On Being A Working Homemaker

Photo by Anastasia Shuraeva

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I sat at my friend’s well-loved dining room table listening to a woman describe her mother: “She’s been a homemaker my entire life” she said, and everyone else sitting around nodded knowingly in agreement. We all understood her meaning: her mother stayed home to raise a family and tend the house and myriad of tasks that happened there. Such an enterprise is more than enough to keep any woman busy, more than enough to merit the praise of a daughter, waxing reflective about her own upbringing. I shifted slightly in my chair, readjusting the seat cushion I sat on and wondering how my own children will someday describe me.

I’m also a homemaker. I don’t attempt Martha Stewart recipes or Joanna Gaines aesthetics, but I try to always cultivate our home to be my children and my husband’s safe place and those of us inside it the safe people. But my homemaking is a little different than the sort the women around that table nodded knowingly regarding.

I often feel like I’m teetering between two worlds: the one in which I’m a simplicity-loving mama of four who makes her own elderberry syrup and rarely wears makeup in the summer or Saturdays, and the other in which I’m an English professor with a demanding job and career goals… and a couple more kids than most female academics (or the national average). Yes, I admit it — I have a PhD in the humanities. I feel a bit like one of Flannery O’Connor’s short story characters, Hulga, who reveals, “I have a number of degrees.”

According to many standards, I don’t fit the description of a homemaker at all, but I unequivocally see myself as one nonetheless, and what I’ve come to discover is that I’m not the only one. Working mamas in a variety of situations and circumstances see themselves the same way. Despite the fact that the mommy wars pitted working and stay at home moms against each other, homemaking is actually a place where women can find solidarity, regardless of how we spend our time between 8am-5pm.

Maybe we need to redefine the word homemaker. Both society and most dictionaries define it similarly to the Cambridge Dictionary: “Someone who manages a home and family instead of earning money from employment.” Though I recognize the sacrifice stay-at-home moms make, this distinction of viewing working outside the home as separate from nurturing a home and family can be harmful and hurtful to working moms. I propose that a homemaker is any person who values and prioritizes being home and making home a loving and enjoyable place to be, regardless of whether that person also works outside of the home.

Sometimes homemaking is misinterpreted as being about interior decorating or gourmet cooking, and some homemakers do have the gift of hospitality and manage a home that is artful as well as inviting. But I am talking about homemaking as a priority rather than a gifting for aesthetics. Homemaking should be something that unites us as women and mothers. Mothers of all sorts can value being countercultural and desire to incorporate healthy, wholesome rhythms into our homes.

I love the way the authors of Theology of Home II put it: “Those of us who work also care about making a house a home … Ultimately, homemaking is a kind of mothering. Despite what the culture may tell us, all women — despite our vocation — have been hardwired for a kind of fruitfulness.”

While homemaking certainly entails the physical space of our home, I am extending the definition. The saying “home is where the heart is” relates. Homemaking is not just what we do at home but also the choices we make regarding being away from home that allow for our time at home to be life-giving.

There’s no way I can predict what my children might say about me at a leisurely dinner they may attend at which they may be asked about their childhood. There are some things I know they won’t say. They won’t say I cooked from scratch very often, but they just might remember that we sat down together most evenings for dinner and that I placed something I made in our kitchen in front of them, even if parts of it were heated in the microwave. They won’t say I put them down for every nap or that I made it to every field trip, but they might remember the family time we spent together both inside and outside of our home. They won’t say they had fresh sheets on their bed every week, but they might remember that we had reading time and prayers every night. My kids might say I was a working homemaker, and if that sounds like an oxymoron, that’s exactly the point. It sounds like a contradiction, but, actually, it isn’t.