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Modern Homemaking REdefined: When Life Makes It Interesting 2

Filed under the home, Uncategorized
Written by Annie on 18th Jun -10

This guest post is written by Haley Montgomery. If you’re interested in writing a guest post for Sister Wisdom, see the guidelines here.

When Annie approached me about participating in her Modern Homemaking REdefined series as a guest blogger, I was honored and excited, but also a little apprehensive. I loved the concept of finding the commonalities of women nurturing their homes and families in so many different walks of life. But, let’s face it. My lifestyle is pretty “common” as seeking commonalities goes. I’m a mother of three preschoolers who sends her kids to daycare while she goes to work at an office. Judging by the waiting lists on the daycare centers in my neck of the woods, that’s a pretty popular lifestyle choice.
So, as I was formulating thoughts about this essay and my approach to homemaking in 2010, all the same old ideas came to mind. Managing time, prioritizing schedules, getting dinner on the table, balancing work and the needs of children, getting to that 15th preschool party, figuring out what happens when the minivan needs to be serviced, determining exactly how many chicken nuggets can sustain one 5-year-old. Not necessarily ground-breaking and interesting stuff.

About ten minutes later, my boss of 16 years decided it was time to retire and close the advertising agency where I work. Yeah. Life has a way of making it interesting, doesn’t it? Over the course of a weekend, a conversation with the Queen of my current company, and some soul searching, I decided to take a trip down entrepreneur lane and start my own graphic design business. Presto, small business owner and work-at-home-mom all in one fell swoop! Can I have a moment, please?

Work opportunities change. Kids change. Schedules change. Choices change. Grocery prices change. Diapers and pull-ups change (constantly). Life in transition. Now there’s a commonality. As I started rethinking the new tenor of my life as a mom, designer, and homemaker as it crashes into the new title of business owner, this one fact began to rise to the surface. Change happens. It just does. We can resist it, but we can’t stop it. We can bemoan it, but we can’t squelch it. We can fear it, but we can’t insulate ourselves from it.

As I look at my life in the five years I’ve had my precious gifts (5yo, 3.5yo and just shy of 2yo), I see an endlessly flowing river of change. And, I see that each new stage of development and each new endeavor has brought frustration or worry, perhaps, but also joy and growth and the satisfaction of having made it through. I’m realizing that for me, modern homemaking is about embracing that life in transition. It’s about grabbing it and sucking the life from it, no matter how quickly it’s traveling. And come to think of it, the idea really isn’t all that modern. My grandmother did it and my mother did it through the constant changes of their times as well. Changing times and circumstances are certainly nothing new.

As mothers and homekeepers, however, it so often falls to us to make the most of those changes, those transitions that may be unique to our years and our families, but common among us nonetheless. I find myself striving in the midst of this inevitable change to create my own individual core consistencies– those things I want to remain constant about myself, about my home, about the quality of my children’s lives. In practicality, it’s about setting in motion the habits and schedules and even shortcuts that make that consistency possible, and about putting to rest the guilt to conform to some other Mom’s homemaking or parenting core requirements.

So what if Ore Ida or Tyson cuts my chicken and potatoes for me? At least I heard the continuing saga of rocket ships and sharks at the dinner table. So what if my kids find their way to bed some nights with sticky still on their cheeks. At least we found out how funny it is to drop your popsicle, pick it up again and pop it in your mouth, grit and all. So what if crumbs and dust bunnies live well and prosper under the couch? At least we know where all the spare Lincoln Logs and matchbox cars are stored. So what if all the lovely art objects have been relegated to the closet downstairs? At least we witnessed the coffee table tower-building feat of the century right up until the 2yo intervened. These are the core consistencies of what matters and what doesn’t. Nothing brings those constants front and center quite like change.

How will I respond to this new transition? How will it affect my home? My schedule? My ability to take care of my family financially, physically, emotionally? It’s easy to get lost or bogged down in this repeat-play in my mind. But, these are questions we all face–every day and with every shift in a thousand areas of life from jobs to marriages to gas prices to potty training.

For the past two years, I’ve chosen a posting “theme word” for the year that reflects something I want to pursue more carefully in my life. The 2010 theme word I determined back in December was “courage.” How could I have known that the events of this year would so strongly challenge that pursuit? Modern homemaking and homekeeping requires courage, to be sure. Courage in the face of change. Courage to pull from that change all the growing and teaching it has to offer. Courage to demand from that change the ability to keep what is worth keeping and release what isn’t. I hope that I can build from these transitions the courage to really live. To live in my own home, that place I’ve created. With my own benchmarks for success and my own set of constants. I hope we all can.

What do you need courage to let go of? What do you need courage to keep as part of your core?

Today’s 2 Cents Courtesy of:

Haley Mongtomery is a designer by trade, a creative type at heart and a mother in joy. She is the author of EyeJunkie, her personal foray into the art of paying attention — part mommy blog, part spiritual quest, part cultural record and part sarcastic word-play. When she’s not chasing three preschoolers, she’s usually writing sentence fragments or obsessing about life as the newly minted owner of Small Pond Graphics. You can follow her on Twitter: @itsasmallpond or @eyejunkie.

Parenting 101: Teaching the Value of Work Comments Off

Filed under the kids
Written by Annie on 6th May -10

Alternate Title: When I Was Your Age, I Had to Get Up at 4 a.m. to Milk the Cows

“Children are thoroughly human and if all their needs are provided for, with little effort on their parts they fall into habits of inertia and moral flabbiness as surely as their elders do under similar conditions. What we parents need to realize is that ordinary modern conditions more and more tend to put children in a passive, receptive mental attitude, and not in an active and masterful one; and further that we can not better this condition without taking a great deal of very intelligent thought” (1).

A lovely woman by the name of Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote that back in 1916, which I personally didn’t realize was such a time of modern convenience. Comparative, I guess, to 1816 or thereabouts, I guess things had gotten significantly easier.
Wonder what she would have thought about video games? Talk about a passive, receptive mental attitude. continue reading…

A Steep Deep Rush Through Amazing Day Comments Off

Filed under the home
Written by Annie on 3rd May -10

in even the laziest creature among us
a wisdom no knowledge can kill is astir–
now dull eyes are keen and now keen eyes are keener
(for young is the year,for young is the year)
–let’s touch the sky:
with a great(and a gay
and a steep)deep rush through amazing day

Pete and Repeat Were Sittin’ on a Fence

The thing that kills me about housework is the repetition. No, that’s not it. The thing that kills me about housework is the thought of all those other things I could be doing instead of housework. Repetition is just part of life, after all.

We shower every day (or thereabouts, hopefully), we say hello and goodbye and I love you, we eat three meals (or thereabouts), we sleep, we work. So on. Life is full of repetition, and that isn’t always bad despite the occasional plunge into boredom. There are ways to avoid the boredom. continue reading…

Create Your Own Inspiration 5

Filed under the world
Written by Annie on 16th Mar -10

Revelations or Epiphanies or Something

I had a couple of “mini-revelations” yesterday. I love those. I won’t call them epiphanies, exactly, but they’re big for me.
One is this: There is no perfect writing topic/subject/job for me. I just like to write, period. I like to write about almost anything. The key is (and this is the second mini-revelation) that
In order to be inspired I need to be immersed.
I need input, and lots of it, to create a continual flow of output. Otherwise I just kind of run dry.

The Input for Inspiration

For me, that best input comes in three forms.
The first is the written word.
I need books, articles, thoughtful and inspiring blogs, poems that shake my heart up, novels that wrap me up in another world, how-tos and tutorials and ideas and magazines and newspapers and quotes and lists and letters and journals. I love to learn and I learn best from the written word. When I learn, I get excited about sharing; my brain takes the new information and races off with it in a hundred directions. I can’t move my pen fast enough to jot down my thoughts.

The second is nature. Outside. Outdoors. Walking, hiking, throwing down a blanket and playing with Zeke in the sunshine. Tromping the trails with Mara and Robbie, showing them the first daffodil, the silent, faithful, soft green moss, the flattened, sweet-smelling grass where the deer sleep. Something about – no, everything about – the real, beautiful, fresh and muddy world is refreshing to my soul and my brain. Being outdoors is when all those words start percolating in my mind, start mixing with my dreams and hopes and values, start bubbling up into new ideas and thoughts and hopes that just need to be shared.

The third is conversation. Talking with my husband, my best friends, or strangers gives me windows into how other people process and think. My husband will come up with completely different spins on what I hear and read. I share a little idea with him, and together we toss it around, critique it, expand it, change it, name it, morph it like a ball of Silly Putty.
Conversations with dear friends are the same way; they expand my thinking, my perspective, my whole world. And strangers! Don’t get me started on this. I love talking to strangers. I think I scare them sometimes. But I’m fascinated by how people think and live, by what they do and feel and how they view the world. When I start talking to strangers, I walk away with ideas for articles and books just popping out of my head. (This may be why people run away from me in the parking lot. Hm.)

No Waiting on the Muse

The result of these mini-revelations is one big thought: I control my own inspiration. This is huge, as a writer. I don’t have to wait to “be inspired” from some mysterious force. I have identified what inspires me most, and most consistently. I just need to grab that stuff when I’m feeling dry. I need to make sure that those sources of inspiration are a huge part of my life.

So what’s your inspiration? What’s your source? What gets you ticking? And how can you make room for more of it in your life?

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This post is part of the 30-Minute Blogging Challenge at SteadyMom. (25 minutes.)
Image courtesy of markbarky.

Are You the Lowest Common Denominator? Comments Off

Filed under self
Written by Annie on 14th Mar -10

There Is No Perfect

…at least not here on earth. In the meantime, here on earth, imperfect earth, there are only two options (neither is perfection): reality and fantasy. The things you actually do enter reality and you benefit from them, even if they’re mediocre or imperfect. Some benefit is better than none. Small steps are better than standing still. But when you ignore, delay, procrastinate… nothing is real. Nothing becomes real.

The Myth of Failure

All the possibilities stay in the realm of fantasy, and you’re stuck there, a prisoner to all the things that might happen. The fantasy of failure and the fantasy of success are equally unproductive and equally unlikely as long as you sit.
But if you take small steps, tiny steps, make daily efforts toward success? Even when you mess up, you’re still bringing some measure of success into reality. And that’s when you start seeing failure as it is: a myth.
The only real failure is the failure to move, to try, to risk, to work.

Quit Setting Ho-Hum Goals

If your goals were such that you knew you could reach immediate and perfect success in them, they wouldn’t be very inspiring, would they?
Big goals inspire us to take on big challenges, face big fears, do more, be more than we knew we could. But you don’t get that sitting still. Sit still on anything and you’ll stay the same, while things around you slowly, surely deteriorate.
Something you’ll accomplish immediately and perfectly isn’t worthy of being called a goal. It’s an item on our to-do list. Do it and then find something bigger, scarier, riskier, more exciting, more rewarding for a real goal. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” said Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.

You Have No Idea What You’re Capable Of

The truth is, you have no idea what you’re capable of and almost every one of us estimates far, far too low. We were made in the image of God! The dreams and goals we have – both the ones we cherish and the ones forced upon us by circumstances – are God’s way of waking us up to our own potential. It’s like His hand is on your shoulder, shaking you awake, saying, “Come on, this will be fun! You can do this! I wouldn’t ask you to if you couldn’t.”
And you can either jump up and follow Him and try and see yourself succeed, or you can clench your eyes shut, hide under the covers, and rot.

Your call.

“Oh, hmm, well, I guess I’ll take the rotting option. Yeah. That sounds peachy.”
Okay… have fun with that, really. Me? I’m getting out of bed. I’m awake, I’m interested, I’m ready. My motto: “Find something I can’t do. I DARE you.”

You Can’t… Unless You Want To

Are there things I can’t do? Sure! Lots of them. And I’ll find them, but for every one thing I find that I can’t, I’ll find a hundred that I can.
I’ve gotten a lot of “You can’t” messages in life. We all do, because the world is looking for the lowest common denominator. It’s a way of making every lazy, fearful person feel better about sticking their heads under a pillow instead of living. We measure ourselves by each other (even though that’s a silly thing to do).
You can listen to the messages of a society which has obviously and repeatedly proved its own lack of intelligence. If that’s where you go for your guide to life… well, you’ll have a socially acceptable, ho-hum-boring life. You won’t be a mover and a shaker, a trend-setter, a record-breaker. You won’t inspire or enlighten or challenge. You’ll be just another individual in the mass of individuals who want nothing more than to hide their individuality. Enjoy.
You might want to invest in a better mattress because you’ll be spending a lot of time in it.

Or.

Or. That’s the best two-letter word in the English language, don’t you think?
Or.
Or you can take all the “you-can’t” lines you’ve been given and throw them out the window.
“You can’t have a happy marriage.” (But I do!)
“You can’t have a baby at home.” (But I did, three of them, in fact.)
“You can’t survive on one income.” (But we are!)
“You can’t make it without health insurance.” (But here we are, healthy.)
“You can’t find time to write while you’re a Mom.”
“You can’t get out of debt.”
“You can’t be happy.”
“You can’t be faithful to your spouse.”
“You can’t find good friends.”
“You can’t accomplish big things without money.”
“You can’t own a business.”
“You can’t finish school.”
“You can’t make a decision.”
“You can’t succeed.”
“You can’t write a book.”
“You can’t change.”
“You can’t make money at the work you love.”
“You can’t, you can’t, you can’t…”.
What are the “you-can’ts” in your world? I have one final sentence for you, the only “you-can’t” worth using:
“You can’t tell me what to do.”

They’re Just Little Obstacles

Most of the reasons that “you can’t” do not actually touch the reason why you should. They’re not really reasons for failure. They’re just excuses for other people who are scared. They’re just little obstacles to your inevitable success. Step over them. Step around them. Build a bridge. Keep moving!

Refuse to be the lowest common denominator. Refuse to be anything but the full breadth of your potential.
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Image courtesy of notsogoodphotography.

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