Roles We Live

Roles We Live

I am a stay at home wife and mother, homeschooling my 6th and last child. I cook, clean, do laundry, pay bills, buy groceries, plan meals, do holidays, and more. I bake bread and caramel rolls. I buy gifts. Sometimes I sew. I made the curtains. I decorate the house. I send in rebates. I plan the school year, homeschool, test, send in the forms for the state, and all the rest of the things that go with homeschooling. I help keep the homeschool coop going. That's some of what I do. I also volunteer, mostly with politics. I babysit my grandchildren and a neighbor child. Life isn't boring, but it's busy lots of the time.

My husband works full-time. He works long hours and provides well for us. He fixes our cars and motorcycles and anything in our house that needs it. He builds anything I ask for. He does the heavy lifting I can't do. He eats what I cook. He massages my neck. He prays with me every morning before he goes to work. He does jobs I don't like. He built me a camper. He cuts wood so we can burn wood and not propane. He helps with the grandchildren when they are here.  He drives when we go on vacation. My husband is very busy, but not too busy for us.

We live with our traditional roles and we like them. I don't have to change tires; my husband doesn't have to make the bed. We don't feel cheated or stuck in traditional roles. We choose it. I am free to do so many things that my friends who have full-time jobs can not do. They have schedules to be kept, hours that belong to someone else. I have so many more hours with my children; I am blessed by this choice.

I have had to live on less than those who have two full-time incomes. We don't have the financial security that two jobs would have provided, but that only means I have had the opportunity to be creative in supplying our needs and desires. It hasn't been a bad thing for us.

When President Obama recently commented about full-time stay-at-home moms, "We don't want that." I was shocked and outraged. To take my life's calling and degrade it by seeing it as lessening my economic impact was frustrating, maddening. My job is important, too. I am raising the next generation, impacting the one after that, too. I am volunteering where others cannot. I take pride in who I am and what I have done. I enjoy my 'traditional' roles and I will teach other young women that it is a good thing that they can take pride in. They can be anything they want to be, even a stay-at-home wife and a mother. It's their choice and their calling; however they do it.