Transitioning from a money-making career to a homemaking career was surprisingly hard for me. I am still adjusting to this transition, but I have learned a few things that have made the transition easier, and that’s what I want to share.
I have a master’s degree in English and I took my time getting it. I worked on and off through college at a variety of jobs, and then after graduating began a career as a technical writer and editor for a civil engineering firm. I was doing fine. My plan was to work for a while, build my resume and experience, then possibly get a job as an adjunct faculty member at a local university and teach while continuing to dabble in technical and business writing.
But that was all “plan B.” Even while pursuing my degrees, my deepest wish and my “plan A” was to get married, start a family, and be a stay-at-home mom. I did get married, and about a year into my tech writing job, we found out we were having a baby.
I was so happy. Finally, my dreams of pursuing a homemaking career were going to happen. But I was also surprised at how emotional I felt about leaving my job, even though quitting my job and devoting myself to homemaking and family building was what I truly wanted. I was also surprised at how hard being a stay at home mom turned out to be--not because the tasks of taking care of the home and family were so challenging (even though they were!) but because it was so challenging to find the kind of fulfillment and appreciation that I had experienced in my money-making career. It was easy to feel exhausted at the end of a day’s hard homemaking work, look back on the day, and feel like a failure instead of a success.
I tried a lot of things to help find fulfillment in my new career as a homemaker, and while some things helped, the day-to-day was not as happy as I had hoped.
Since then, I have learned what I was doing wrong: I was trying to apply the measures of success in a money-making career (that we are taught to value and appreciate beginning in kindergarten on up) to a homemaking career. I was applying the values and expectations and strategies of accomplishing tasks and providing high-quality deliverables on time to my home and family life and it just didn’t work! To explain why this was so more clearly, I want to look at different ways we define success and find fulfillment and point out which ones apply to a money-making career versus a homemaking career.
In school and in our money-making careers, measures of success are pretty easy to see. You get a good grade, you get a raise, you do things faster and more efficiently and with greater skill than the competition. To succeed, you need good working relationships with peers of your class, and while there are personality differences and great challenges and creative thinking needed, you are typically all conscious of a common goal and when you do something to further that goal, you are appreciated, respected, and compensated with either good grades or good money. Progress in your job is easy to measure: you get better, faster, more skillful, more popular, or more valuable in your field. Fulfillment comes from a job well done and knowing whether you’ve done a good job or not is pretty clear because we have been trained from childhood up to recognize success in the money-making system. It’s a good system and provides great benefit. It’s definitely needed.
But in homemaking, such measures of success are not always applicable and can actually discourage or obscure true progress and value in what you do. There are no grades or raises, and there really isn’t any valuable competition with peers. About valuable competition: I don’t count “keeping up with the joneses” or striving for a social-media-worthy lifestyles as participating in valuable competition. Looking at other people’s situations and lifestyles can be inspiring, but I’ve noticed that measuring homemaking success by such comparison is often toxic. This is because comparing your homemaking with someone else’s, be it mommyvlogger89 or your sister-in-law,
(1) tends to create excessive focus on the material side of homemaking because that’s the part that’s really easy to see, judge and compare;
(2) often misses the important emotional environment the homemaker creates, the interpersonal side that really makes a house a home; and
(3) fails to account for the very unique circumstances of your own life situation.
So yeah. Valuable competition in homemaking does not come from competing with peers. Probably the best form of valuable competition in homemaking comes from comparing your present efforts with past efforts and noting your personal growth trajectory. But progress in a homemaker’s role is not always easy to measure: does the ability to clean the whole kitchen in fifteen minutes flat mean you’re a good homemaker? Not necessarily. And while assessing personal progress, even if it is difficult, is a great exercise, it was perhaps only a part of the way we measured our success in a money-making career.
Which brings us to another big difference in how we measure our success: There is usually no immediate monetary compensation for our efforts. But, even though the homemaking career is not paid in money, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pay monetarily. Investopedia says that the services provided by a stay-at-home parent (i.e. homemaker) would be valued at a median annual salary of $178,201. (For more on the economic value of a career homemaker, try reading the book Radical Homemaking.) But this six-figure economic value does not come in the form of a paycheck, which can make it harder to recognize.
Perhaps this lack of recognition is the crux of the challenge: often, homemaking efforts seem (or really are) unnoticed or unappreciated when done well, while failing to put forth these efforts causes complaint. Sometimes, as a homemaker, you don’t get the praise, but you do get the blame. And often this blame is coming from ourselves.
One solution to this is to try to achieve greater household success and recognition by getting the rest of the household to help with the work: the holy grail of homemaking. But in this effort, it may be difficult to come up with common goals with your family members, especially if the family members are opinionated and inexperienced children (or even your parter!). Sometimes, you efforts at getting some help and appreciation are not popular. At all.
And let’s admit: it’s harder to find fulfillment in jobs that are truly never done, like dishes and laundry and keeping the peace. There’s actually a whole book on the history of American homemaking called Never Done. Ugh. (It’s by Susan Strasser if you’re interested.)
BUT.
I am here to tell you that my homemaking career is now bringing me much more fulfillment than a money-making career ever could. For me, the keys to finding this fulfillment and to making the transition from a money-making career to a homemaking career are to
(1) define what successes in homemaking looks like for you; and
(2) transition from seeing never-done jobs as a nuisance to embracing them as cyclical rituals of love, service, self care, and even worship. Housework as liturgy, if you will.
Once I established what my roles and responsibilities are as a homemaker (and what they are not!), I could end the day with a clearer sense of what I had really accomplished and feel good about my efforts. And seeing my recurring jobs as opportunities for mindfulness and love instead of pesky checklists helped me find an enjoyable rhythm and beauty in doing what is, perhaps fortunately, never done.
AND.
I also keep up my money-making career with small part-time opportunities. I haven’t completely turned my back on my money-making career, and you certainly don't have to. Knowing how to be and feel successful in both money-making and homemaking is possible and good. I am not saying that everyone can or should quit their job to be a homemaker, although you may find that's the best option. I am saying that, at some point, to find fulfillment in a homemaking role, we have to reframe our perceptions of success to fit the unique scenario a homemaking career presents--scenarios in which success criteria in the money-making realm do not always apply.
SO.
How do I define my homemaking success and change my perspective on housework?
I’m still working on it. This course covers some of that. But a lot of this is personal, meaning up to you. So let’s keep working through the course. Hopefully it will help. But to get you started on finding your own answers, try this lesson.
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