Getting married, for me, was never with the goal of staying home, raising 2.2 children, and decorating my house with the white picket fence. It just meant I'd get to see my best friend daily and do life with him. It actually used to drive me crazy for Cliff to stumble upon me doing something "homey," like baking bread or attempting to sew a button back on, and hear him call me, in an endearing tone, his "little homemaker." He meant nothing demeaning by it; in fact, he really loved seeing me in moments like that, just as much as he loved seeing me score another book deal or finish dreaming up another website to create.
I, for the record, however, didn't want to be a "homemaker." Homemakers were women who never went to college, or if they did, they had thrown all of that promise and potential for success away to spend time changing diapers and baking cookies and scrapbooking. Homemakers, in my experience, weren't always happy. They could get angry and tired of picking up toys and making dinner, and instead of playing with the kids, they yelled at the kids.
I still remember being on maternity leave, at home with Caleb in the little apartment we lived in off the university campus where I worked, and listening to the stay-at-home mom below us scream at her children - constantly. I never wanted to be like that and vowed during that time that I never would.
Don't get me wrong, changing diapers and baking cookies and scrapbooking are all great things - I've done all of those things, including the scrapbooking, but it was always in the mix of other ambitions and dreams. Eventually I had to give up the scrapbooking because, like a lot of things in my life, it became a challenge to overcome or to find perfection in instead of just something fun to do to relax. But those weren't the only things I wanted to do.
When I met Cliff, my goal was to sing. I'd used all my graduation money to put together a little demo tape, and I'd earned a music scholarship for college. One day, I just knew I would go to Nashville and sing Christian music. But as Cliff and I got more serious, I became disenchanted with the music degree I was studying for. I was sick of and just plain bored with classical music (what all music majors train in), and I started finding opportunities to focus more and more on communications - writing articles, working in radio, dabbling in public relations. Still, my dream was to sing and do concerts.
"You know, if you get married, you're not going to be able to travel and do concerts," my mother told me one day.
I was home from school for the summer, Cliff was away at boot camp, and I was mooning over bridal magazines as I did just about daily.
"Why not?" I asked, my nose turned up at what my mother was suggesting.
"Because you'll have your own family and you'll need to be there for your husband and for your kids, if and when you ever have any," she said. "You're not going to be able to travel everywhere and still have a family."
Looking back, I know my mom had good intentions - maybe she said it to make me think about whether music was really my calling, or maybe she said it to make me think about whether I really loved Cliff enough to give up my music. Regardless, it was the first time I'd ever been forced to face the fact I might actually have to choose between marital bliss and pursuing a dream.
And she wasn't the only one who suggested I couldn't follow a dream and still get married. Later, back at school, after Cliff and I'd announced our engagement, the director of the seven-member student vocal group I sang in stunned me one day when he announced that I wouldn't be allowed to be part of the group once I was married. "You'll need to focus on your marriage, not traveling around with us," he told me (a guy, I might add, who wasn't married). I became angry, both with my mom and with my director, and I remember thinking, Why can't I do both? Particularly with my director, it annoyed me that someone else would decide for me whether I could or couldn't handle following a dream while being a wife. It was almost as if becoming a wife meant giving up any other part of me. But I really begged to disagree. And I was even more determined that it wouldn't happen.
I certainly had no intention of being a wife who stayed at home, whatever that meant.
But God had other plans in mind for me than singing, and through a couple of very specific events, he led me into a writing career, which I immediately took on and ran with, looking for opportunities to advance and find what I interpreted as success.
For years I worked, and I worked hard. I piled on the work and at twenty-six years old, I was working a forty-hour corporate writing job, finishing up my bachelor's degree, and writing my first book after taking two trips to the Middle East. Oh, and when I wasn't trying to save the world, I was a wife and a mom to our two-year-old. Another goal of mine that didn't happen by accident but by choice. A year after we married, I got a bad case of baby fever. I saw babies everywhere. And soon, we decided to have our own. At the time, I thought of having a child and being a parent as a great accomplishment, but it wasn't the only accomplishment I wanted. There were so many other things I wanted to achieve. So I was busy. And I got busier.
Being busy made me feel good. Being busy made me feel important. Back then I said I was just driven - I loved making a difference. Today I would say I had my priorities seriously out of whack. But my patient husband took it all in stride, and at night after Caleb fell asleep, while I worked on a chapter for my book, he would kneel on the floor or sit at the table in our small apartment kitchen, setting up one of the many physics experiments I needed to do for the online physics course I was taking.
Maybe I've mellowed some in my now thirty-something years, but I'm no longer as resistant to the idea of being a homemaker. Now, I actually worry that I've missed out. That I'm behind the learning curve. I mean, there are very few things I cook well. And while I can clean when I put my mind to it, I'm not the neatest housekeeper. And I have no idea how to sew. (I attempted it once, sewing a Bob the Tomato costume for Caleb when he was two, which came out looking like a pretty decent facsimile but would not have won any seamstress awards.) I worry that I have been so swept up in career that I forgot to pay attention to home.
I'd really like to change that.
Read more about Sara's story and how she did change her view of her role as a wife and mom in her book, My So-Called Life as a Proverbs 31 Wife. Copyright © 2011 by Sara Horn. Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon. Used by Permission.