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I’m Home! Now What Do I Do?

May 21, 2012 4 Comments
A Woman New to Homemaking

        Welcome home!  Congratulations on becoming a homemaker!  The rewards of this role are of inestimable worth!  Below a few things are shared that can help make your transition smooth and have you on your way to sailing into homemaking bliss:

1. Don’t Believe Homemaker Stereotypes - Don’t believe that all homemakers are like June Cleaver or Peg Bundy.  Not all homemakers are excellent, not all homemakers are nurturing mothers, and not all homemakers are lazy, spendthrifts, and ill-kept in appearance.  You are you, and the homemaker you become is completely up to you.  No stereotypes, no molds – break the mold and become the homemaking woman you are created to be!

2. Give Homemaking a Real Chance - Perhaps you’re giving homemaking a try, but really think that you will get bored or not like it much.  Most women who are bored with homemaking fail to really give it the effort it deserves, and if they do, they may fail to explore creativity in homemaking and enrich their lives by volunteer work a few hours a week or month.  Go the extra mile in homemaking and gain the skills required to homemake well, and find joy in creating for your family home.  This is an amazing world full of possibility and happiness, now that you’re here, embrace it and give it all you’ve got!

3. Realize Your Worth in this Role – There is no way to underestimate the value and worth of a devoted homemaker, click here to read a past post that delves into this a bit more, if you’d like, and click here to read “The New Women’s Movement: We’re Coming Home” that explains some of the multitude of things that such a homemaker does and their worth.

4. Don’t Believe that You’ll be Poor - A family can be very well-off financially and rich in many ways, regardless of its size, on the husband’s income alone.  There may be an adjustment phase at the beginning of your being a homemaker in which times are tight financially, but this can be worked-out as you go through it. There is no need to worry that you’ll always have to buy nothing but thrift store items and that your children will have to wear hand-me-downs from others, that you’ll never be able to afford to get your hair done, never have a family vacation, and have to eat cheap, inferior quality foods, all because you don’t provide any income.  You are in a position to be an extraordinarily wise investor, and in so doing, can contribute more to your family’s economy than many women who work outside or inside of the home for money.  Click here and here for two past posts containing information on this subject, if you’d like.

5. You don’t need to Bring in an Income – You’re a homemaker; this is a more than full-time job.  You have a lot of things to do as a homemaker in addition to fulfilling your role as devoted wife and mother.  Your family’s health, safety, welfare, and happiness depends in very large part upon how you do your job as a devoted wife, mother, and homemaker.  Your business, your profession, is making your house a home, which takes a lot of time, thought, and work.  In addition, if you are raising children, especially homeschooling them, you have a full plate.  You can learn to make it on your husband’s income alone, and make it very well.  Learn to live on your husband’s income, to invest it as only you can, and make your house a home and you’ll be extraordinarily rich in far more than money.

6. Enjoy Yourself – Being a devoted wife, mother, and homemaker does require work, but it can be, and is for many women, the most enjoyable, rewarding work on earth.  Enjoy what you’re doing and be creative, let yourself go into creating your family’s one-of-a-kind home and life.  You are free to create a masterpiece home and family, free to take materials or ideas and make them into unique things for your family.  The possibilities of the outstanding life you can create for your family are endless.  Explore this, enjoy this!

7. Educate Yourself – Now that you are a homemaker, you have time to become an extraordinarily well-read woman.  There is a lot to know about decorating, family health, homemaking, and such that can keep you busy learning, and there’s also a wealth of knowledge to be found on probably anything a woman is curious about or would like to know more about.  You have the time to schedule time to learn, to broaden your mind, to really become an outstanding wife, mother, and homemaker as well as a very liberally educated woman.  You needn’t take college courses to do this, just read and self-study.  A well-read homemaker can be extraordinarily interesting to speak with and such a delightful woman to know. 

8. Become Yourself – You have the time to really get to know yourself because you’re your own boss, on your own time, and “running your own show” (as the old saying goes).  You have time to polish-up areas of yourself that need it, time to see things that need changing about yourself and change them, and time to really think about – and create – the life – your life – that you want.  There is no more “what others require of you” like there was at the workplace, it’s what you require of you now.  Your mind and body aren’t working to do a job for someone else for pay, you’re doing a job for you and your family, and you’re free to think about whatever you’d like, not what the boss requires or paying job outside or from the home requires.

9. Build Your Marriage – A happy, healthy marriage is the foundation of the home, so work to make yours the best it can be: one of Celestial Love, mutual dignity and respect, and deep adoration.  To do this, get a copy of the 2007 (the latest) edition of Fascinating Womanhood by Mrs. Helen Andelin, read it, and apply its teachings.  There are online courses and live study groups to go with this book, and participating in one of these is highly recommended.  No matter how clean and materially comfy a home is, if one’s marriage isn’t happy, the home isn’t. 

10. Learn the Skills Necessary to Do Your Job – To be a successful homemaker one needs skill in how to do the job.  There’s sometimes more to many homemaking jobs than meets the eye.  Become an expert and do your job as such.  The book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson is an outstanding, modern, how-to book for all facets of homemaking, from washing dishes to piano care to caring for books properly to setting the table and everything else!  Get a copy of this book and refer to it for any homemaking job you need to learn how to do, would like to know more about, or would like to learn to do correctly.

~ ~ ~

        Again, welcome home to the world of homemaking!  This world – your world - is completely unique and one-of-a-kind; no one else in the world can make your family’s home what you can.  So much of your family’s life (and remember, you are a part of your family) revolves around the home you create, give them what they (and you) deserve, which is your very best!  Excelsior!

Filed Under: All About Raising Children, Being a Domestic Goddess (House Cleaning and Home Making), Being a Wife, Cheerfulness and Charm, Encouragement, Family Finances, Family Health, Feminine Physical Beauty, For Newlywed Wives, For Young Women (Approximately Ages 18 - 28), Investing for Homemakers, Marriage, Mothering, National Womanhood Issues, Wholesome Romance, Worthy Character

FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragement: Freedom in Submission

May 16, 2012 Leave a Comment

        The more a wife submits, which is really letting go, the freer and happier she becomes, and the same it is with her husband.  It feels so good to let something unnatural – God didn’t create us to lead and be the heads of our families – go and “go natural”.  In doing so, we are free to be who God created us to be; without this freedom, without living in-line with His natural law, we can never fully develop into who we are, and this is a great loss to ourselves, our husbands, our families, and the world.

Filed Under: Encouragement, FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragements, Male Leadership, Marriage, Moral Character, Worthy Character

Grand Investments of the Devoted Wife, Mother, and Homemaker

May 14, 2012 12 Comments

        A wife can actually make her family more money, as a homemaker, by carefully taking every penny her husband provides her, investing it, and multiplying it, than many women can through years, even decades, or their entire lives, of working outside or inside of the home for someone else’s money.  An example of this would be gardening…

        A very small part of her husband’s income is used by the wife to buy very carefully selected heirloom vegetable seeds (which cost approximately between two and three dollars a packet).  The wife doesn’t waste her husband’s money on a hodge podge of seeds that might work, but invests in the right kind of seeds, with knowledge she has gained through studying gardening in their locale, and buys the proper amount needed for her family.  She then works with her husband to prepare a garden to grow the seeds in, plants and tends to them with non-toxic, healthy-for-her-family and healthy-for-the-garden fertilizers, and has food in the summer that is abundantly healthy and unique to her own family’s yard.  She has extra to share with neighbours and those who could use the healthy food, like the poor and widows in her community.  She has enough to preserve for the upcoming winter, and she has seeds to save for the years to come because she purchased non-GMO heirlooms.  She, her children, and her children’s children will have heirloom seeds in abundance, and if God so blesses them and their gardens, will never know hunger.  Her family’s health and dental bills are reduced because of the truth in the old saying “you are what you eat”, for the majority of us, our health is directly tied to what we put into our bodies; the better the food, the better one’s health (and energy).  Eating like this builds health, which is helpful and wonderful presently, but in the future, as well.  As she and her husband age, they do so in good health, as do their children.  This saves not only them, but often fellow taxpayers a lot of money on healthcare.

        Gardening is just one example, there are a whole lot more investments that are comparable in inestimable value.  It’s easy to see how such a grand investor can truly be a large part of making her family rich in far more than material gain and money ♥. 

Filed Under: Being a Wife, Encouragement, Family Finances, Investing for Homemakers, Marriage, National Womanhood Issues

FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragement: Looking Back Together

May 14, 2012 Leave a Comment

        To be married means that a husband and wife are building a life together.  The more the couple builds, the more of a masterwork it becomes.  No matter how long a couple has been married, it’s important (and fun!) for a husband and wife to take the time once in a while to speak about how far they have journeyed together, how much they’ve built. This is a totally positive time of reflection, one in which any negative experiences or words are left out.  It is a special time to appreciate each other and the marriage that the two are building.  Why not initiate this conversation tonight?

 

Filed Under: Being a Wife, FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragements, Marriage

Receiving Gifts from Our Husbands or Boyfriends

May 13, 2012 2 Comments
A Woman Delighfully Receiving a Gift

        It is *very important* to support our husbands or boyfriends in gift giving, even if we don’t agree with them about purchases. The following example is excellent in relating this point, and the point that sometimes our husbands or boyfriends see things in gifts that we don’t:

        A wife liked to sew and lived much of FW, however, she worried too much and uneccessarily about money, though her husband made plenty of enough as the family’s sole provider that they lived comfortably and could afford many nice things. Her husband would often comment that he wanted to buy her a top-of-the-line sewing machine as her’s was a good one, but was a basic model, more for beginners to use (the money for this machine was there, it could have easily been afforded). He wanted her – his beautiful, precious wife - to have the best sewing machine.  She would respond that she didn’t want or need a new machine, that it would be a waste of money, that the machine she was using was fine (I believe Mrs. Andelin referred to this type of reaction as a ‘cold water treatment’ or something similar). This happened often enough that the husband finally just stopped mentioning it.

        The family then fell on somewhat hard financial times and her basic sewing machine started showing wear, so much so that it became impossible to sew correctly with it. Now the wife wanted the top-of-the-line sewing machine, but her husband had lost much of his desire to provide it for her, especially when things were tight financially. As their finances improved, the wife would mention needing the new, higher quality sewing machine, and her husband would sometimes say, ‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with the one you’ve got.’ He eventually showed a little more desire for her to have the new machine, but only when she mentioned it – then he would say things like, ‘you’ll have one just as soon as I can afford it.’

        The “magic” was gone, and there was no getting it back. Had the wife accepted her husband’s generous offer of a new sewing machine in the first place, it is most likely that she would have been so inspired by its “bells and whistles” that she would have taken her sewing skill level and enjoyment in sewing to a new height, which would have been a real blessing to herself, her family, and others (she sewed items for her family and loved ones). But because she refused it, she was left with a sewing machine that became unusable, and because of that, had her sewing skills and enjoyment stunted in growth and blessings were lost. Likewise, accepting the new machine could have caused their marriage to reach a new level of growth and enjoyment, whereas keeping the old one killed a beautiful feeling in a man for his wife that hasn’t been able to be recaptured.

~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~ ♥ ~

        Many, many men absolutely delight in showing their affection to the ones they love by giving gifts. It makes them feel very good. To have someone slight the gift, show disappointment in, or even criticize the gift, can discourage him from giving them, therefore a beautiful facet of love will lose its luster. There is a reason men have traditionally sent roses to the women they love; to have the roses rejected, sneered at, or thrown in the garbage can absolutely cause a man such pain that he leaves-off his interest in the woman. Woman have lost men over such. To encourage gifts, to delight in them, and to appreciate the man and his motive for such generous gifts is The Fascinating Way.

Filed Under: Being a Wife, Charm, Marriage

FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragement: End Contention in Marriage and Bring Him Home

May 10, 2012 3 Comments

        To contend means to be in competition.  For example, boxing match opponents are called “contenders” or sports teams that play against each other, each team with the hopes of winning, of being number one, are called contenders. Contention is ruinous to happiness and open communication in marriage and has been an age-old problem between husbands and wives. Contention is very unfeminine and has a very negative affect on oneself, one’s husband, and their marriage.

        A contentious wife is always trying to show, usually through her words and often in her actions (think of the “Oh just give me that!” woman who grabs a broom from her husband while angrily pursing her lips, rolling her eyes, and shaking her head in disgust as he tries to help sweep the floor), that she is of superior knowledge, ability, or skill. There are also a lot of wives who are very contentious as far as self-righteousness; they are quick to point-out their husband’s unrighteousness and perceived sins and behave as though they are guiltless, that they are of more supreme spirituality. Such an attitude itself is unrighteous and unholy.

        The Proverbs speak of the contentious women in the following two verses (among others):

“It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with an angry and contentious woman.” Proverbs 21:19

“A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.” Proverbs 25:15

        Many husbands would rather be anywhere: work, bars, hanging-out with friends, etc. than to be in a house with a woman who is contentious, with a wife who feels that everything her husband says and does is a call to a contest or battle of wit, skill, or righteousness to see just who in the house is better, who’s number one, who’s of supreme worth.  The majority of men really aren’t like that with women, especially their wives; they’d much rather spend time speaking respectfully, enjoying themselves, or even being romantic with their wives.  Wives would like these things, too.  It’s a mystery as to why we, as wives, so easily adapt the contentious lifestyle, but mystery or not, it’s ruinous and to be avoided for the happiness and peace of the marriage and entire family.  Contention in marriage is destructive, mutual respect and working to be our best in each of our God-created roles is constructive – the two thriving halves making a complex, multi-faceted, deeply beautiful and rich whole.

        One of the best things a wife can do to encourage the blossoming of love and to provide a home life that her husband yearns to be a part of is to end contention.  Fascinating Womanhood will teach her how!

        Remember: We are not in a one-against-one contest with our husbands, we are in marriages. 

Filed Under: Being a Wife, FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragements, Marriage, Moral Character, Womanhood Issues, Worthy Character

FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragement: Escaping Out the Bathroom Window to Find Religious Freedom

May 6, 2012 Leave a Comment

        The following story can be found on pages forty-six and forty-seven of the 2007 edition of Fascinating Womanhood by Mrs. Helen Andelin.  It is quoted, at length below, with permission:

“Escape Out the Bathroom Window”

“A woman who was devoted to her religion tried to persuade her husband to investigate her church.  He resisted.  She kept after him night and day, but each effort failed.  One evening she secretly arranged for the missionaries of her church to drop by at dinnertime, thinking her husband would feel obligated to invite them to dinner and be friendly.  She also arranged for them to bring books, tapes, a film, and other materials from which they could preach to him after the meal.

“Everything went as planned.  Just as the family was sitting down to the table, the missionaries rang the doorbell.  After an enjoyable meal, the wife said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if these two gentlemen explained a little about the church.”  Due to moral pressure and courtesy, the man agreed.  As the missionaries were assembling their materials, flannel board, books, and pictures, the husband felt trapped.  He excused himself to go to the bathroom, climbed out the bathroom window, and disappeared.

“The desperate wife turned to her church for help.  Several men came to her rescue and began looking for her husband.  After three days of extensive search, he was found.  He had no intention of returning home, but due to kindly persuasion and his wife’s promise that she would never mention religion again, he returned home.  The wife kept her promise, and the man began to relax in peace.  The impressive part of the story is the following:

“The husband became acquainted with the man who found him and confessed, “I have wanted to know more about your church, but not from my wife.”  Secretly he learned about his wife’s religion, converted, and became a member.  One Sunday morning the minister announced the new member of his congregation and asked him to come to the rostrum.  When her husband arose, the wife was so surprised and overjoyed she burst into tears.”

         Mrs. Andelin also wrote on pages forty-nine and fifty of the aforementioned book, quoted here, again with permission:

“A man is particularly in need of religious freedom, as all mankind has always been.  Wars have been fought over it; men have fought valiantly and died for it; the Pilgrims left Europe because of it; America was founded on this principle.  It is still as important to each of us today; it is our God-given right.  A man has a right to his personal feelings about religion.  When his wife extends this freedom to him, rewards follow.”

Filed Under: FW~A (Near) Daily Encouragements, Marriage, Moral Character, Worthy Character
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Fascinating Womanhood ~ Alaska - Copyright 2010 - 2012. All rights reserved. Feel free to link to any blogpost or page on this site, but do not copy, repost, or publically distribute any post or page on this site or any part thereof at length or in anywise outside of United States "fair use" copyright laws without the expressed written consent of the author of this blog, Mrs. Wayne Hunter. I, Mrs. Wayne Hunter, will legally pursue action against any copyright violaters as well as libelers and or slanderers.

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Disclaimer: This blog is written by an authorized Fascinating Womanhood teacher for the purpose of sharing the teachings of Fascinating Womanhood, The Fascinating Girl, and All About Raising Children by the late Mrs. Helen Andelin. Other than being an authorized Fascinating Womanhood teacher, I am in no wise a professional and none of my writings and teachings on this blog, via e-mail, and otherwise are to be construed as the giving or sharing of any type of legal, medical, or professional advice, care, counsel, diagnosis, treatment, help, or cure.

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