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septembersung · 7 years

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Hi! I've been following your blog for some time, and was wondering what advice you would give to someone who is most likely going to be a SAHM (partially by choice). What are the best parts? Challenges? Does it get lonely?

I tried to make this short and pithy, but as they say, I lacked the time. So, to make a short story long…

I’ve been a SAHM for just three years now, so I’m not exactly a veteran yet, haha. I feel like most of my advice/whatever is aimed at my own idiosyncratic self’s past mistakes and idiocies, so you may find that none of this is relevant to you.

The biggest things I’ve had to deal with are self-discipline/motivation and a complete lack of ability to bridge the gap between The Plan and The Reality. There’s a military saying: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” It is amazing how hard that is for me to understand and apply in my daily life.

The best parts are absolutely:

1) Being with my kids. No matter how crazy I get, no matter how bad the day goes, I am immersed in my children’s doings and thoughts, and they in mine. They have been entrusted to me to raise well and lead to heaven. It is a privilege and a blessing, an honor and a duty. Intellectually, I understand that many moms/families need or have to work and therefore send their to kids to daycare. Intellectually, I understand that many moms/families cannot homeschool and so send their kids to outside school. (Most of my real life mom friends do work and plan to not homeschool, and looking at their lives, I get it.) Intellectually, I understand that my own SAHM situation is financially precarious and we are still untested in the waters of true homeschooling and I may yet end up doing both those things. But for our family, in my heart, I cannot get my inner self around the conviction that if I were to go back to work and send my kids to daycare, I would be abandoning them to someone else to raise. It tears me up just imagining it. What I’m trying to say is, SAHMing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and my default state is to take the easy path, but even so, just getting to share the daily living with my kids - to be in their lives - that’s the crowning joy. Even though sometimes I think I’m going to lose my mind. So joy in the really Catholic sense.

2) Being a SAHM means that the work of my life, my “career,” my daily doings and most of the things my thoughts revolve around, are directly related to, involved in, or just are, the stuff of The Good Life, or the Catholic life. In a very real sense, I have the privilege of leading an undivided life: my work is my life and my family. My time and efforts don’t belong to someone else’s whim. So I ought to be really good at this by now? And yet…

Relatedly, it also means that I have - in theory, in seasons - the flexibility to pursue my interests in a way I just wouldn’t with an outside job. (Conversely, this also means there is no calling in sick. Ever.) There’s no way I’d be writing books and reading so much if I had a “real” job. I’m awful at jobs - always have been. I’ve never been able to hold one down for more than a few months. In its way, I suppose being a SAHM is my version of a bohemian artist lifestyle.

My challenges are the “drudgery” and everything that goes with it, like self-discipline and self-motivation and self-denial (read a book or clean the bathroom? Hmmmm.) I hate housework, and that is at least 90% of my job. (Bear in mind though that my oldest is only 3, and in ~6 weeks I’ll have three 3 and under. They keep telling me it gets better; you hit a magic age for the oldest one or two, and a magic number of kids, about 4, and - they say - it actually starts getting easier.) You think you know what it takes to keep a house clean, or how to arrange a cleaning schedule, until you live in your space all the time, and you have a large number of people in a small space, and you’re too morning sick or too pregnant to keep up with your schedule, or your schedule is suddenly made up of nothing but exceptions to the schedule, or you get the perfect cleaning schedule down and realize you’ve left no time for yourself to eat, or take a nap, or actually play with your kids… I’ve tried a lot of different systems. Some of them I haven’t given a fair shot, for one reason or another. But I’m starting, at long last, to get a feel for what needs to be done in general, and what we need done, and how often. But then, I didn’t grow up in a large family (only child here) or in fact doing many chores at all (I was excused most of them due to music practice and similar. Good intentions, bad plan.) My parents are also supernaturally tidy neat freaks and possessions-minimalists, while my own family is, let’s just say, not. So I started at a practical disadvantage.

It does get lonely. But, I am also incredibly, horrendously bad at making friends and entering into a community, much less keeping up with any kind of a social schedule. So I have my own natural disadvantages along with the way modern society is set up to isolate the SAHM. (Historically speaking, women quite often lived and worked in community, with their husbands working near or at home. We’re just heading out of a marvelous Christmas break where we really got to be a family, on the heels of the hardest fall semester ever where my teacher husband was routinely working 60+ hour weeks. So my perspective is a bit skewed.) Things got better last year in terms of seeing a few friends regularly. But again with the schedule problem, and consistency. Plus I live in a very small town, go to church out of town with a community of other church commuters, and getting to The Big City is a huge budget drain. I did find a little community here that I get to see periodically; and I do have plans and options for the coming year and two years, as we really head into homeschooling. So as my kids become school-aged, it should actually get better. Probably even overwhelming, given how much I value my down time. Online helps to the loneliness thing include some major Catholic mom-blogs, tumblr, even; and there’s always books to read.

BOOKS. Do yourself a favor, and get yourself a copy of A Mother’s Rule of Life. You won’t regret it.

There’s good information and a different scheduling approach, with very useful immediate tips, in Large Family Logistics, but the spirituality is hardcore Protestant. Not that that can’t be worth reading, but for the whole package, start with A Mother’s Rule of Life.

Practical help online: Like Mother Like Daughter. “Auntie Leila” is a delight to read. And there’s free printables (which I’ve never actually used, but, maybe someday.)

Standard disclaimer that I don’t necessarily agree with or endorse 100% of anything you’ll find in these books or blogs, just that I like them in general and they’ve been helpful to me in one way or another.

One of the most helpful things you can do, heading into this, is to know your own weaknesses and have some idea of how to combat them. They will be pressed, exposed, magnified, in ways you can’t imagine. Another most helpful thing: be able to convince yourself, on a deep down level, that everything is temporary. Because it is. So temporary. So passing. It’s hard to believe, when things really suck, and it’s hard to remember, when you have three fantastic weeks of family-oriented vacation, that schedules and needs and to-do lists and everything just… keeps revolving. What I’m discovering - and I’ve done more of this discovering in the past, say, twelve months, than I did in the rest of my life combined - is that I’m the most successful at Doing It Right when I have some kind of solid skeleton of dos and expectations that is flexible enough to blow with the wind without falling over, but that can be dressed up or down according to the needs of the moment.

Aha - short and pithy - it came to me at last. The top three SAHM virtues, from my experience: Patience. Prudence. Perseverance.

I just kind of fell into SAHMing. Heck, I just kind of “fell” into my reversion and having kids - divine providence had to practically push me into Husband’s arms. I’m kind of dense that way. So this has been a complete world-upside-down series of years for me. But I would not trade it for anything. I would choose it all again. It’s hard, and it’s dirty, and everything about modern life makes it as uncomfortable as possible (except for dishwashers, God bless their inventor,) but I want to encourage more women to consider it and give it a real gung-ho chance. It’s one of the most overlooked opportunities-of-a-lifetime ever.

#aquotidianrose #my life #notes from the motherside #my catholic thoughts

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