Letters from Pemberley

Here at the retreat, the spouses had to meet together to discuss our own vocational/spiritual journeys up to our time at Pepperdine.  We had such scintillating conversation starters as, “What were your bliss activities when you were a child?” and “What did you dream of doing when you grew up?” and “What person most impacted who you are today?”  My answers to the above were: “Reading and playing Mommy,” “being a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom,” and “My mom.”  Among the dozen of us spouses, only three are SAHMs, and though the other two said they were convinced to stay home because their moms always worked, they say they don’t really feel that they have a purpose or have “found themselves” yet.  Another mom of five who used to stay home but went back to grad school when her youngest was two said that she’s so grateful that her husband supported her in going back to use her intellect again.  (Another, after I gushed about living my dream job before 30, rather aggressively insisted that she knew she could never stay home because her kids would hate her and she would hate them.)

I’m not going to talk about moms who choose to work because my friends who do so know why I stay home, and I know why they work.  Rather, I want to talk about the specific situation of an educated woman who chooses to stay home with her children, especially during the early years.  As my fellow SAHMs expressed this week, it can be an isolating and draining time of life during which we find ourselves asking if this is what we went to college to do.  I’m incredibly saddened, though, that my new friends here only got as far as wanting to stay home because they didn’t want their kids to grow up with a working mom like they themselves did.  Because they didn’t have models or mentors who lived out joyful, fulfilling homemaking, they feel lost.

I can’t relate, because I grew up in a home where my dad was the breadwinner and my mom was the homemaker, and they both relished and supported each other in those roles.  My mom is one of the most intelligent women I know, and also one of the most interesting.  She’s also the kind of person who can meet an international student and knows where on the globe they come from, what language they speak, and probably the social and political situation in their homeland for the past 50 years.  She’s the kind of person who tutors convicted felons in remedial algebra so that they can take the GED, get a real job, and get off welfare.  She’s the kind of person who reads economics textbooks for fun, who leads philosophical book discussions with women at church, and who will call you up and tell you that she was just listening to this really challenging sermon on grace and forgiveness.  And she spent about 25 years staying home to raise three kids, reading a million books, driving to a million swim or skating practices, living extremely frugally to stay within a very small budget, and teaching me how to bake homemade bread, sort laundry, and sew skating costumes, wedding dresses, and quilts.  There’s been a resurgence of respect for housewifely arts (thank you, pinterest!) among young adults, but I grew up learning those things from my mom.

How many times do we SAHMs hear or talk about “wasting our education?”  In college, I served as president of the Honours Program, a group dedicated to making interdisciplinary connections and challenging ourselves to think harder about ideas.  That mindset was part and parcel of how I grew up: around the dinner table, our conversations tied together politics, philosophy, theology, and the arts.  My mom and dad would discuss any subject we were studying in school, and they made sure we kept up on national and world events.  It honestly never occurred to me that a SAHM wasn’t an intellectually challenging career choice.  As a little girl, teenager, and college student, my mom always epitomized what I wanted to become.  In college, I memorized Proverbs 31 (and Derek used it when he proposed to me), and I truly want to rise up and call my mom blessed as the wife of noble character’s children do.  I’ve shared that I don’t want to impose a particular timetable of expectations on my daughters, but I do pray that Derek and I can communicate to the girls (as my parents did to me) that if God blesses them with a husband and children, the life of a housewife can be richly challenging, intellectually stimulating, and deeply rewarding.  As we celebrate Mother’s Day this year, I want to honor my mom for personifying for me how to use my God-given gifts to glorify Him through the ministry of the home.

As an important sidenote, I also want to praise Mom Muller for living out homemaking in such a way that her sons found deeply appealing, as well.  I made sure to ascertain on our first date that Derek would be totally supportive of a wife who chose to stay home with her children, throwing herself into not only their early years, but their school years, as well, whether through homeschooling or being the room mom/chaperone/fundraiser/chauffeur.  He told me that he was so grateful that his mom had done that for him, and he hoped his kids would have the same blessing.  The other spouses here at the retreat expressed confusion over their purpose in life and how they fit into their husband’s career path.  From the beginning, Derek and I have had a shared vision of how we can work together to create a happy, healthy family like the ones we were raised in, glorifying God from our home life outwards.  I don’t think we realize how blessed we were to have positive role models in our parents.  Because his mom has different strengths than my mom, I’ve been doubly blessed to have another wise mom to learn from this past decade.  Countless home remedies, recipes, and laundry secrets now in my repetoire have come not from my mom, but from his! I feel totally comfortable calling Mom Muller for advice on anything, and I hear that such an in-law relationship is rare.  So I also want to honor my mother-in-law for living out Proverbs 31 in a way that blesses her sons (and daughter-in-law).

Happy Mother’s Day tomorrow to two remarkable Proverbs 31 women: Mary Willett and Diane Muller!