Making a Home Feels Good

Information comes out on the internet. And especially if we like it, and it validates something that we’re feeling we’d swing hard in one direction. And so I see a lot of that around women taking care of themselves and not doing all the things, all the things and not burning out. And I think it’s really good to be aware of those things but I think in an effort to take care of ourselves. Sometimes we drop some of the things that were actually making us feel better. So at this moment, I’m not talking to women who are very pregnant. I’m not talking to someone who’s postpartum. I’m not talking to someone who is in the throes of living under the water with depression or anxiety or grief. Right when we’re under the water, It’s just really hard for us to see things clearly and to problem solve.

So I’m not talking to those moms but a lot of us are not under the water. We might have waves of depression, or waves of anxiety, or waves of grief. But we can come back to calm and see things clearly and problem solves clearly. We may be dealing with a lot, right? You might come to me and tell me Sterling here’s what I’ve got on my plate and I may fully agree with you that that is a lot. But I think a lot of us are shutting down and then not doing some of the homemaking things that make us feel good. Dopamine releasing in your brain makes you feel good. We get dopamine when we pet a really cute animal. We get dopamine and oxytocin when someone hugs us. We get dopamine when we eat sugar. Or watch something entertaining. Dopamine makes us feel good. But we also get dopamine when we complete something; when we check off a box; when we are proud of ourselves. And so some of us kind of embraced that hot mess mom thing, and motherhood is so hard. And particularly in my book, Catholic Mom Calm, a lot of women have reached out to me and said, thank you so much for explaining and validating why modern day parenting is so difficult. Things like the noise and the information overload and the lack of support. And so hear me when I’m still fully acknowledging all of those things. But then we kind of throw our hands up in the air and we’re like, see, I told you, it just is really hard.

But I don’t want us to give up our power to be disempowered. One of the things I think that is so special about women, this feminine genius, this nurturing sense. Is that we are really good at taking care of a space. A home and that doesn’t mean you have to be good at decorating. It doesn’t mean you have to be good at organizing. It’s not a personality type but overall, we are good at taking care of the nest. And when we do it well, It feels good. Just like eating healthy food and moving your body tends to feel good. Taking care of your home also makes you feel good. Now there is a big difference between taking care of your home from a place of guilt and shame and pressure, we don’t want that. We want to take care of your home from a place of this is going to make me feel better. This is what I want to do. This is who I want to be; I’m working on this; I’m learning this; I’m cultivating these skills.

And you get to be whatever kind of homemaker you want to be. So homemaking, I think is about creating a space where people can rest and encounter the Lord and, and be at peace. And there are so many different spaces that can look like that. You can have kind of a, I’ll just call it like a pottery barn space where everything is perfectly tied together and looks great and is tidy. And then you can have a really kind of cozy. Thrifted furniture lived in warm space. There are many different kinds of spaces where people can feel welcome and relaxed. And also your attitude contributes to that. And so I had a friend, and the first time I came over to her house it was just there was just kid stuff everywhere. She clearly did not pick it up for me and I was so impressed by that. Actually, I was so impressed that she had the confidence to invite someone new over to her house and just be like, yeah, this is what it looks like. And it wasn’t dirty. It was just someone who had a lot of kids who lived there.

But she was so calm and she was so present with me and it made me feel welcome and it made me feel relaxed. No. If you sit down and you put your hand on someone’s couch and there’s jelly on the couch, that’s not relaxing. We would say, that made me feel uncomfortable. So there are probably some set of standards that we could agree on but it’s far fewer than you think. Right. It’s not, oh, in order to be relaxed in your home the baseboards need to be cleaned and everything needs to be vacuumed, and mopped and wiped down. I have been in plenty of homes that made me feel welcome and didn’t have those things. And then there’s a totally different list of things that are just for you. How did you like it? What makes you feel calm and relaxed and cozy? What environment leads you to the Lord? I want us to really begin thinking of ourselves as homemakers. And enjoying it and taking pride in it. And it doesn’t mean that we have to make the bed with no wrinkles and tucking the sheets, just write every day. I know moms who do that and they like it. They get dopamine from that. And they liked the way it looked and they have a sense of pride about doing it. But that doesn’t mean if you aren’t into tightened sheets that are tucked in, that you’re not a good homemaker. But just like not moving your body and eating a bunch of food that isn’t good for you. We tend to feel a bit sluggish and our energy is low.

I think there’s an equivalent in our homes when we just kind of phone it in, or we’re not really doing it. And then when we begin to tighten it up and we begin to pay a little bit more attention there we feel better about ourselves. It feels better. And so I want to invite all of you to know that you get to design the homemaking. List of things that are important to you. You don’t have to do what other people do, but I want you to test it out. I want you to try it and see how it feels. To take care of your home with systems or rhythms or food or tidying. How does it feel?

I am constantly surprised at how much I can get done in 15 minutes. You know, let’s say that we put the boys down, I think around 7:30, And by then I’m tired. I don’t want to mop the floors at 7:30, and I don’t. But instead of checking out, I’m reading a book. I’ve been challenging myself on, hey, what can we do for 15 minutes? And I’ll just pick one area and I tidy it or straighten it up or clean it up. And if you do this a few times throughout the day tidy up or a quick thing like you can clean the everything drawer you can reorganize the pantry pretty easily in 15 minutes. I mean, it’s not, we’re pulling everything out and totally rethinking it, but you can move things around. You can wipe down a bathroom. These little snippets of time where you just push yourself. For me, I really like cleaning off the kitchen counter. You know, behind the stove or ready to just kind of dump their stuff for the day. I’m the only one who really cares about that, but it doesn’t take long for me to put things away. And then wipe it down and it’s just clear. And I really enjoy that. And it gives me dopamine and it makes me feel good. And that’s what I’ve been telling myself like, Hey, I know you’re tired. Just 15 minutes and it’s going to make you feel good.

I cleaned our room the other day and even moved things and swept underneath it. And I think that took more, I think that took 30 minutes cause I really cleaned all of it. But it’s still really clean and that was maybe five or six days ago, and it’s easier to keep clean because once you clean in you feel less inclined to throw things around. We have a chair in our room and of course it collects things. And the top of our dresser. And so I’ve been doing it just for me. And I also like creating an environment for my husband and my kids that’s comfortable for them. But I think a lot of these things they would not consciously say were important to them. I don’t think my husband would say, hey Sterling It makes me really happy when our bedroom is clean. But I’m sure that when he comes in at night and it’s tidy, he likes it a little bit better, whether he knows how to articulate that or not, like whether he knows that’s what he’s responding to. I want to invite you to explore embracing your role as a homemaker. Not because anyone’s making you, not because you’re bad, not because your house is filthy, but because it might make you feel better.

And I think it could be pretty small. I don’t think it has to be hours of work. It may, you know, if you do. Three sessions of 15 minutes a day will end up being hours over the week. But I think you can discover the way that you want to be a homemaker and often when I give women permission to do that, they do identify just maybe the top five or 10 things that are important to them and they begin doing it. And then they like themselves better. They feel better. They walk around their house and it makes them smile to see things. The way that they want. And it will be different from what your friend wants. It’s not a moral issue how you choose to organize your pantry. So just like when we don’t eat great food and we don’t move our bodies, we don’t feel well. And then we’ll take all of these symptoms and we lump them together. Like, maybe we say. I’m really stressed out and I have six kids. But then also, if you just ate, like, Cheetos and Dr. Pepper all day, probably that’s also why you don’t feel well.

I think there’s something else happening in our brains when we stop paying attention to our homes. And for most of us, we just never got any training there. We were just kind of thrown into a house. I mean, I was raised by a single mom and we lived in a small apartment. I remember cleaning it sometimes, but certainly not a system and I think she worked so much that when she wasn’t working, she wanted to spend time with my brother and I, which is lovely. And so she didn’t spend a lot of time talking to me about cleaning or cooking. But all of these are learnable skills. And especially if you start small with just the things that bug you and you start working on those things I think you’re going to feel better. Most of us want to feel better. So I’m inviting you to the year of the homemaker. I talked a little bit about that last week’s episode with And I just think it’d be fun for you to get together with a friend and talk about it.

An accountability, buddy. There’s so many books about this. I don’t think you need that though. I think you could just look around your house and say, you know, here are three things that I want to work on. And then I really want you to soak up the dopamine when you do it when you’re done, but then also when you see it every time after that, like when you walk back past your room, you’re like, oh, Oh, kind of makes me happy that it’s clean. You can give yourself a little bit of dopamine that the world is heavy and dark and there’s so much negative stuff everywhere. Let us try to make our homes a place that makes us feel better. That’s what I want to do this year. I want to take the things that we’re doing at home and really just level them up. I want to involve the kids in more things particularly as a way of turning my girls.

I don’t know that I’ve explained a lot of things to them. I’ve taught them how to do individual things, but I want to step back and show them more about what it looks like to be a homemaker and to run a home. And I think that this can help us. Jordan Peterson talks about bringing order to spaces in your home and how really empowering that is and how powerful it is for the culture. And I believe it. And so as women. I think we can set the tone for this. We are the managers of the home. What do you work outside of the home or not? You can still be thinking about it for 15 minutes.

If you’re busy, start with 15 minutes a day. And then push yourself to do two 15 minutes once a day. And just see what happens, just run it as an experiment. And if you still want to check out the Year of Calm, that is still up catholicmomcalm.com/year-of-calm. And then we’re going to be doing homemaking stuff all year. In the Catholic Mom Calm Communities, if you want to join us there you can. Be paired with an account. We’re going to do accountability groups of four, if you want. And we’re just going to be working on all sorts of things but I have a feeling, a lot of us are going to be working on homemaking and systems. All right my friends I’m praying for you. Happy new year. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.