Homemaker

This is something I have been thinking about for a while now.  A few years ago, I read a book called the Feminine Mystique and I felt like many before me that it had something powerful to say.  It told me that women needed a life outside the home, goals and a career, something to achieve other than changing everyone's sheets once a week.  I could see the 'trapped' position that mid-20th-century women were clawing their way out of.  But now there is a new feeling of displacement.

I am a woman in my mid-twenties with a full time job and aspirations for the future, but despite my attempts, I still feel a little lost at homemaking and running a household.  This is not my parent's fault, but rather a generational epidemic.  We are poor time managers, and spend our time off watching hulu, eating out, or doing any other amusement that gets us to the next moment.  Planning?  Baking bread?  Making a weekly menu?  For many of us, those activities sound outdated, but we've also lost the wisdom behind them.

I am not inclined to call homemaking "women's work".  Man or woman, gay or straight, married or single...we all could use a little home time, and homemaking is an art that is disappearing.  The inability to run one's home and household budget is a real obstacle to my generation.  We want so badly to have it all, that we wind up with debt and poorly managed budgets because we never learned that it starts at home.

I was nervous about posting this goal, but now that I have been thinking about it for so long, I think that it is something I can stick with.  I talked earlier about slashing our grocery budget, but I am finding that it is going to involve some real know-how and planning.  So my goal is to take all of you on that journey with me.  Although I don't think I have that many readers today, I know there are many out there, close to me or not, that are struggling to make ends meet, even with college degrees and full-time jobs.  This is a back-to-basics culinary adventure.  This is Martha Stewart on a budget with the wisdom of Mireille Guiliano.

As this is a big undertaking, and I still want to have room on this blog for my family to see my life, I have created a new blog for my "home-making" endeavors.  I tried to come up with a good name for it and the word hearth kept coming to mind.  So I called my new blog "Woman of the Hearth" and because I am a francophile, you can find it at femmedufoyer.blogspot.com.  Right now I am starting with documenting my grocery budget only.  I will post my grocery list and menu for each week.  Eventually I will get into other parts of managing a household and a household budget, but this is a good start.

I don't mean to come across as a know-it-all, although I know sometimes I do.  Hopefully this project will nurture some feedback from family and friends and encourage discussion of that dirty of all dirty words: homemaking.