Diary of a Clueless Housewife Entry 1: In the Beginning was Chaos...
In which my trial and errors of figuring out how to run a home well are to be documented.
About 4.5 months ago I had child number 2. Two months previous to that, baby 1 turned two years old. And two months prior to that milestone, my husband and I bought our first official home and moved several states, giving up our title as Floridians and stepping into a new place as Texans.
I had not been planning to move while 21 weeks pregnant, completely upending my life right before it was about to change and expand with another baby. But every door in Florida closed and the one to the Lone Star State swung wide open. So we followed in obedience, leaving the burgeoning community we had found in Florida to start all over again.
With my second pregnancy, I was exhausted. If you are reading this and you are in your 20s, please have all your babies in your 20s because having only done this in my 30s, with each pregnancy getting a little harder, I think spring chicken me would have fared better. Baby 2 was also deeply lodged in my pelvic region, which gave me the worst pain of my life. I'd often end the day feeling like someone was tearing me apart at the pubic bone. It made chasing after a toddler tough.
It also made home management tough. I now had 3 extra bedrooms, a hallway, and a laundry room to keep tidy, as well as an expanded main living area compared to the two bedroom apartments we had been renting since we married. Oh, and I had a toddler. In this time, I read Phylicia Masonheimer’s Every Home a Foundation, desperate to find some type of rhythm in the midst of what felt like chaos. I read it but eight months pregnant me did not have the capacity to bring a rhythm to fruition, all while trying to meet people and prepare for a new baby. So I pushed it aside, accepting that I would just never be as productive or as put together as Mrs. Masonheimer. I got by on the haphazard schedule I had and made it work.
Then baby 2 rocked my world.
I'll make a post about the whirlwind of baby 2’s birth (I had her within 2 hours of waking up), but suffice to say she came a week and a day before 40 weeks and she came furiously.
By the time my husband went back to work 3 weeks later, I was drowning in overwhelm. I felt guilty about not having the time for my toddler, I was trying to manage her and a baby that I did not put down enough, and my house was a mess.
And I do not thrive well in mess.
Thankfully the postpartum anxiety was recognized far more quickly this time around, and I was willing to put my baby down so I could care for myself and my toddler1, but I was left floundering with what to do.
Simultaneously, I would watch the social media accounts of Masonheimer and Halberstadt and so many other mamas that not only functioned, but thrived and were productive. Here I was, crying most days at dinner at 4 pm sick with overwhelm and anxiety, trying to figure out why I was such a mess. Why I couldn't do motherhood with any semblance of sanity. Not sure if I could even handle the eventual 4 kids my heart desires.
Thankfully, Masonheimer in her book acknowledged what she and so many of these women I saw on my tiny phone screen thriving had, that I sadly did not: motherhood examples.
For me, feminism destroyed any hope of a true mothering example in my own mother, leaving me without an understanding of how to do any of this. I had no blueprint to pull from. Like Abraham and his going out where the LORD called, I, too, am trekking into the unknown.
The only difference is the pesky comparison game I play against those that have been blessed with a roadmap.
You Need A Career As A Backup
I was raised in a household where, for the most part, my mother was not home. Even now, talking with her is awkward because she really didn't manage a household throughout the week with small children past a few weeks of maternity leave. My mother was a career woman and returned to work when I was 12 weeks old, leaving me in the care of a babysitter.
This was not something she needed to do, truly. My dad was in the military and also worked during the week. But her work was her pride, her joy, and her identity. As much as now she seems to try to make me feel bad because I stay home and she did not, these were both very conscious choices we each made that required some level of sacrifice.
As a result of my childhood experience, I was determined to stay home with my kids. I don't have a lot of memories of being in the daycare when I was a small child, but the few I do have aren't great. I don't remember feeling overly loved, how I might have felt if I was being cared for by a family member, and I often felt a sense of fear that what I was doing what constantly wrong. I also have a lot of memories of Face from Nick Jr. and watching Gullah Gullah Island.
I remember only seeing my mom when I would crawl into the bathroom while she was taking her morning shower, enveloped by the warmth of the steam at 5:30 am. I watched The Magic School Bus with breakfast as she got ready for the day. And then it was off to day care until dinner time. I, again, don't have many memories of this. At some point during this time, my dad was out of work due to an injury, and he took care of us during the day for awhile. But, again, I don't remember much of that time period either.
By the time I was 5, we had moved from New York to Maine, where my parents spent about 3 years working in a group home for troubled boys. My life was chaos in this time. There was no consistent structure: some days we lived as a small family in the back apartment of a large Maine farmhouse while others were spent with the handful of teenage male delinquents in the main part of the house. Supper was always a different location. And sometimes my brother and I had to be locked away in the apartment style living space that was our family's quarters while my parents dealt with an out of control teenage boy.
After muddling through for a few years, my parents decided to move back to New York. Not too long after, my mom gave birth to my sister prematurely, those days of going back and forth to the NICU in the hospital to see her then to home for a bit and mostly school are all I can remember. It wasn't long when we got back that my mom took per diem work and by middle school, I was coming home to an empty house where something was stewing in a crockpot and mom wouldn't be home until 5:30 or sometime 6. At this point, my dad had already served one of his two tours in Afghanistan. He would go on to serve another and then ended up working downstate at a base where he would be home every other weekend by the time I was halfway through high school. My school and my teachers raised me, though I must compliment my parents that they did their best to be as involved in the education part of my experience as much as they could be.
There was no semblance of order or organization in my home. My mom often shirked these responsibilities in teaching how to care for a home by blaming my personality, that I didn't want to learn how to do it. That I was too impatient. So I learned how to cook chicken well from the Whole 30 book. How to clean by working several summers in a kitchen and helping turnover cabins at a family camp in the Adirondacks.
I had always wanted to be a stay at home mom. I was shamed for this in my home economics class when it came to our career planning unit (as if 6th graders know what they want to do with their lives anyway). It was what disappointed my mother, who always told me I needed to have a degree in order to care for myself when I get older because “you never know what could happen and you'll be left to take care of yourself”.
So here I stand at the precipice of having two children and trying to maintain a household with dreams of tending a garden and caring for chickens some day. Wanting to be productive in my every day life. With the goal of home educating the children God gives me without an reliance on AI or using a virtual learning platform to have someone else teach my children. And I am utterly overwhelmed and ill prepared, darting back and forth from an invisible center line like that old woman from Easy Bake Battle.
I stand with a Master's degree clutched in hand…and overwhelmed because I don't know the first thing about caring for a toddler and an infant at the same time. Fueled with what I've used before to try to learn how to care for a house — the internet— has only made childrearing a scary endeavor in which my kids can never for a moment be uncomfortable or left to cry because otherwise they will be traumatized. As a former traumatized child, I don't want that for them, and I am so afraid to mess them up, it's hard to see our circumstances are not even remotely the same.
And Now to Build a Place of My Own
I have returned to Masonheimer’s guidebook of encouraging mothers to find a rhythm. I haven't logged onto Instagram to scroll in over a month. I am slowly weaning my time down on Facebook. I have abandoned most of the Reddit forums I religiously visited with my first baby in order to try to figure this out on my own (though. shout out to the /exclusivelypumping sub that saved my butt and gave me a lot of hacks when nursing my first went sideways really quickly). I am already beginning to learn from other friends. Trying my best to take what works and leave what doesn't. I am trying to figure out a way to not feel enslaved to my children, but to find the healthy balance of servanthood and discipleship. Learning what works for us and leaving the rest behind.
I would love for an older, more experienced mama friend to come walk alongside me. I was so sad when we left Florida because I was beginning to meet these types of women who were starting to help me find joy in motherhood. I am prayerful that God will bring some into my life as we grow roots here in Texas.
And that I will begin to see that the weight of perfect motherhood is a crown I place on my own head. After all, Jesus told me that His yoke is easy and His burden is light ( Matt. 11:30). This heaviness and anxiety are not what I am called to live in.
So there will be days where my baby cries. She is okay. There will be days my toddler will not have all of my attention. She is okay. There will be moments I royally screw up as a mother. And the biggest difference between how I mother and how I was mothered will be recognizing when I am the sinful one, confessing it to my kids or to my husband and to God. Maybe all 3. Maybe multiple times a day. And I will be okay.
Maybe the postpartum anxiety I struggle through is meant to be my thorn2. Maybe there are parts of motherhood I have to lay down to God that aren't as glamorous as the moms I follow and try to emulate from afar. And that is okay. That is good. Because I am not them. And God's grace is sufficient for where I fall short all the same.
It does not mean I am to remain defeated3. It does not mean I should squander my talents because it feels safer or more comfortable to bury them in just trying to survive4.
I figured I also am not the only daughter of the 90s, a latchkey kid trying to figure out what it is to be home with children and manage a household because the woman who could have taught me how to do so dropped the ball for the altar of security and identity in vocation, not in the blessing of mothering. Maybe my muddling, the fears that I have of doing this wrong, of learning to lay it all down, can be an inspiration to another clueless daughter trying to become a housewife, caring for others while tending to souls.
And I hope to reflect on the failures as well as the victories. Because victories are nice, but they aren't ultimately what shape us. It is the grace and mercy of God in the face of our falling shorts that does.
I am allowing myself a final grace week of chaos as we approach Easter (in part because our family is getting over an illness that hit each and every one of us the past two weeks). And in the Spirit of Christ providing us a way to step into new life because of His sacrifice on Passover weekend, I am going to step into new life next week, following the daily house care rhythm Masonheimer lays out in her book, giving it a couple weeks of repetition as I work to develop a house caring rhythm of my own.
And by the grace of God and the spirit of working hard so as not to grow weary, I will put forth my best in the hopes that God in His power and wisdom furthers it to bring Him the glory.
My first I was so scared to put down thanks to Internet nonsense that I often skipped meals all day and rarely did more than shower when it came to personal hygiene
2 Corinthians 12
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
Matthew 25:14-30
Im so glad you are back to writing. I really enjoy reading it. Im praying for you to find your household rhythm and enjoyment in your motherhood role.