Am I A Failure?
Do you ever need another homemaker to speak truth back to you? Do you ever need someone to remind you that homemaking is 100% routine and 100% flexibility? That it’s okay to function at the baseline for a season? That you’re in a season? That you need to eat if you’re going to feed others? That getting through the day with everyone (people, pets, and livestock) alive is a good day? That pushing may not be wise right now? That it is okay to grieve the loss of what life was like yesterday? That sometimes you need to end the day with a list of what you did get done instead of thinking about what you didn’t get done? That three things a day may be three simple things like one load of wash, one round of dishes, one delivered meal? That you need to ask for help? That you need to remember to be thankful? That you need to go outside?
When you’re in a season of needing other women to talk to you like you’re a child – reassuring, informative, simple, and repetitive – about your work, do you wonder if you really understand your work? If I really grasped these truths deeply and profoundly, wouldn’t I be able to hold onto them?
What about when we have to repeat them to ourselves, like Jill Pole repeating the signs from Aslan: go soft, go slow, don’t get frantic, hang tough, keep your powder dry, cheering strength, merry durability, we do hard things? Are we failures? Does a little bit of doubt creep into our hearts? Shouldn’t we have a good grasp on this now?
I think it’s a reasonable thing to wonder because it has a yes and no answer.
Yes: It is important to test ourselves. If we don’t ask this question, we won’t know if we’re actually taking into our hearts what we say we believe or if we’re just giving it a surface-level acknowledgment. Yes, yes, homemaking is important, we say, while at the same time we never study ourselves in our space, we spend our days dreaming of being away, and we allow bad attitudes to fester and spread. We say we love homemaking and being homemakers, but take the first opportunity to leave that comes along, be that a social life, serving others (it can become an excuse), a much too large cottage business, or even an outside-the-home career.
Moments of crisis are proving grounds. They ask us if we are really here like we say we are. This is true in our churches, marriages, friendships, and homes. It’s easy to be a homemaker when the income is good, the house is pretty, the family is well, and the plants are green! Homemaking in the spring is all affection! Homemaking in the cold dark of winter (or summer or February) is the proving ground of our real love. Homemaking when you or your husband lose your job, when the list of home repairs is long, when the family is chronically sick, when the plants are dead because you can’t even keep an aloe alive is when we have to prove if we really mean what we say. It takes no effort to be present when life is easy. Can we be present when life is hard?
This is when we need others to remind us of truth, but if we don’t wonder what it means about us when we have to be reminded of truth, we’re wasting an opportunity to grow.
No: We are finite women. We carry a lot in our heads and hearts and hands. Single, married, child-full, childless, maids, matrons, and crones, we are not infinite, and we’re not engaged in an easy, mindless job. We are homemakers with strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and lots of demands on all of those. This is the very reason we are part of HearthKeepers. We know that we all need to hear the truth when we’re down in the mud and gunk. We need other women to raise our heads to the sky and see the beauty when all we can see is the dirt.
Excuse my language here, but when the shit hit the fan in early 2026 in my home, I needed all of you to tell me these things. It wasn’t that I didn’t know them. I know them deep in my very soul. But pulling them to the surface and repeating them to myself when my brain was more flatlined with shock than I realized was a lifeline. It gave me room to breathe. It gave me permission to not try to keep my home in the state it was in on January 26. It turned my dismay into another element of my work. I needed all of you to say, “This is who we are, and this is what we do,” because it settled my soul even while my To-Do list exploded and my high-alert-alarm blared for months.
There was one day, in the middle of it all, when I wondered if I was a failure because here I am writing about homemaking, a lover of homemaking, a studier of homemaking, and yet my home and my heart felt out of control. One of y’all, I’m not sure who, had had to remind me of the truth yet again, and I thought, is this a sign that I shouldn’t be doing this? If everyone has to repeat back to me what I’ve honed and grown in myself, have I really believed in homemaking at all? Surely, I should know all this by now, right? Not have to remind myself of it, and have others remind me of it. It was a good moment of self-examination. I had to ask myself if this was unbelief or finiteness.[1]
When I paused to examine myself, I found nothing surprising. But I was still encouraged and grounded. It wasn’t that I believed my home and my training and my study and my self-growth were suddenly fruitless or undone. I know and believe each thing I’ve had to remind myself of and each thing everyone has reminded me of. It was that I needed to face the fact that I’m only one little person grappling with a really huge thing. In fact, to expect myself to not need all of you to speak truth back to me smacks more of pride than anything. What else would I expect? That somehow I’d be able to go through this difficulty without it disrupting my life? My home? My emotions? My thoughts? Who do I think I am? And what a burden to put on myself. Self-examination, done in small pockets, can be fruitful.
All, all this is true, not only of our thought life about homemaking, but about the physical reality when things have gone really, really sideways. Do I still believe home is right and good and healing when great hurt has happened? How about when the injured person comes home and isn’t instantly calm and comforted? Yes, this could be because I failed. I’m sure I did. But it can also not be all about us. It may be that an injury has occurred that we aren’t capable of healing. It may be something that family member or friend has to deal with, and all we can do is provide the soft landing and loving support as they wrestle with it. It may be that we are looking too closely at the situation too soon, and we need to give it a bit more time and space. It is both Yes and No, or at least the Yes and No should be examined, not feared. It can be almost impossible to allow ourselves to feel the honest sting of failure, especially when we’re overwhelmed, strung out, and tense. But we should try. We should take just a moment to glance at the Yes to make sure we’re not just being “fair weather friends” of homemaking, of tending our people, of being parts of our communities. If we are, we can take this opportunity to become more sturdy, grow our fortitude, dig deeper into Merry Durability and Cheering Strength. Homemakers, we don’t run away when hard times come; we deepen our roots.
And, as we constantly reiterate in HearthKeepers, we live in community. I need you and you need me because those moments of what seem like unbearable life upsets aren’t meant to be faced alone. They aren’t moments of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps any more than they’re indications that you should leave. They are times for us to lean on our community. We talk, we reach out, we ask for help. We listen. We remember. This is us lighting the way back home for each other. Sometimes you will be the light, and sometimes you will be the one who needs the light held up high so you can see it.
We are failures, and we will fail. We are finite, and we will be overwhelmed. Neither of those is the end of the story. Both can be helped by reminding ourselves of what is true and speaking truth to one another…over and over and over and over and over.
Thank you to each and every one of you who did this for me, who have done this, and are doing this. Some of you may not even have realized it. You were just here, being a normal member of our little community, but it was a light held up for me to help me home.
[1] How often as mothers do y’all have to ask yourself this? Is this a child being a child or something I need to correct? How often as Christians do we have to ask ourselves if this is sin or finiteness? Unbelief or a need to return to the truth we hold dear? How often does Christ gentle repeat back to us what we already know but need to hear again? Isn’t that what preaching is every week?
If you’d like to join our GroupMe chat, click the image above. We are largely a word-of-mouth community, so if you are enjoying our content, please share our articles and podcast episodes with fellow homemakers-maids, matrons, and crones. We would love to have you join the conversation.
Visit Vulgaris Media or find our book on Amazon.
Thank you for the wonderful editing, Sarah!
