mama monday: mormon blogs

My apologies for last week.  While Andrew and I completed a multi-ring circus week, you may have wondered what happened to my posting schedule.  I had time.  I did.  I just didn't have the inclination or inspiration.  Typical writer mumbo jumbo, but it's true.

Thank the Government of Ontario for Family Day.

So, where were we?  Mormonism?

Andrew sent me an insightful (and witty) article from Salon.com a few weeks ago entitled: Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs.  Since my hero in the wife/mom/comic/home decor/writer world is Heather Armstrong, aka: Dooce, who hails from the Church of Latter Day Saints - or LDS (she abdicated membership in her 20s although she still lives in Utah to be close to her family) - I figured I'd read into the popularization of Mormon mom blogs a little.

The author of the article, Emily Matchar, writes like a member of A.A. airing her dirty secret.  "I'm your standard-issue late-20-something childless overeducated atheist feminist," she reasons, "yet I'm completely obsessed with their blogs."

The explanation lies in a kind of backlash against the backlash against motherhood (some might consider it to be anti-feminist, but I think it's hypo-feminist: the right to choose and the respect of your choice).  Here's a quote:

It seems that a lot of popular culture wants to portray marriage and motherhood as demeaning, restrictive or simple, but in the LDS church, motherhood is a very important job, and it's treated with a lot of respect," says Natalie Holbrook, the New York-based author of the popular blog Nat the Fat Rat. "Most of my readers are non-LDS women in their late 20s and early 30s, college educated, many earning secondary degrees on the postgraduate level, and a comment I often get is, 'You are making me want kids, and I've never wanted kids!'

I'm sure feminism never meant to narrow women's freedom - well, widen it in one area for the sake of another - but that's exactly what it did.  Options were made available (educated women, women in the workplace, working moms) but, in our excitement, we may have thrown the baby-making out with the bathwater.

Why is stay-at-home mom preceded with or followed by a disclaimer, apology, or anecdote to cut the tension?

I, for one, am interested to see how feminism (in the true sense of the word) matures through this season. I'm eager to encourage the renewal of freedoms we once had: the freedom to be a wife and mother, the freedom to stay at home to raise children, the freedom to home-make.  I'm supportive of my brilliant and creative friends who are doing the same and using technology to help spread the word, like Melissa B., Ruth, Jess, and Melissa L.

And, in the meanwhile, I'll leave you with a few Mormon blogs to check out. because:

The basic messages expressed in these blogs -- family is wonderful, life is meant to be enjoyed, celebrate the small things -- are still lovely. And if they help women like me envision a life in which marriage and motherhood could potentially be something other than a miserable, soul-destroying trap, I say, "Right on."

The Rockstar Diaries

The Langs

Say Yes To Hoboken

Nat the Fat Rat

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)