Home Work by Helen Hayward was a highlight of my recent reading. It is a gentle stroll through the unfolding years of her life, as she ponders what it means to care about her home, her household, and how it runs.
She outlines her early adult years, leaving Adelaide for London, and establishing a career. She struggled with the tension of enjoying a well-kept, inviting home with the reality and business of work and commitments:
“And even while my thoughts were focused on my career, in my heart – a place I didn't often go – I never doubted that there was an art to running a home and that it was a worthwhile thing to do.”Upon marriage and the subsequent arrival of children, the question of maintaining the home became front and centre:
“From day one of motherhood, the emotional, imaginative and physical work of looking after my baby and home felt demanding. I felt I had no choice but to stay on top of household tasks…Cooking, organising, errands, shopping and cleaning became urgent. My life may not have depended on them but my sanity and well-being did.”The family returned to Australia settling first in Melbourne and then in Tasmania. As Hayward’s mother got older and began questioning whether her life (spent at home with a focus on child-raising and volunteering) had value, Hayward was asking her own similar questions:
“Was it possible to find meaning and satisfaction in housekeeping? And did this have something important to teach us about life itself? Eventually these questions snowballed into one giant question. Was our home work essential to living a good life or did it take away from it?”What I really appreciated about this book was its tone. Hayward tells her story gently and honestly. She doesn’t force her choices on you. She just shares her thinking, and perhaps others will find something in it for them.
She isn’t starry-eyed about the realities of managing a home:
“Daydreaming about what family life might be like was easy in my early 30s. Housekeeping for the family that I went onto to have, as the years galloped by, was more challenging and time-consuming than I'd ever imagined.”
“What I do know, and do have words for, it's just how much love and effort it requires to keep up a warm and attractive home, especially with a family at the middle of it.”Yet, there was a recognition of what was learnt in the process:
“Being a mother of small children forced me into a self-reliance I had not known I was capable of.”
“What I didn't understand back then, what I couldn't fathom in my pigheaded adolescence, was the extent to which loving someone is to look after them. Aged sixteen I refuse to accept, it was incomprehensible to me, that loving someone is inseparable from caring for them practically, emotionally, and soulfully.”She concludes that the reason that you maintain a home is mainly to love the people in it.
“It's a daily expression of my willingness to do things that I don't really care about, for the sake of something bigger that I really do care about. For me, these big things are love and beauty. The kind of love that I've stumbled on goes beyond family, to everyone I care about. It extends to everyone I know who is in the throes of doing this difficult thing called life.”Much of what Hayward shares echoes my own thinking in this area. I suspect she is only 5-10 years older than me and her story has many similarities. I have also chosen to be the primary person at home, managing the household for 25 years. This doesn’t mean there isn’t another focus elsewhere - Hayward was in paid employment for many years, and I have given much time to unpaid ministry. While I might be initially be tempted not to think of myself as very “homemakery”, when I think back over the years, I realise I have taught myself how to do basic home maintenance, clean gutters, change doorknobs, make bread, cook, paint a room, make jam, sew curtains, and so on. The things that keep a house going.
Like many, I have found there is both a tediousness to the never-ending cycle of cleaning, washing and cooking. Yet, there is also a sense of satisfaction in maintaining a welcoming home, where everyone is fed and clean, and where things work. And even more so - when others are served and loved by your actions.
This is what I appreciated about this book. It made me recall and reflect again on why I have chosen the path I have.
I've been struck anew recently by how unnatural it is for the woman to be "the homemaker". I come from a farming family and we lived on the farm. Dad was very much the farmer and mum ran the house, but dad was in and out of the house all day and always there to lend a hand if mum needed something.
ReplyDeleteFor the first fifteen years of my career (and the whole of my first marriage) I worked in an office every weekday. It seemed normal at the time. But this model of work, where someone leaves home for 8 to 10 hours each day is pretty recent in our history; the agricultural model of living where you work was the norm until the industrial revolution. The rise of home working (I've been mainly working from home for about eight years now) has meant I get to be much more involved in our household and I love it.
I'm very lucky to have a job where I'm extremely flexible and I realise this isn't the reality for most people, not even for a lot of people who work from home full time. But I'm extremely grateful that I have the chance to be around home with my family and participate in our household, even as I work. We feel much more like a couple who work together rather than two people who spend a bit of time together each day.