How I Made Homemaking My Hobby: Confessions Of A Messy Creative
I’ve always been drawn to creativity. It made me happy to dance and sing as a young child. I loved to write stories and make art. I have a distinct memory of living in Kansas City, MO as a young girl. We were downtown, at an arts center, and there was this big room for kids to make art. I saw all of the colors, and a powerful surge of joy from the Holy Spirit overtook me. It was a significant moment.
Now I’m much older and have rediscovered my joy in creativity. It brings me so much delight that it’s hard for me to break away and tend to other things around the house. I guess I’m what you would call a creative messy.
I wasn’t always this way. It really took over when I had babies. The mess overwhelmed me, and I was almost constantly stressed by it. I’d always dreamed of being a writer or having a music career, but I rarely found time for those kinds of creativity once I became a mom. I even had a spiritual leader tell me that now that I was a mom, whatever my thing was, I would just have to let it go.
This put several messages into my mind: my dreams are dead, having kids is going to be miserable, and God is always going to be mad at me, as long as my house is messy.
After a while of striving to please God in my misery, I had a mental breakdown after my second baby. Healing from the episode meant I had to open up to God’s unconditional love and learn a new way of relating to him.
Our new place of worship had a strong emphasis on grace, and counselors there encouraged me to pour into my small children more than anything else during that season. I really let things go around the house, and after rediscovering creativity, the messy house became even more unmanageable.
I started to realize this was a problem almost 3 years ago. It bothered me and my husband that things were almost always messy. And It seemed I had passed on my creative messy tendencies to my young daughter, who loves making cards, but her room is often hard to walk through.
A friend from church came over and helped me organize my kids’ rooms. It was amazing what we were able to accomplish. The problem is, the rooms didn’t stay organized. It seemed too hard to implement clean-up time with my kids every evening like she suggested. My daughter would tell me that she didn’t want to clean up her toys because she was still playing with them. We had to leave them that way until tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until they were forgotten and new messes were made elsewhere.
Another friend loaned me a book entitled, The New Messies Manual, by Sandra Felton. This book was like a breath of fresh air, as The Organizer Lady was someone who made me laugh, someone I could relate to. It helped to know there were others like me in the world, and it was refreshing to know there was hope for someone like me to turn around. This book is full of great ideas and inspiration and helped me gain motivation for organizing my messes.
There were many things to distract me, however, and it would take much longer for me to fully turn around. God had me on a journey of inner healing, and it seemed like there were several things I would discover before fully discovering my joy in homemaking.
As I went along in my journey, these are the things I found quite enjoyable: essential oils, making things with essential oils, crafting (crochet and sewing, etc.), and gardening. I went through these phases before finally getting turned on to homemaking. It was as if these activities needed to be hobbies I could be turned on to before fully embracing them.
I read many books and articles about home organization and cleaning before I finally found the book that fully turned me on to homemaking, called The Art of Homemaking by Alison May. It was in these words that I discovered homemaking could be enjoyable: “I can still remember the day I discovered Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts shortly after its publication and found that to my astonishment there were other women like me: women with professional lives who kept house as a beautiful all-encompassing hobby.” When it dawned on me that homemaking could become one of my hobbies, I welled up with hope.
This is something I can be creative with! I love to decorate in unique ways, and I even actually love to clean and organize. It’s just been challenging with all of my other hobbies, and the kids. Now I joyfully look forward to cleaning and organizing with renewed vision for helping to create a more beautiful environment.
When I was a little girl, I loved to clean. I deeply admired my mother because she worked so hard around the house and cooked us nutritious gourmet meals. My mom always told me I had the gift of organization. She would fondly reminisce about the time when I was 6, and I packed her bags to go to the hospital to give birth to my baby sister. As a teenager, I always cleaned the bathroom every weekend, and I loved doing it, only I wished it didn’t have to be done so often. I even cleaned houses for pay while I was in high school, and it was something I enjoyed.
How does one lose such a gift, you may ask. Choices that led my life on a downward spiral until I hit rock bottom took a toll on my young adult life, and it’s been hard to get such a gift back. Books like Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson were quite helpful, with practical tips as well as an explanation of what happened to a generation, whose mothers encouraged them to get a college education and a career, rather than be a housewife. My mother encouraged me along the same lines, but there seems to be a new wave of young moms, who are embracing the old ways of homemaking and such.
Mendelson’s book is full of everything one might need to know about keeping house. It actually turned me on to cleaning, and it doesn’t just inspire me but moves me to pay better attention to the practical. Her stories and insight call my attention to why it’s important to keep things clean and orderly and get on a cleaning schedule. I can’t say I’m there yet, but I’m glad to be finally going in this direction.
Although some women seem to have it ingrained in them to keep house, I was one who needed a different type of journey to embrace such a life. God has been very patient with me, as he led me through a series of changes in my life to help me get to where I am now. Through relationship with Jesus as my shepherd, I have been led to daily discoveries that helped me heal.
I’m reminded of the verse, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). This simple, sweet journey with Jesus really is the abundant life we learn about in the Bible. Now I realize that life is not so much about what we do, but it is about relationship with Him and others.
Even in this breakthrough of loving homemaking, I still feel overwhelmed and stressed about the housework much of the time. A friend recently suggested that instead of feeling stressed about how much there is to do all the time, I could simply ask Jesus, what are we doing today? Then I can do the things that need to be done right away, like tidying up for visitors or washing the dishes so my husband can make dinner.
I guess it's best to prioritize the most loving thing because by keeping house I can love others well. It has also helped me as a creative person to view my home as my canvas and enjoy the art of decorating in a way that will touch people’s hearts with God’s love.
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