The Power of the Practical

Children raised with an overemphasis on schooling will tend toward paralysis in practical matters. A highly educated woman faced with the logistics of caring for small children and household management is liable to think she lacks the disposition or skill to adequately accomplish her aims.

Into the void step countless products to divert her from her goal: planners, books, courses, gadgets, and apps promise to solve her dilemmas. But, in reality, all this stuff may distract her from the most efficient means of improvement: simply doing.

Learning by doing

The best way to learn how to care for your particular children is to spend time with them. The best way to learn how to make meals, wash cloths, and keep house is to do it. The repetition becomes refinement. Much is made of the “drudgery” of housework, but in subtle but powerful ways there is constant improvement. Watch an experienced grandmother who raised a brood of children on a shoestring budget move about her kitchen and you might see a neatly choreographed rehearsal of actions honed over years of daily practice. Housework is an opportunity for beauty.

As one connoisseur of homemaking put it, “If the key to having a business of bliss is doing what you love, then we should simply love what we do, no matter what it is.” Rather than resisting the daily chores, which were almost universally much more labor intensive for every generation before us, we can accept these buttresses of order in the rhythm of home life and find ways of appreciating them. With practice, they can become predictable spaces of meditation and humanizing work that recalls us to our bodily selves.

Of course, there will be struggle at first. How lacking grit has become in our schooling practices! The product of 22 years of “learning” and a college degree is a shrinking violet who cannot face her own child and a stack of dirty dishes. This is in no way to disparage the young mother in question. She has been indoctrinated with fantastically bad ideas about work and worth, women and aptitude.

Combatting untruths

The most insidious idea poisoning the young mother’s mind is that she cannot change, she cannot adapt, she’s “just not stay-at-home material.” The first stab and running a home with a child in tow will likely be frustrating and fall short of perceived standards of cleanliness and order. That is not a reason to give up. Virtue is not required at the outset of something practical; it develops gradually through the repeated exercise. Simply by cooking, one’s cooking improves, and so it goes with much in life that is not taught in schools.

An important caveat: the priority is not cleanliness. Many a mother has fallen prey to the infinitude of house-cleaning and neglected the purpose she originally intended. If one succumbs to the endless refinement of household tasks, one will tend toward a trivial life in which the children are joylessly subjected to a diet carefully cleansed of high fructose corn syrup served in spaces that have been meticulously sanitized. This is not the real work of a mother.

Rather, the purpose of household management is to facilitate familial connection and human flourishing. In order to foster such excellence in children, the mother must possess it in herself. How could she possibly develop excellence while managing the aforementioned unbearable load of children and cleaning and cooking and laundry? There are machines that will manage much of the work, and what requires human energy is perhaps not an obstacle to her excellence but part of the path to it.

While on the one hand, you don’t want your family to live in filth, on the other hand the more you focus on cleaning, the more dirt and disorder you will see. The trick is, perhaps, settling on your “good enough” and sticking to it.

The ultimate aim

In her 1938 book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, Brenda Ueland includes a chapter entitled, “Why women who do too much housework should neglect it for their writing.” She offers the sound observation:

For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you must be something yourself. And how to be something yourself? Only by working hard and with gumption at something you love and care for and think is important.

So if you want your children to be musicians, then work at music yourself, seriously and with all your intelligence. If you want them to be scholars, study hard yourself. And so it goes.

And that is why I would say to the worn and hectored mother who longed to write and could find not a minute for it: If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: “Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!” you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

Dipping one’s toe in the water of motherhood and home management, it may seem impossible that one could lay aside the burdens of domesticity for an hour and do something one feels in supremely worthwhile. Yet, through the miracle of the practical repetition of daily life, such vistas open up.