Confessions of a Desperate Housewife

After a recent speaking event, a man asked my husband Daniel, “What does your wife do for a living?”

Daniel came home and mentioned it to me later.

“Well what did you tell him?” I pressed.

“I told him that you recently quit your job, that you’re a housewife right now.”

I bristled at this response and then bristled again at what it revealed about my own thinking.

“Did you tell him anything else about me?” I continued.

The truth of the matter is that I didn’t want to be known as a housewife. I didn’t want to be identified exclusively as a woman who stays at home and cooks dinner and washes dishes and helps kids with homework. There’s nothing wrong with doing any of this, of course. It’s deeply meaningful, important work. But it’s not the sum total of how I want to present myself or my contributions to the world.

Now you can judge me for this all you want, and there’s probably some validity to your judgments. I’m confessing this all to you as a way of processing some of it myself. I have a great deal of respect for women who dedicate their lives to creating safety and stability for their families, and some women are exceptionally skilled at this. I’m not knocking stay-at-home moms at all. Having done both the mom-who-works-fulltime-outside-the-home and the housewife gigs now, I can easily tell you that there are many ways I think the housewife gig is harder. It can be thankless and tedious. The hours are longer, and there’s no monetary compensation involved. People who’ve never done it can tend to think you sit around watching Netflix and eating bon bons all day on your husband’s dime when it’s actually round the clock work. I’ve been tempted to change my bio to read “chief diaper changer and butt wiper.”

But it can also be a major blessing. As I parent my 2-year-old, there have been many times where I’ve paused to try to remember my strategies for certain things with my older kids only to be hit with the realization that the reason I don’t remember said strategies is because a daycare center was implementing them for me; I didn’t manage my older kids’ dietary schedule throughout the day. I paid someone else to do that for me. It’s a major blessing and a privilege to be afforded the ability to connect with my little one to this degree. I don’t take it for granted.

But what I do hope to communicate, however clumsily, is that while my children are absolutely my magnum opus and the greatest contributions I will ever make to the world, it’s a bit of a challenge for me to feel like my entire identity is reduced to the word “mother'“ because it doesn’t really communicate all the things that make me me, nor does it invite any curiosity about other ways I might be able to be connected to the world in which we live.

Now maybe no one should have their identities reduced to their profession. What you do to earn a living does not necessarily correlate with who you are in your essence or what God hardwired you to accomplish. You wouldn’t necessarily know, for example, that the neighborhood plumber is actually really passionate about caring for the homeless or that he works backbreaking hours doing menial tasks in order to fund his charitable efforts on the side. Still, when my husband says that he manages a security team, that immediately signals to his audience that he might be a good person to invite to any number of events or activities requiring his expertise. And, in fact, that’s how he landed the gig as our church’s security point person.

And it’s this connectedness that I think is really lacking for some of us when we get categorized as housewives. Yes, I want people to know that being a mom is of the utmost importance to me. But I want to also know that I’m wired for justice, that I care passionately about the fair treatment of women, that I’m a writer, that I’m lionhearted and willing to speak up in defense of the underdog, that I, too, have skills to use to benefit the kingdom outside the confines of my own home.

And I think this is a struggle women tend to face more than men. No one rebukes my husband when he identifies himself by his occupations or extrafamilial passions rather than just saying he’s a husband and father.

And maybe there’s a sensitivity here, having grown up in Christian patriarchy, where women’s skills and talents are perpetually marginalized and held up as selfish pursuits that distract from our true purpose. I’ve lost track of the number of times Reformed Christian men have called me a feminist Jezebel for inhabiting space in the public sphere. But I think the Kingdom of God suffers when we sideline half our army and neglect the unique skills and passions that could benefit the world by assigning someone the label of “housewife” without digging any deeper than that.

Dorothy Sayers had some brilliant things to say about the importance of women having livelihoods and meaningful pursuits outside their families. I know there’s some progressive feminist clapback and even sometimes a hostility toward housewives, and that’s certainly not something to which I wish to contribute. But I think we could mitigate some of the animosity by pausing to remember that even women who choose to dedicate their lives to home and hearth are unique individuals outside of this role.

So the next time someone tells you they’re a housewife, I invite you to curiosity. Ask them what else they’re passionate about. Help them be fully known.