Keepers of Apartments

There's dishes in the sink. My makeup is slathered all over the bathroom counter. Bills are sitting in the mailbox where I hope they'll just disappear. And on my phone screen, Emma and Mr. Knightley dance at the ball for the fiftieth time. My eyes water and I sink further into the couch.

There's a nagging thought in the back of my mind. Things need done. But it's fine. I'm working full time. I have to get up before dawn some mornings to get to work. I need a break. Thomas won't care when he gets back from work. He doesn't. He notices the mess, but he doesn't say much about it.

The next day at my job, I mention to my similarly-aged coworker that it's been a while since I've done laundry and I'm dreading it. She confesses the same. We agree that we should probably do it. Both of us aspire to piles of fresh clothes by the end of the night.

Both of us open the next day and admit neither of us touched the piles in the corners of our rooms.

Oh well. We'll get to it. It's fine. We're busy. We're stressed.

"You know," another coworker says. "My mother used to iron all of her sheets and towels. And she worked too. I don't know how she did it."

We all agree at the general impossibility of such a thing. There's no way we could do that.

Except, I realized, as I drove home that day, I too could do that. I have the same anatomy as any other woman who lived before me and ironed their sheets. Am I going to? For Pete's sake, no, but it's all a matter of being diligent about my use of time.

We newlyweds and newly graduated girls are a generation that's bogged down in stress and anxiety. We watched the towers fall almost two decades ago on live television. We are saddled with more debt than any other generation, all in pursuit of some sort of stability. A lot of us in Reformed backgrounds have voices telling us we should stay at home completely, trust God to pay the bills we can barely pay as is. A lot of us cannot even afford our own homes. The world markets budgeting and organization at us in TV shows and expensive programs. Some of us struggle to throw together budget recipes from Pinterest and scour the Facebook marketplace for odd ends to structure some semblance of a home. And the Internet is a cesspool of polarized arguments on where a woman should be, from extremes such as "You shouldn't have kids so you can save the environment" to "You shouldn't be earning any money at all or arguing with your husband, that's unbiblical." With all these pressures on our minds, plus the daily grind of working jobs we have to work rather than ones we'd choose, it's easy sometimes to just hold off on the daily chores out of exhaustion. The lack of sleep. The stress.

Those burdens are legitimate. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Previous generations were often just as stressed. I think ours is just the first to express that shamelessly and we get a lot of flack for that.

But, my fellow burnt-out young ladies, we really can't let these burdens be the devil's tools in preventing us from diligence in our homes.

There's a lot of spiritual teachers among ladies out there who will tell you the state of your house doesn't matter. It's not important. There's more important things. Break free of routine.

Yeah, well.

We're called to be keepers at home. I personally don't believe that means a woman must only be stay at home, but that's another argument for another day. What does that mean? I'm sure most of us have sat through enough studies of Proverbs 31 and Titus 2. A lot of times, these passages are constructed by such studies to mean that a woman must follow a particular lifestyle that is usually limited to a local cultural ideal. For myself, I heard a lot about homemaking as being the cooking, the cleaning, and the childrearing. These are basics that recent America has really lost track of, but they are also just basics. Being a wife has a lot more serious weight than just the dishes and the laundry I'm always loathe to attack. I once read an article that compared wives to shield maidens. Shield maidens were Scandinavian women who entered combat alongside men to support them. Spiritually, we are called to the same. It requires a lot of diligence and hard work to maintain your covenant home as a fortress for Christ through prayer, scripture, and faith, as well as striving towards holiness and sanctification alongside your husband in your home (even if it's just a crappy apartment).

Right now, your calling might be the same was mine, and that is to work menial jobs so we can have an earthly home. If it encourages you to keep this perspective, remind yourself of it every time you haul yourself out of bed to go out of your home and wipe down somewhere's public bathroom for ten dollars an hour.

That said, we know when it comes to our mental health that when we are doing poorly, the basics are what tend to go first. We don't eat (or we eat too much). We don't get out of bed. We can't control our emotions. We don't clean ourselves properly. We withdraw from others. It's a sign that something is wrong.

It's not quite an equal equivocation/a great analogy, but (assuming we are doing well mentally and physically) our basic chores can be a thermometer of our spiritual diligence as women in marriage and in our calling to be keepers of whatever address is on all of our paperwork. It's hard. It's hard to jump from school into homemaking, especially when for those of us blessed immensely with diligent Christian mothers who made our beds for us. It's like running from the hot tub headlong into the ice cold deep end. You have to work to swim. But this is our calling. We have to dive in headfirst to all of this menial repetition. This daily dealing with the effects of sin. It's not romantic. It's annoying. It's frustrating. Because it's daily small combat against the effects of sin. And it sucks, because our hearts long for true work and true rest in our heavenly home.

Martin Luther talked about fighting the devil by washing dishes and diapers. Now, he also said husbands are just as responsible for these things, and believe me, Thomas knows that on his day off he's probably going to have to take the reins while I'm out making lattes for the doctors and lawyers of suburbia. But the state of basic needs in our homes can be a wakeup call to our general diligence in marriage. For sure, there's times of emergency and extreme where it's just not going to happen. There's times where it definitely should be secondary. But it's still the basics. And the basics need done.

I'm still not great at it. I've found that if I make a list and set a timer, I can get everything done around the house in less than an hour, about the same length as an episode of Emma. So, personally, I really don't have any excuse.

Except I ran out of quarters for the laundromat.

Guess the laundry is happening tomorrow. *plays next episode*