In the absence of a long story, I need to refocus my energies. I found this writing on the Focus on the Family website. It sums it up nicely for me!
In Professionalizing Motherhood I quoted Holly Schurter, a mother of eight, on the concept of homemaking. I think her words bear repeating:
Cultivate the skills, not only of housekeeping, but of making a home for your family. As you know already, they are not always exactly the same. Housekeeping consists of the laundry, the dishes, the toilets, and floors that need to be scrubbed, but homemaking is something else…
Homemaking is the deliberate cultivation of beauty and productivity in family relationships. Homemaking is about helping your family feel loved and comforted. Homemaking is about celebrating each other, and about caring for each other, as well as for your friends and extended families and even the occasional stranger. Anyone can keep house. Not everyone bothers to make a home.
Homemaking happens when we fully understand the value of home in our lives. Homemaking happens when we intentionally make home a safe house, a trauma unit, a pep rally, a playground, a school and more. Somebody has to have the time and energy to bring those roles alive in a family’s life. Somebody has to make a house a home. Homemaking is majoring in family relationships.
I think Laura Ingalls Wilder captured it best when she said, “Just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women’s work at home, while only the doing of little things, is just like the golden gleam of sunlight that runs through and brightens the whole fabric of civilization.”