wifercize wednesday: the new domesticity

One of the blogs I follow, Pacing the Panic Room, recently featured a few guest posts by the author's wife, Cole, here and here.  I've been in love with this blog ever since Ryan (a photographer) began posting shots of his wife's pregnancy and I've been hooked ever since.

Although I usually scan the blog for pictures I found myself reading each. and. every. word. of Cole's Q&A session because a) she's cool, b) I think we could be friends in another life, and c) she has a wicked sense of humour.

One of the questions a fan sent in was:

Dear Cole, Where do you turn to for inspiration? Favorite books/magazines/websites/movies/pop culture?

Cole answered that she recently read Radical Homemakers and Made From Scratch - which, incidentally, are two books on my Amazon.ca Wishlist in case you're interested and you should be because my birthday is coming up next week - and this only heightened my fictitious BFF status with her even more.

I've written about homemaking before and, since taking a work-from-home position with the church, I've found myself thinking about it more and more.  What does it mean to be a homemaker?  How much of a homemaker can I be if I buy everything ready-made?  How can I express my creativity in-home and make our house an expression of who we are and what is important to us?

One of the main draws of books like Made From Scratch is that people, like myself, are feeling a draw back to making things ourselves.  Not picking them up, prefabricated, from a Big Box Store and displaying them as if they were our own creations.  There's a "new domesticity" (a term coined and explained further here) that is more than just hipsterism.

We want to be a part of making things.  It's what humans were created to do: create!  And, yes, it cuts costs and impresses people and gets you hipster status as well.

I encourage you (wifes, husbands, singles, anybody!) to begin your adventure into the new domesticity.  It'll be messy, because the instructions won't come with the packaging, but you'll learn something about life, and yourself, along the way.  I promise.

A good place to start would be looking up DIY projects online the next time you run into a household problem, search creative blogs for ideas to yoink (I like yoinking from ApartmentTherapy, Design*Sponge, Piewacket, Remodelista, and DesireToInspire, to name a few), check out The New Domesticity's group Flickr account, read books like the ones mentioned above (also Domestic Bliss by Rita Konig is another one), go to yard sales ("One man's trash is another man's treasure"), keep your eyes open for curbside adoption options, have clothing swaps with your friends, live a sustainable lifestyle, recycle, sew, build, cook, and get your hands dirty.

Here's a video I stole from my brother's Facebook page to get you all inspired-like.  Don't forget to let me know what projects you get up to!

Makers: Mini Maker Faire Toronto from Ryan Varga on Vimeo.

wifercize wednesday: double time

The question remains: what will I do with my time after next Wednesday at 5:00 p.m.?  (Not that I'm counting the seven days, two hours, and thirty-eight minutes until then.)

As with most of my dramatic decisions, no matter how spontaneous they appear, I put a ridiculous amount of time, energy and contemplation into resigning from my job.  Keep in mind I have been a faithful soldier in the army of corporate administration for a decade.  I can answer phones, coordinate schedules, book appointments, edit correspondence, order supplies, photocopy files, file photocopies, and Brother P-Touch™ label like a champion.  Sometime simultaneously.

Once I'm off the grid, however, where will I find definition?  CBC radio recently reported on the influx of baby boomers hitting retirement age.  The first wave of them have celebrated their 65th birthday but many are loathe to leave their places of employment: for 20, 30, sometimes 40 years they have defined themselves through career.  Once they're out the door, they face the question that a job has answered for them for more than half their life - what do I do?

Practically, I've worked out that I'll be pastoring part-time with Catch the Fire (Andrew and I have been pastoring youth and young adults for seven and four years, respectively) while Andrew continues to teach high school at YDSB.  But that won't define me.

I hope that the tension between who I am and what I do will dissolve and blend in wonderfully nebulous titles: wife, mother, pastor, sister, writer, daughter, homemaker, friend.  I hope that I will live up to these titles in ways I previously have not.  I hope to diffuse the arguments such as:

"Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive."  (Marya Mannes)

And I hope to do this by way of example.  I might be frustrated and challenged along the way, I may end up Brother P-Touch™ labeling everything in sight for an afternoon out of habit, I may find myself fearing my self-imposed retirement, but I also may discover that who I am and what I do are not mutually exclusive but mutually comprehensive.

wifercize wednesday: suzie home-maker

It hit me like a sneeze.  At first, a slight tingle - an itch, really - barely perceptible and mostly ignorable.  I think it began when my mom gave us a subscription to House & Home for our one-year anniversary.  No harm done.  Just a magazine.  But then the tickle grew, the eyes began to twitch, and the mouth formed a turned-down crescent.  I began to bake (a foreign tradition to me, as my mother was more of a cook than a baker).  I discovered I liked baking.  And Andrew liked my baking.  I tried my hand at gardening.  I requested patio furniture.  For my birthday.  Now, the urge is irresistible.  No amount of superstitious preventative measures could possibly stop this impulse.  I weekly check home decor blogs such as Covet Garden, Remodelista, and Design*Sponge.  We ordered two matching grown-up couches.  I revel in doing laundry, cleaning dishes, and Swiffering.

Eyes squeezed tight, face distorted and stretched, a large gasp of breath, held, and...

I've caught the home-making bug.

As surprised as I am to have been struck with this contagion, I largely blame my married status, my home ownership, the influence of my wife-friends, and my biological clock - which once I assumed was digital, but has now morphed into a city hall clock tower.

Don McKay, a Canadian poet Andrew introduced me to when we were dating (the story is a little more romantic than that: we were at Starbucks on a date, one of those Starbucks attached to a Chapters, when he grabbed my hand, pulled me into the poetry section, selected McKay's Camber from the shelf, and read selections to me out loud, such as: "I want to spread the shed years on us as a mulch"...I know...I win - and others which I posted a few months later) wrote in his book Vis-à-Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness:

"Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world."

I love that sentiment.  Our home, our little house nestled in what otherwise would be a strictly Portuguese neighbourhood, with its butter-yellow stucco exterior, its heating/cooling issues, its dark bamboo flooring, its seamless blend from living room to dining room to kitchen, its two matching grown-up couches, and its tiny patio furniture on its tiny patio is an expression of Andrew and myself.  The bamboo floors are scratched because we love our chocolate lab, Solomon.  The dish rack is nearly always full because we love to feed our friends.  We have three 6.5-foot bookshelves, all full, organized into fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and reference, by author's last name, because we both graduated with English degrees and love literature...and we're anal retentive.

It's our little plot of land.  A little plot of land that speaks of who we are on the inside.

What McKay continues with explained my current fancy with home-making:

"To make a home is to establish identity with a primordial grasp, yes; but it is also, in some measure, to give it away with an extended palm.  We might try to sum up the paradox of home-making by saying that inner life takes place: it both claims place and acts to become a place among others.  It turns wilderness into an interior and presents interiority to the wilderness."

I've been pondering what a funny thing home-making is. Its a dusty concept, buried behind suffragettes, feminists, and mommy wars.  It makes me think of Betty Draper, coiffed and at home, preparing meals, keeping house, and gossiping with neighbours over cocktails.  But if home, as McKay puts it, is weighty enough to warrant the definition "inner life finding outer form" why should a the role of home-maker be so drôle? 

I'd like to think that the movements begun on our behalf by women who we will never meet were to give us the freedom of selection.  When home-making was the only entrée on the menu, our choice was limited, and social norms cruelly kept us there.  Likewise, if being a career mom with children in daycare were the only widely accepted option for women, the equation would still be unbalanced. 

I watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile when it first came out, and one speech in particular stuck with me all these years:

Joan Brandwyn: You stand in class and tell us to look beyond the image, but you don't. To you a housewife is someone who sold her soul for a center hall colonial. She has no depth, no intellect, no interests. You're the one who said I could do anything I wanted. This is what I want.

I'm eager to experience for myself what home-making will offer.  I'm eager to see what my particular brand of home-making will incorporate.  I'm eager to turn wilderness into an interior and present interiority to the wilderness.

---

She looks over a field and buys it,
   then, with money she's put aside, plants a garden.
First thing in the morning, she dresses for work,
   rolls up her sleeves, eager to get started.
She senses the worth of her work,
   is in no hurry to call it quits for the day.
She's skilled in the crafts of home and hearth,
   diligent in homemaking.

(Proverbs 31 woman)

wifercize wednesday: domestic bliss

[Note: this is a post I saved in draft form on October 7th, 2009.  It was left unfinished due to a hunt for the quote at the end of the post - a hunt that took, apparently, AN ENTIRE YEAR.  Fortunately, the post is still true today as it was a full year ago.]


Perhaps it's the change in the season, and that change signaling the long months of hibernation to come. Perhaps it's reading "A Room with a View" recently, with its cozy, early 1900s colloquialisms. Perhaps it's hormones. Perhaps it's age.

I'm just so happy being a wife. Having a home. Sleeping in the same bed, next to my fabulous husband, night after night. After night.

Not ground breaking for you homebodies, but you who suffer from wanderlust? yes, you who are already plotting your next trip? you who can't seem to settle down but rather feel that what you're searching for is Out There? This is for you.

Instead of browsing more travel porn, let me give you a piece of advice. "You may need to see the world in order to find your place in it". That was God's advice to me in 2004, as I was weighing the pros and cons of spending a year in Korea teaching English. I took it as a green light (what traveler wouldn't have?), packed my bags, and spend a fabulous year in Asia.

I spent my 25th birthday on a beach on the coast of South Korea and discovered something: no matter where I was, there I was.  The same fears haunted me, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same desires, the same frustrations.  The only difference was that, on the other side of the world, I was miles away from a hug or a coffee or a kind word with anyone I knew well.  And anyone who knew me well.

It was while in Korea that I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and discovered this quote:

How can I leave that earth?  It is not good to go far from your native village.  Then you forget who you are.

The quote stuck with me, I wrote it out in my journal, it trailed behind me like a cartoon thought bubble for the rest of my time in Korea, it comforted me when I experienced re-entry difficulties back in Toronto, and it still makes me smile today.  My native village turned out to be better than I ever thought it could be.  And I know who I am.