No Longer Quivering
Yesterday I was thinking about housework while I was doing my housework. So many female cultural enforcers in Quiverfull define women by their housework, insisting that it is number one and you must do it a certain way. It’s certainly turned into a showpiece of Lori Alexander’s blog The Transformed Wife. Lori fetishes everything she does around her house before ordering others to do the same. Wrong-o, this preaching joyfully doing housework can be dangerous.
There’s not much joy in housework. It’s a necessity that someone needs to do, but let’s face it. Most of it is mindless, something you do while literally thinking about anything else. If you like to whistle or sing, or have the television on the background, or no noise it’s all good. There literally is no wrong or right way to go about it, no matter what the cultural enforcers say.
Like all of Lori’s theology it’s one size fits all when life is not that way. Life is messy, not black or white. There will be times when the cleaning is easy and times when getting it done could be so, so hard! And all of that is okay.
Full disclosure: I don’t spend but an hour or so daily cleaning. I have my routines down, my house is easy to clean unlike my last one. Tile floors and no clutter make a huge difference! It’s easy, I’m quick, have the right tools and do not obsess over it. I am neither smiling or frowning while I do it. I’m usually thinking about the next quilt I’m going to make or something more interesting than how happy I am to mop the floor. I have someone that comes in once a week to do the things I’m not supposed to do because of the asthma. Also considered rude to live in a second world country and not employ locals.
But I know not everyone can live their lives like I do. I have zero expectation that women must live in a climate with warm weather year round that requires minimal clothing. I have no expectation that everyone has a tile floored beach house without clutter. I do not think everyone needs to clean as they go around their days and keep separate baskets of cleaning supplies in each room like I do.
Why? Because everyone is different, with different circumstances, needs, socioeconomic boundaries, class, and a myriad of all sorts of things. I recognize differences.
Many female cultural enforcers ignore that fact most inconveniently. I single out Lori Alexander because she is one of the most guilty of this ignoring. Lori posts and talks as if everyone lives in the same upper middle class bubble she does, without food insecurity, without financial stressors, without any cultural variations. Lori lives in a protected sheltered bubble in which other circumstances do not exist and preaches that way. Here’s where the danger in that comes in.
Here is what one woman was posting yesterday in Lori’s various social media accounts. I removed her name because I don’t wish to add to her stress, but she was having a melt down trying to follow all of Lori’s rules on housework.
This is what happens when you push this message with no outs for illness or other needs. You create victims. Sad self inflicted injured victims.
It’s not a sin if your husband or others has to help out because you’ve had back surgery, or a baby. It’s normal to have needs, to have those times when you need help. Help can also arrive from the most unexpected places too. I had offers of cleaning help post stroke from those I would never have expected even if I didn’t take any of them up, I just used the house cleaner for more hours. Having someone else doing your housework because you are incapacitated is no sin!
It’s a sin to brainwash people into going against all common sense, and causing them greater injury and slower recovery in my book.
Even silly things like Lori preaching that she eats a couple of huge lumps of Kerrygold butter on brown bread with her salad and sardines can be harmful if someone is avoiding fats post heart attack/stroke, or allergic to sardines or the veggies. We all do not have the same needs and that’s okay. It’s not a sin!
You are human. You are going to have needs that you must lean on others to meet some of the time. There will be times when you will be the one others lean on. Jesus knows this.
Please do not listen to these locked in female cultural enforcers or you could end up twisted up in guilty knots and making your health much worse! There’s nothing Godly or holy about ending up with double pneumonia from waxing your floor during a bad bout of bronchitis. No one is going to be harmed if someone else does it, or even if it does not get done in that moment. Floors can wait, your health cannot.
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