Mothers: Work For Your Children

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I am a “stay at home mother.” It now takes four words to define my “job” because so many women, having given birth and given up their children to the various systems of day care and mass education, call themselves mothers. The system assures them that they are mothers. The system assures them that they are, as a matter of fact, great mothers—free from all that boring home-ridden, under-stimulating motherhood stuff. The modern mom is just fine. So are her kids. And her husband. If you need proof, the system will provide it:

Do children in daycare have an edge over their peers? It all depends, according to Judith Katz, Administrator of Minee Subee Early Education & Childcare Centers. She says that a simple daycare’s primary goal may be to keep your child safe, while a “good childcare center is dedicated to helping children prepare for kindergarten – working with that child on colors, shapes, numbers, body parts, and letter recognition.” Katz explains that children enrolled in childcare and early education facilities have the opportunity to learn more about socialization and peer interaction. Children also learn about sharing, manners and even conflict resolution — important life skills that children who stay at home solely with mom or a babysitter simply aren’t exposed to in the same way. . . . Parents who choose to put their child in daycare want the same things as parents who choose to stay at home with their child: a kind, loving, safe environment in which the child will thrive.[1]

Note the use of the term “choose.” Most women don’t choose to leave their children.

“Only 15% of working women with school age children want to work full time, although 75% currently do so.”[2] But, leave them, they do anyway. In the end, they think they have no choice (ah! — that word again).

Why would 60% of mothers think that there is no choice but to let other people raise their children? What could possibly overwhelm every part and parcel of their being, their hormones, their emotions, and their better judgment to make them think that there is no other way? What prevents them from seeing any alternative to what the system is pushing them to do for their family?

They are clearly duped, and that is why I don’t deride them, but they are not really mothers. They have given birth, they have children, but they are not mothers. They do not raise their children, they do not keep their homes, they do not make their family’s food, or organize their family’s world or world-view. They are simply adults who possess the first and last call in how and when to delegate their children to strangers and systems alien to our folk.

There are many theories floating around as to why they can’t live any other way than the way they live now. The big mortgage on the house, the credit cards, the kids in day care, the kids in school, the kids in after-care, the two leased cars, the microwave, the daily fast food, the cost of gas, the cost of dry cleaning, the cost of clothing, the cost of insurance co-pays, the dental bills . . . mom and dad have to both work. It can’t be any other way.

Or so the system would have you believe.

It is a crime against our folk for any of us to be living like this. We all know, we awakened souls, that the family is the core of the folk. We know that when the family core is ruptured . . . the folk as a whole are damaged. (See my article “How Feminism Negates Folkways ^[2].”) A damaged folk is easy to extinguish.

Most people have little idea about how to live outside of the system’s parameters, how to be undamaged. They are dimly aware that something is wrong: they moan about Sunday blues, about the Sunday Crunch, about being too busy, about the state of their health, about the state of their minds, about the state of their kids’ lives, about how they would love to slow down, love to eat better, love to be healthy, love to be happy . . . but, they honestly don’t know how to live any other way. The majority of these misguided folks would love to feel good about being alive, but . . . they don’t know how anyone could. After all, isn’t our world the inheritor of all the best of everything? We won the wars, we own the time saving appliances, and we embrace diversity, feminism, and technology.

This sorry state of existence that they call a life is still being sold to them as the best of all lives possible. Too many people today think that modern life represents the pinnacle of civilization, the reward of democracy, the wonder of modern advances in chemistry, industry, and technology. The fault, they are led to think, must lie with the people who cannot cope, not with the system itself.

The world is swimming in anti-depressants. I doubt any people can really cope with lives lived wholly within the system that is in place these days.

The antidote to all of this is almost too simple. Just stop measuring life with the yardstick of the present system. Discard the current rule, so to speak. The hardest part is the only the initial adjustment (more on achieving that in future essays).

I know what I’m writing about. My family lives in the traditional manner. I have a husband. We have three children. I home-birthed. I home-school. My oldest has her high school diploma at age 15. My middle child is a 13 year old Star Scout (next stop: Life, then Eagle!). My youngest just won a ribbon at the county fair; he’s 11. It’s not his first fair ribbon.

I stay-at-home mom. I make breakfast. I make lunch. I make dinner. I teach various subjects. I oversee various things. I take the kids to and from all sorts of activities/events/going-ons. I have time to knit dog toys for a Girl Scout pet drive. I have time to serve pancake breakfasts with the Boy Scouts. I’m the mom who organizes the scout garage sale, the wreath drive, and the reading merit badge library visits. All important work

And every single portion of that work beats any portion of the time I spent — pre-children — in a “job.” I didn’t have bad jobs, either. I managed divisions of rather large book stores (which is the classic way for a person with a Literature degree to earn her keep), I also free-lanced, which is probably the other classic way to keep earning for a person like me. I was very good at what I spent my days on. But, they were just jobs. J.O.B.S. Nothing more.

The work I do now is vitally important. Crucial, really. I am the mother of a family. I am raising three children. I am householding. I am cooking nutritious food from scratch—much of which comes from our garden, which I have time to tend. My children eat fresh eggs and drink milk from a cow they know the name of. The nutrients that are building their brains give them clear-headed intelligence — we use no ADHD drugs here, no fluoride, no high fructose corn syrup . . . my children’s teeth are strong, their bodies are strong, and their minds are strong. This is very, very important for the good of our future. Most people are — despite the great propaganda that science and agriculture are making our lives better through better food production — malnourished.  Modern agriculture teamed with modern food processing makes little more than dead food, and dead food makes for dim brains.

There is no way a “working” mother can take the time to cook slow food in the old ways (ways that ensure proper food is obtained and that the nutrient content is not erased in the preparing of it for the family). There is no way a “working” mother can take the time to grow a full garden of food, to keep the soil at optimum enrichment so that the food it grows is optimally nutritious, to seek out traditional food sources that she doesn’t grow herself, to prepare everything from scratch . . . including lacto-fermenting, dehydrating, soaking, braising, kneading. Even seemingly simple tasks like collecting seeds properly (an essay in itself) take time that a working mother simply can’t have if she isn’t there on her land, in her house, to take care of these things, one by one by one.

There is no way a “working” mother can fulfill her role in the traditional, eons old, way.

And it shows. Our world is degenerating as families are degenerated.

We’ve lost our knowledge of farming and animal husbandry, and more recently, we’ve lost most of our practical knowledge regarding housekeeping. Housekeeping is no longer considered an art. If we have the money, we outsource it. We earn money so we can buy prepared food and pay someone else to clean our home. The home is little more than a crash pad where we watch TV and a storage unit where we keep the things we buy when we are not working.

The home used to be a place where we made things. We made the things we used, and the things we ate, and we made them with pride. With generations of experience guiding their hands, homesteaders transformed the harvest into usable goods. They could make almost everything they needed. There is power in that, power that we’ve exchanged for convenience.

This exchange is often celebrated as a liberation from drudgery, but art is never drudgery, even if it is hard work. The practice of art is profoundly satisfying, precisely because it is challenging, and when it comes off well, you know you’ve created something of real value. Drudgery is not about hard work, rather, it is a condition of skill-less work. One of the big lies of the last century was that the home arts were drudgery that needed to be abandoned in favor of commerce. We gave them up, just as we ceded farming to factories.[3]

The system would love to have you think mothering is a chump job, that any gibbering idiot could do it, that it requires no skill, no will power, no dedication, and little (very little) education, self-esteem or social value. The system would also love to have you think that if you decide to be a real mother you must stop being the real you that you were going to be.

Ha.

The fact that I’m writing this essay puts paid to the idea that stay at home mothering spells death to individual thought, private time, or real personality. If anything, my detractors think I have too much of these assets.

That said, I highly doubt that any woman who works 9 to 5 at any “paid” job while leaving her children in the care of other adults is experiencing her real self. Face it, like the rest of the working dead, she doesn’t have the luxury for real selfhood. She has a boss, commitments, schedules, commuting, work clothes to wear, and quick meals to throw on her table.

Shuffling the kids off to day care a la Huxley’s Brave New World, mindlessly stuffing nutrient dead food into a microwave and then into the faces of the family, coming home to watch mass media television or take part in mass social media is a chump life. Any gibbering idiot can do it—look around if you don’t believe me. It takes no skill to purchase food from a supermarket, no skill to drive cars to jobs that most people can perform with minimal training (if that), no skill to engage with the most basic aspects of life on terms imposed by a soulless modern system.  And even worse, it takes no will to live, no courage, no power. Instead it takes diminishment, it takes acquiescence, it takes compliance to a force outside of what we know is right.

A folk with no will, a folk who unquestionably accepts influences that do not enhance their life, has nothing left to take away.

“That’s why you’re taught no history,” the Controller was saying. “But now the time has come . . .”    . . .

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them.

“Just try to realize it,” he said, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. “Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.”

That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.

“Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”

They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.

“And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”

They shook their heads.[4]

Women: raise your family, make your food, keep your house and our ways. Men: take care of your family, bring home that bacon, protect your home and our ways. We are the inheritors of so much that is worth preserving — would you throw it away now? After all this time, would your generation be the last to hold living memories of what a folk we were?

They who understand the past may keep the future.

“How pleasant it would be each day to think, today I have done something that will tend to render future generations more happy.”[5]

Notes

1. Sue Douglass Fliess, “Do Daycare Kids Have an Edge? ^[3],” Education.com.

2. Valdas Anelauskas, Discovering America As It Is (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2003), p. 129.

3. Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, The Urban Homestead (Port Townsend, Wa.: Process Media, 2008), p. 162.

4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper & Row: 1965), p. 25.

5. Richard Jefferies, quoted by Henry Williamson in “Autobiography,” in Selections From BUF Quarterly, ed. Dr. E. R. Fields (Marietta, Ga.: The Truth At Last, 1995),  p. 64.