I recently received the following comment:

I’ve been married for 2 years and have been a stay-at-home wife for about 5 months. I admit that I’m a little bummed out. I’m having a difficult time creating a schedule. I read blogs about SAHW’s and they all seem fulfilled, happy, and have things to do all the time. I live in an apartment in a city so I can’t plant a garden or tend to farm animals. I don’t have any children yet. We can’t move out of the city because then my husband would have a very long commute and I don’t want that. I’m literally stuck and boggled down with questions from people like, \What do you do all day?\. I don’t know how to answer them and I feel like a failure at times. I live in a big city where 90% of the women work, the other 10% are SAHM’s. But when I talk to SAHM’s, they pretty much tell me what they do with their children, which I don’t have. I don’t even know what time to wake-up in the morning? Or what to do first thing in the morning? I know that this sounds \crazy\. Does anyone have any advice or guidance on how I could create a schedule? Have any ideas of what you do with your time? Thanks in advance. Blessings to you!

Welcome to a rare and noble calling, a life of incredible freedom and nearly limitless potential for service, ministry, and the creation of order and beauty, and one that can sometimes cripple us with its never-ending choices. There you are, all day. You can do whatever you want. How do you make the most of it?

I was a stay-at-home-wife for three years before my first child was born. I remember the choices, the clueless questions from “normal” people, and the uneasy feelings of being directionless and not necessarily useful during that rough, initial-adjustment period. I didn’t get it “all figured out” back then, and I floundered around a lot. So much of what I’m about to share I learned later, after the transition from “stay-at-home wife” to “stay-at-home mom,” but I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with having children. I think it’s much more about time in the trenches. And, take heart, five months really isn’t a very long time to find yourself when you’re doing something as radically countercultural as turning your back on the nine-to-five work world. You are doing something valuable and worthwhile that takes a long, long time to master. Be patient with yourself.

OK, so what do you do all day? Here are my two cents on navigating the possibilities. I hope others will have some ideas to suggest as well.

Step 1: Find your vision.

Why are you staying home? What’s your purpose? This forms the basis for evaluating your many options. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. And it becomes your “elevator speech,” the brief little life summary you can share cold turkey with people who ask about what you’re doing. It’s also deeply personal, something you may want to pray about and discuss with your husband. Here’s the sort of thing I’m talking about:

I am staying home because I feel called to serve my husband, family, church, and community through creating a beautiful, well-functioning home where my family can thrive and from which we can reach out to meet needs around us so that I can be the kind of woman outlined in 1 Timothy 5:9-10 (“well reported of for good works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work”).

Step 2: Make your goals.

Once you have your big vision, focus in on smaller goals to support that vision. Someone who had the vision I just gave above might have smaller goals such as keeping the apartment neat and clean and beautifully decorated, learning new skills (like interior decorating, quilting, flower arranging, etc.) to support the goal of keeping a beautiful home, studying to prepare for other seasons in life (parenting, elder care, home ownership, etc.), extending hospitality to new families at church, taking meals to families when someone is sick, helping with housework or taking care of children when new babies are born, helping elderly family members or neighbors get to doctors’ appointments or shopping, discipling younger women, and writing encouraging blog posts (I had to throw that one in). Goals, just like vision, are going to be deeply personal and based on each person’s individual talents and interests, as well as the needs around her.

Step 3: Work out the nitty-gritty.

Once you know what you want to do, you have to decide how much time to devote to each thing. Start with your own family’s physical needs and move outward. Figure out how much time it takes you to handle all your laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and beautifying of your little nest, and then take a look at what you have left to devote to “washing the feet” of the needy people the Lord brings across your path.

Next you need to decide when and in what order to do everything. Here, you’ll want to start with your hard constraints like hours of sleep needed, mealtimes, and any regularly scheduled activities. Pencil all of those in first. If you have options about when to go to bed and/or get up in the morning, you may want to just adopt your husband’s timing. It maximizes time together, and gives a little nudge toward making sure there’s plenty of nonsleeping happening in bed, too. If you need more sleep than your husband, you may want to consider scheduling yourself a nap time. Also be sure to give some of your freshest and best time to the Lord.

When your “must do at such and so time” skeleton is made, you can start planning times to tackle your goals. For this, it can be helpful to take advantage of your body’s natural rhythms. I am a morning person. My big energy spurt is right after breakfast, and it gives me a great big boost to hit the ground running, getting my most important and most physical jobs done before lunch. That way, as my energy wanes through the afternoon, I don’t feel depressed about all that I still have to do.

All that’s left is trying your schedule for a while and tweaking as necessary.

You may also want to check out these related posts:
Ideas of Home by me, and Coming Back Home and Home, the Forgotten Realm both by Mrs. Anna T. (Actually, Anna’s entire blog is wonderful and has a strong homemaking focus.)

She was going crazy, and she wanted to go back to work.

And who could blame her, really? She had gone from being an independent woman, who got in the car in the morning, drove herself to her job, solved problems all day, and drove herself home by way of a few errands, to being a woman who needed to ask for help just to be able to take a shower. She had gone from interacting with people all day long, talking, smiling, sharing ideas, to a sudden, crushing solitude, with long, quiet hours ticking slowly by and nobody to talk to. She had gone from a world of deadlines and challenges, evaluations and praise, to a world where it hardly seemed to matter to much of anyone what she did or how she did it, and worst of all, she wasn’t entirely sure if she was good at what she did even though everyone seemed to think her life was easy. What had happened? She’d had a baby and quit her job to stay home.

Our modern world is one of working wives and stay at home moms. For most women, full time homemaking starts the day they arrive home from the hospital with a little bundle in pink or blue (or for the few who are crazy like me, the day the midwives finish up the birth laundry, pack up their oxygen tank, and head home). And that means something that few people ever talk about. It means that these women face two major life changes, at the very same time, at a time in their lives when they are least able physically to cope. Many people wrap all the issues up in one big black box and say, “Staying home with a baby drives me crazy. I have to go back to work.” But since I became a stay at home wife first, and a mother a few years later, I know something I rarely hear anyone else say. Staying home day after day when you aren’t used to it can drive you crazy. And adjusting to motherhood can drive you crazy. And anyone on postpartum hormones is already crazy anyway.

I believe that staying home and raising children is one of the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding jobs anyone could ever do. But unfortunately, an awful lot of women never make it past the initial stages because they are bowled over by exhaustion, loneliness, depression, and boredom, and they run screaming back to their former employers, never realizing what could have been because 1. they didn’t have a vision for it, and 2. they had no idea how HARD it was going to be to get there.

I’ve talked about having a vision before. But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the other half of the problem: the adjustment, the fact that doing what is so common in our culture, going from working woman to stay at home mom, is just so plain hard.

I want to look at each of these by themselves to take a hack at demonstrating why first time stay at home moms at home have such a rough go of it sometimes.

For starters, let’s examine what happens when you become a homemaker. First off, you lose your identity. I don’t mean this in the grumpy feminist “homemakers have no identity” sort of way, but on a simpler level, since in our culture we define ourselves by our jobs, when you quit your job, in some sense you quit yourself. You are no longer Jane the math teacher, Jane the air traffic controller, Jane the concert pianist. You’re just Jane. Jane the what? Jane the “I stay home and bake cookies?” Wow. So impressive. You used to be able to hold your own at those schmoozy social events. People would say,  “You must be making such a difference down at the high school. Thank God for dedicated teachers like you.” Or, “Oh my, that’s so interesting! I never met an air traffic controller before.” Or, “Wow, you must be so talented. I can barely play Chopsticks.” And now when you say, “I’m staying at home these days.” they sort of smile vaguely and look for someone else to talk to.

This is frustrating. But it’s no where near as bad as that feeling you get sometimes at 10:30 in the morning when you aren’t sure what you’re supposed to be doing. You could, in fact, do anything, and that’s a bit unsettling for someone’s who didn’t used to have so many choices. (Don’t worry, after you make a few of them and hold your course for a year or two, you’ll never have that feeling again, especially if you decide not to use birth control. Heh. Heh.) But the transition from being driven by external forces, to being driven by your own passionate vision can be a hard one, and it usually involves a floundering period where you have no concrete vision, and therefore no drive. That’s when you start wondering if those insulting people at your husband’s work party may have been on to something when they got suddenly very interested in talking to someone else. Maybe you are boring. Maybe there really isn’t anything worthwhile for you to do at home. Maybe laundry is lame.

Sometimes thinking these things can get depressing, and that’s when you GO CRAZY.

Ok, now pretend you have a new baby. Yes. I’ll bet you never even thought about stuff like how stupid long term sleep deprivation can make you feel. (Can you say, aphasia?) Or about how it feels to be touched more hours per day than not. Or about how you can’t just go anywhere and do anything any time you want and how that feels after the novelty has worn off (and before you settle in to a totally different perspective on life). Or about how now you will have to choose between learning to do all your housework one handed or listening to your baby cry. And while we’re on that topic, how about that crushing agony of hearing your baby cry? Before, crying babies were just kind of annoying, but all of a sudden your heart is ripped out of your chest and someone is pounding on it with a sledge hammer. My baby, my tiny, helpless, infinitely precious, totally dependent on me (and I’m such a failure because I don’t know what to do) baby is crying. And how about the fact that all those dumb parenting books make it sound so easy and promise you such great results if you’ll just follow such and so brilliant method (sound like a sales scheme to you? ever wonder how those guys got their books onto Boarders’ shelves? now let’s all say, business men, not mothers), but here you are, trying as hard as any first timer ever did to apply the proper, proven techniques, but the book didn’t say anything about babies who act like yours does. And how can you be such an awful mother, when even animals manage to do this mothering thing with such apparent success? This is even before we bring up breastfeeding. How can something so natural be so hard sometimes? Maybe you just aren’t the mothering type.  Maybe what you need is more “me time.” Maybe daycare is actually good for children.

Sometimes thinking these things can get depressing, and that’s when you GO CRAZY.

And last of all, postpartum hormones. If you’ve never experienced them, think about PMS. PMS is to postpartum what a little sniffle is to pneumonia. It’s like having aliens invade your brain and start experimenting with your internal thought processes. You can almost hear them discussing amongst themselves. “Her hair is unkempt. Maybe that should make her suicidal. Let’s try it.” “Ooo. Now let’s see if being low on orange juice can make her cry like her dog just died.” Don’t try to make any decisions when you are in the clutches of postpartum hormones, not any decisions. This is not the time to decide to sell your couch, or move to Ecuador, and definitely not the time to decide to go back to work. Because right now, you aren’t just going crazy. You are crazy. You are not responsible for any of your actions. Aliens, remember? Give yourself at least forty days before you even consider any of your thoughts to be valid. And probably four months before you take anything seriously.

Alright now, before the “as yet not stay at home moms” among you run out and book a hysterectomy, let me repeat what I said earlier, I believe that staying home and raising children is one of the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding jobs anyone could ever do. But it’s hard. Really hard. Especially at first when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing and had no idea how hard it would be. Sometimes those of us in the Mommy Cheerleader Club who spend lots of time telling everyone how they should really ditch the work world and do something truly great with their lives like staying home forget to mention that it isn’t instantly easy and rewarding. Actually, it’s never easy. And the rewarding part doesn’t always start right away.

Going back to work can seem like the way to escape the fatal craziness and get back to your old life, like the Israelites wanting to go back to Egypt when the desert turned out not to have stuff like food and water. But going back to Egypt isn’t the answer. The answer is making it through the desert and getting to Canaan so you can hang out under your own vine and fig tree (and when I say “hang out,” I mean “work your rear end off, but really enjoy it, and feel like you’re doing something that actually matters”).

So, why am I telling you all this? So you’ll cut yourself some slack. So you won’t be surprised. So you’ll realize that everyone struggles, and it’s not just you, that you aren’t a bad mother, or a failure. So you won’t think it’s hopeless, doomed to never improve, and run right back to your old job gasping for breath and leave your baby drinking formula with the other infants in a day care center. And I’m saying this to the veterans, too, just as a reminder, so you don’t recoil in horror the next time someone tells you about someone who was going crazy and wanted to go back to work.

Last spring we were batting around the idea of moving. We’d even gotten a Realtor to show us a farm we loved. We were serious enough to start pricing barn restorations. But there’s this thing about buying a new house. For most people (and that would include us), when you buy a new house, you have to sell your old house. And that quickly posed a problem.

Now is not the time to sell a house.

There are too many houses for sale at rock bottom prices, and no one wants to buy. The house next door to us was foreclosed on this year, and the bank could not sell it, even though they were only asking about half of what it sold for three years ago. So we’re staying. And with the current financial mess our country is in, we may be staying for a long time.

As I’ve said before, this is a 1,200 square foot, three bedroom house, with a half basement. Cozy. Especially for a soon to be family of six. (Hence the idea of moving.) But we’re staying. And I could be grumpy about it, look at everyone else’s big house, and feel deprived in this world of McMansions. I could get frustrated at the idea of having four kids share one bedroom, worry about what people might think of visiting a house where the front door opens into the living room instead of a nifty entry hall, or fret about the narrowness of the kitchen.

Or I could count my blessings. It’s a lot more fun, and Biblical.

In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. –1Thessalonians 5:18

So, for everyone who lives in a small house, or even if you don’t, here are all little house blessings I can think of.

1. Less house = less stuff! That means less stuff to sort, keep track of, re-organize, and otherwise shuffle. And that means more time for other things like reading books, going to the park, or baking cookies.

2. Less house = less stuff for the kids, too! That means an earlier nipping of materialism in the bud. We’re out of space, so we just can’t do the huge birthday and Christmas thing. Our kids are growing up thinking that it’s normal to buy Christmas presents for kids in third world countries through the World Vision Gift Catalog, or that birthdays are about sharing an adventure with their family rather than opening mountains of presents. Less kids’ stuff also means a more manageable amount for small children to keep picked up and put away. (Notice I said, “more manageable,” not “manageable”–we still have too much, and it’s often not put away, but I’m holding out hope that with less stuff there’s more chance to conquer the junk pile.)

3. In a small house, everyone has to get along because there aren’t many places to skulk off to. And that means that we really have to learn to be kind or everyone’s miserable. You can’t fake it when you’re all in the same room for most of the day.

4. A small house is an adventure. It can really be challenging to get things optimized, figure out what you need, what truly makes life better, and what just gets in the way. We try one thing, then another, rearrange, and try again. It’s like a puzzle, fun if your attitude’s right.

5. In a small house, homeschooling is more integrated into everything else I do. I can set the kids up at the kitchen table with school work, and start in washing dishes, and then when my daughter calls out that “six and seven are thirteen,” I can say over my shoulder, “yes, very good!” And then of course when the children get up for the umpteenth time, I can notice it, even if I’m starting dinner. And if I’m reading to the baby on the couch, I’m still only a few feet away from the table, so I can still be answering questions.

6. And let’s not forget the obvious, small houses are easier to clean!

7. Life in a small house is like a constant vacation. Well, not really, but there are rich people with big houses who buy small houses, which they call “cottages,” that they retreat to for family togetherness and bonding and to enjoy a peaceful, more relaxed pace. We’ve got a great view, bunk beds in the kids room, and no TV–sounds like a “cottage” to me! Just think of all the family togetherness and bonding in our lives since we actually live here. (I’ve given up on the peaceful, more relaxed pace at this point because, like I said, we have three small children, with another on the way.)

And there you have it. Those are all the blessings my current brainstorm produced. Maybe you all can think of more?