A true and wonderful friend posted this where I could see it yesterday. Go on, watch it and then watch again. And then, as a chaser, here’s my favorite. You’ve seen it before but you’ll really want to watch again. The second one is a joke, of course, but the first one is disarmingly funny and if you get your back up I’ll come through the web and biff you.
…did you watch them? There’s no point reading on if you didn’t watch them.
So anyway, continuing on from the question of housework yesterday, today, out of the depths of my magnanimous self, I thought we could have Anne’s Essential Guide For Not Having To Educate A Woman.
One
Marry a woman who doesn’t want to be educated. That’s probably the easiest way out.
Two
Buy a bigger TV.
Three
Don’t educate yourself. Costs too much and then both of you can be ignorant.
Four
Sign her up for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Five
Take her shopping because math is hard.
Six
Don’t, under any circumstances, let her homeschool.
Seven
Deny her book money.
Eight
Buy her a large house that requires constant cleaning.
Nine
When you read aloud to her, read really boring books late at night like Luther’s refutation of the Anabaptists.
Ten
Buy her Jesus Calling and a stack of annoying Women’s Devotionals. Send her to a big conference where she can learn that she is God’s Special Princess.
All kidding aside, I think there’s a peculiar feminine pleasure that men miss out on in their intellectual pursuits (just to generalize in the most sexist and unscientific way possible). If you really do enjoy keeping house, and are fairly competent at it, and you like to read and have a job that you like doing—paid, or volunteer, or whatever—assuming the modern stresses and anxieties of life aren’t gobbling you up, a restful interchange between the material nature of the house (and maybe the children) and the flights of the mind have the potential to balance you through the day and the week.
The new modern domesticity has some deep wisdom in it. The headlong rush towards consumerism and time saving and efficiency robbed a whole generation of the pleasures of doing physical work, of thinking about the laundry as if it was an interesting conundrum worth mastering, of cooking as if it didn’t only have to feed the body but could also feed the mind and soul. What are we saving time and money for anyway? A boat? Taking time over a physically material task, so far from being a waste of the self, when you have done it and done it well, brings a satisfaction that rushing out to a mindless data entry job never will.
On the other hand, thank the Lord for an education. The mind numbing mothering of young children and housework is a drudgery without the lifeline of a bright screen filled with articles, books, interesting people and thoughts—I shudder to think, cough, about such a life. And it is true. Suddenly you wake up twenty years later and want to do something. With your mind. For real.
Of course, I haven’t mentioned the horrors of true and desperate poverty, of single motherhood, of having no choice because there was no education and the only options are jobs that no one really wants to do, and so many mouths to feed. Which was the point of universal education—so that everyone could make a genuine choice about what kind of life they wanted to lead.
Imagine, just to channel John Lennon, a church where all the people were interesting and reading interesting books, were well versed in theology and the Bible, where the physical work of caring for each other was balanced against fascinating conversations about the mission of God in the world…oh wait! I just described my church. I don’t even have to imagine. I will be there today, chopping lettuce for the soup kitchen, listening to Trollop’s Dr. Thorne…because of my awesome education.
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