Feeling Inadequate as a Homemaker

Have you ever felt a pit in your stomach thinking about how you’re not showing up the way you want to be at home? As women, we’re expected to be and do so many things that often we need to compromise in one or more areas of our lives. For me, and for many other women I know, the area of compromise has been our homes - we’re not cooking all our meals from scratch, we haven’t deep cleaned in a few months, our closets are bursting at the seems because we haven’t taken the time to organize them, and we still haven’t taken the time to decorate like we always said we wanted to. On top of all that, our families feel like they haven’t spent quality time with us - I mean true, fully present, quality time where we give them our undivided attention. 

Isn’t it amazing that we can find other things to prioritize over this? I mean when you really look at your life - really zoom out and look from a third person’s perspective - is what your prioritizing more important than making your house feel like home? It sounds so trivial, but I believe that this is the most common source of our unhappiness as women - the constant stress and guilt of not taking care of our homes, and thereby our families, the way we want to. 

The good news in all of this is that the solution is easy - start prioritizing your home. Of course, putting that into action might not feel so easy, but that’s only because we’ve started conditioning ourselves to believe other “priorities” are more important than our homes. So, to make it feel easy, you need to work on understanding why your home should feel like the most important thing in your life. In case it wasn’t already clear, I consider “home” to include our families, houses, property, and daily means of life (i.e., cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc.). 

I urge you to take some time today to list out everything you’ve been prioritizing in order of highest to lowest. If your home isn’t at the top of the list, I urge you to evaluate how you’ve been taking care of your home and how you want to be better. Then simply rewrite your priority list putting your home, including what you need to do to show up better) at the top of your list. Now anytime something new comes up or when you’re making your daily agenda, ensure you stick to keeping your home as your top priority. This is something I’ve done personally, and over time, I found all the small changes I made by doing this exercise started adding up to where I started feeling proud of how I was showing up at home. I wish the same thing for you.