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  For many of us, those activities sound outdated, but we've also lost the wisdom behind them.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.

New Old Budget

Ok people...here's the skinny.  I just got a new job.  Well, a new old job.  You see the baby-boomer super rats that make (are still making) horrible decisions about my life have created an environment where a college graduate of mathematics with a service-industry resume gets sucked back into the service industry to avoid starvation.  I don't have the bank account to wait for companies to tell me they are liquidating the job I applied for before I get an interview.  Yeah, that has happened more than once.

Sob story aside, I am really stoked on my new job.  However, it pays the same as the job I had pre-college degree only now I have post-college debt.  Bummer.

I have a plan though!  One that I can't fully test until October (due to the most amazing event of my life happening Sept 15) but I am excited to see how it goes.  The BIG PLAN is this: we have allowed for a $500 grocery budget each month in the past.  Food's expensive!  Plus, with keeping the budget big, I got to make whatever I wanted and we ate out less.  In theory...we still max out our eating out budget every month.  So I am going to try out a $200 monthly grocery budget.  It would mean some serious planning, knowing what's on sale and in season, and possibly turning into vegetarians at home.  I want to keep the eating out budget the same and it will seem like even more of a treat to go out.

Reality has hit and I am not the bigshot I thought I was...yet.  And I definitely don't have the bigshot budget I thought I would have.  But we're so happy and that's all that counts.  An extra $300 a month would go SO far.  I'll keep you posted on how we do and if I find any tips and tricks I'll pass them along!