home work

Wanna get people freely and ferociously offering their opinions? Try bringing up the subject of mom who work or don't work outside the home. More specifically whether keeping a home and raising children solely is the more biblical mandate.

Reading the boundless blog post on women as homemakers and men as breadwinner and then mostly the comments concerning it just makes me laugh. To me, among other things, this topic is a good lesson in NOT waxing eloquent or theoretical about something you've never experienced. (It's in the same lesson with keeping your comments to yourself about the lady screeching her overflowing cart around Wal-Mart desperately trying to finish her shopping while her child wails and whines. God has a wonderful way of teaching character development with your very own set of similar circumstances in the near future.)

Can or may I just say that being a full-time mom is perhaps THE most challenging job there is? Some days the least fulfilling and probably more days the best. Does one every master all the things involved in it?

Perhaps there are those who have the organizational skills to keep the entire house orderly all day while living in it, do business or otherwise on the telephone while the toddler and preschooler quietly sort and fold clean laundry, prepare healthy, tasty meals and then promptly wash, dry and put away all the dishes involved in that venture in addition to making time for one hour of step aerobics class at 5 a.m. each morning followed by an hour of Bible study and prayer accompaned by a steaming cup of fresh brewed tea or coffee and a homemade caramel roll. I must talk to this person.

Am I busy? I guess so if busy is defined as "always having something to do" and mainly because I am my children's nanny, there is always another load for the washing machine, Meals-On Wheels isn't available for my kind and Pizza Hut doesn't deliver out this far. But the schedule is flexible.

Ultimately I am responsible for the children God entrusted to me. Therefore, FOR ME, paying another twenty or thirty or eighty dollars a day to feed and teach those who I have brought into the world, while I spend 8-5 investing in somebody else is illogical in my mind. In the same breath, I have no doubt that a job outside the home would provide me with daily accomplishment, recordable achievement and end of the day closure, three things sometimes lacking from a day at home.

And just because I honestly believe I would be disobedient not to invest my time right now completely in my home, does not indicate that my procedures are close to being all in shape. Let's just say that Martha Stewart herself might just throw up her hands in despair by just walking into our porch right now.