Leaning into My Homemaker Life

I’ve always been a homemaker. I believe any woman with a home is. But there have been seasons when I gave homemaking very little of my attention.

About six months ago I found myself struggling with myself, my life, and my expectations. I was fine, my life was fine, but my expectations needed some careful consideration. And my focus.

For years I had been pouring into my writing career, especially my food blog and my cookbooks. Yes, I was still raising my kids and enjoying my marriage and homeschooling, but all my spare thoughts and time went to this other passion of writing. Homemaking was an afterthought at best.

From Homemaker to Writer and Back Again

I am a grandmother in the blogging world, having started this gig back in 2007 when it really wasn’t a thing yet. Others who started at the same time as me have either quit or become millionaires. I have done neither.

When I started I was a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom. Over the years I became a work-at-home, homeschooling mom. That transition was hard at first, but I got pretty settled into my identity as a working mom.

In 2021 I paid big bucks for a business coach to promise me that if I did X, Y, and Z, we would make bigger bucks than I could ever have imagined. Millionaire status was actually a possibility!

That, of course, did not happen.

While my blogs did initially take off after I did X, Y, Z, market forces were at work — and lots of other bloggers were also doing XYZ — and things started to tank. At this time last year, my income had dropped in half, an income that we needed more now that our rent doubled and inflation was still climbing.

The promise of financial gain has led me down more than one toxic path in my life.

My Identity Crisis

I spent the fall and winter working hard, hoping things would turn around, but the market wasn’t having it. Changes with Google, AI, advertising, and competing blogs kept Good Cheap Eats from bouncing back.

And that’s why in January I found myself in the throes of an identity crisis:

You could have an identity crisis any time that you undergo a life transition or find yourself in a significantly different situation or role. It could happen during midlife. An identity crisis could happen to soldiers returning to civilian life. You may be in a new relationship or having a major health problem. Or, you could have an identity crisis during the time you are moving quickly toward retirement from your work. 

Lukin Center

What I realized was that I had conflated the success of Good Cheap Eats (or lack thereof) with my success as a person. Until I realized this I walked around in an almost constant state of disappointment in myself — with a big L emblazoned on my forehead.

I’m so thankful to have figured out the source of my malaise and to realize that it wasn’t something wrong with me, per se, but in what I expected of me.

My solution was to spend a lot of time carving distance between me and my food blog. Things I did:

• I unplugged from social media.
• I unfollowed most food blog accounts.
• I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted my future to look like, including entertaining the possibility/recognizing the reality that GCE might not ever bounce back and make a bazillion dollars.
• I read more books that had me thinking big thoughts.
• Bryan and I talked. A lot.

That last step was probably the most important, talking with my husband about how I was feeling, both the disappointments as well as the expectations I had to make more money. As we talked about my getting a “real job” and thereby changing our daily life even more dramatically, he said something that I will always treasure.

That was incredibly helpful to relieve the pressure I was putting on myself. He had never put that pressure on me; I had. And it was killing me.

Will I get a “real job” if our finances require it? Probably. At the moment, it’s not the play.

While my writing still supplements our income, my role/title is shifting. I can’t reclaim SAHM because that’s typically when you have full-time care of kids. I don’t. I can’t claim WAHM because I’m not working-for-pay all that much.

Instead, the more appropriate title for my season of life is Homemaker. And I’m so okay with that.

Leaning into My Homemaker Life

Now, I know that people may get in their chonies in a twist about my verbiage.

Can you work outside and be a homemaker? Yes. WAHM and homemaker? Yes. SAHM and homemaker? Yes, of course.

But, I’m leaning into my role as homemaker because it fits:

• I’ve still got five out of six kids living at home. That’s a lot of people and their stuff to manage.
• While parenting is harder in this season, it’s not the same kind of time-intensive activity it once was. The kids don’t “need” me all day long like they once did. I’m more homemaker than sahm.
• I want to enjoy our time together before they start heading off on their own. Being home-centric helps me to think about what will make our living together richer and more pleasant. I want their most recent memories of home to be the best they can be.
• Our kids are all very social and regularly invite friends over.
• We are becoming more active at church so we’re opening our home to others more often.
• This house is so pretty and such an upgrade from our previous rental that doing things in the home gives me a great sense of accomplishment.
• I am a homebody at heart. I love to be home, so why not focus on making the experience as good as it can be?