like blender pancakes (whole kernels of wheat blended in) and sourdough pancakes.

A less typical but more important meaning of homemaker is spiritual: “All of us—women, men, youth, and children, single or married—can work at being homemakers. We should ‘make our homes’ places of order, refuge, holiness, and safety. Our homes should be places where the Spirit of the Lord is felt in rich abundance and where the scriptures and the gospel are studied, taught, and lived” (Bonnie L. Oscarson).

Rather than viewing bygone statements (in judicial opinions, for example) about the importance of motherhood and homemaking as an insult to women, I see them as a call to me to place higher importance on fatherhood. Making my home a consistently loving place is the most difficult and focus-requiring task that I am working on, and I don’t see that changing soon. Home is where we share deep feelings, reach our highest point of exhaustion, talk about long-term goals, and deal with mundane tasks.

All of these situations force me to choose what attitude I am going to have and to exert great energy and trust in the Lord and others. Why is this harder at home than elsewhere? Partly because we are home a lot, and partly because we are more free at home. There are not as many social pressures, and in fact we have special legal protections over our homes, like from the 4th Amendment. With this freedom comes greater temptation to not behave optimally, since the consequences of behaving badly seem less harsh or more distant.

However, members of my church have been taught that “no other success can compensate for failure in the home” (David O. McKay). My dad knows and lives this. I assume that people that my dad works with really appreciate him; I’m not sure, because he doesn’t talk about work much. But my mom and siblings appreciate his gentle, hard-working, and fun-loving nature more than we can say. So yes, I suppose I think I’m my parents’ highest achievement : )  And I hope Ginny is the same for me.

How can these warm and homey thoughts translate into action? I can be willing to slow down, truly see, and love my wife and daughter and other family members, even while there are other things that could be done. Even while at school or work, I can try to be motivated by a desire to make enough money to let my wife be at home as much as she chooses. And as excited as I get about activities that I have with friends, I can be respectful of the fact that they have responsibilities at home.

I can try to be respectful and complimentary of the eternally important things people are doing in their own home, understanding of struggles they have with this most difficult endeavor, and helpful when possible. I believe these efforts at home are the most important efforts we can make to make society better today and to prepare us for eternal blessings.