A homemaker

This article is my submission to the blog challenge sponsored
by Art Bookbindery, "Empowering Writers to Self Publish."

Often the obituaries define a woman around here as a homemaker. Today I got to thinking about that and what the term homemaker meant to me years ago. Homemakers were the women who brought home made cookies and cupcakes during the summer Vacation Bible Schools. Homemakers were the mothers who always went on the school field trips with us. And homemakers were the mothers who sewed their kids’ clothes, and this wasn’t always a good thing.

Now that I’m a grown woman, I’m certainly old enough to bring those homemade cookies to V.B.S., but I don’t often think of myself as a homemaker. Though, if I were to die, that would certainly be the title they would give me. I thought through the other titles I have held to see if they described me any better:

Seventh grade teacher
College professor
Writer
Secretary
College student

Hearing any of these other titles would automatically bring to mind a certain kind of person. You would probably be able to imagine what that person, that secretary, that teacher would be doing during her day. Maybe you would even think you knew quite a bit about her simply by that description. But what do you think of when you think of a homemaker? An apron-clad cookie baker?

Perhaps there is no way to make the word homemaker appear any other way and only a woman who has given herself over to the title of homemaker joyfully can fully understand all it entails. I never thought that after all the years of college, the 7 years of marriage, holding various job positions, that I would ultimately become a homemaker, and even more so that I would love the job so very much. But sometimes you surprise yourself.

She was a homemaker. She read The Big Red Barn to her son every day for 6 months until he was ready for another book. She chased butterflies with her daughters and delighted in their laughter. She generally only opened cans of soup for lunch but sometimes she threw caution and clean floors to the wind and made cupcakes with the children and let them use the sprinkles with abandon. She used her rudimentary skills as a seamstress to sew tiny aprons for her daughters and they loved them in spite of the imperfect seams. She made an omelet at night for her husband so he could have breakfast the next morning without her having to get up early. She chronicled birthdays and family vacations in photographs and occasionally organized them in albums. She picked up toys at night and folded laundry, tucking it into drawers with a sense of satisfaction of a job finally completed. And before going to her own bed, she touched the faces of her sleeping children and prayed over them, and sometimes she cried a little wishing she had listened more that day, yelled less and gone on that walk with them instead of cleaning the kitchen. She rose each morning with plans to do better. Some days were good and some days were hard, but she knew she wouldn’t trade jobs with anyone in the world. She was a homemaker.