Production vs. Fruitfulness
A while back, the broader homemaking community started talking about production in the home as a way to push back against the consumerism of our Amazon age. I loved it. I loved thinking about what my home was producing and how I could produce more. I loved broadening the definition of what was productive so that production didn’t become some new twisted form of false guilt and frantic living. I loved the way production deepened and broadened both my physical labor and my heart and mind. So I’m very thankful for the concept of production. That should be clear. I’m also ready to go deeper in and higher up. I think I know what that looks like for me, and I’m dragging all of you with me.
Fruitfulness.
I want to change my inner vocabulary from production to fruitfulness.
First, because I have grown weary and wary of job-oriented vocabulary in my home. I don’t even like to call my homemaking my career anymore. It’s not my career. It’s who I am and what I do. I first noticed this when I was looking for a datebook and realized all the feminine datebooks I liked had huge swaths of add-ons that I would never use because they were all geared towards a career woman climbing the corporate ladder. I tried at first to utilize all the goals and self-actualization and dreams and action points, but it became too much. I spent more time filling out my datebook than doing the things that needed doing. And the things I poured onto the page very rarely happened because homemaking is a slow-going endeavor that encompasses all of life and, thus, doesn’t work like managing a business. Shocking. I finally just chucked it because I’m not a career woman. The only ladder I’m climbing is to dust, paint, or hang things. I have also grown weary of our career-only culture, both for men and women. This is not a disagreement with a strong work ethic. Work is good and necessary. But we’ve reduced work to only a career, and that concerns me because it makes all of us so very narrow.
Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad.
The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs.
G. K. Chesterton
Second, with all my being, I wish to exit the chronic-franticness culture. The word “production” has a certain frantic/career air to it. It has a certain weight to it that I’m not sure is healthy in a home, or at least, not for my home anymore. I think there is a time and place for a homemaker to take a season and focus on production. It can tighten things and combat laziness. It has its place. But I don’t think we want to stay there because we can forget that we are homemakers, not business managers. It can reduce our gentleness and softness and our strength because we continue to view ourselves and our homes both from a masculine and career-oriented perspective. Hence, once we get a firm hold on the home not only consuming, but also turning and producing, we can move up to the next level: fruitfulness.
Look at some of the words associated with being fruitful: fertile, prolific, bountiful, plentiful, verdant, abundant, beneficial, growable, gardenable, helpful, nourishable[1], flourishable, harvestable, healthy, and yes, productive.
Be still my earthy, feral, bog-hag heart.
Words associated with production: manufacturing, output, fabrication, construction, distribution, industrialization, management, assembly, yield.
Notice how the production words aren’t living words. They bring to mind factories, offices, metal, trucks, and meetings. Fruitful brings to mind gardens overflowing with vegetables and flowers, children, feasts, community – life! I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather be fruitful than productive.
The benefits of Fruitfulness:
Seasons: Fruitfulness has a garden feel. Gardens are seasonal, and each season is fruitful in a different way. When the garden lies fallow, it is still busy, still working, still being fruitful, just not in the same way it is at the height of harvest. This reminds the homemaker that our lives are filled with different seasons: maid, matron, and crone. And even those three seasons of life have mini seasons built into them, just like how often we look at the agricultural wheel. Life has times of build-up and times of rest, times of plenty and times of want, times of inner focus and outer focus. When we speak of our fruitfulness, we remind ourselves that life changes and each of those changes has different work and different blessings.
Sharing: Fruitfulness has consideration of family and community built in. You only need to plant one or two zucchini plants before you are desperate for anyone to take a zucchini. Fruitfulness implies bounty. Only a miser clutches at her bounty. Bounty is meant to be shared with others. We keep what we need (actually need) and share the rest with others. Fruitfulness reaches out with those extra zucchinis, bakes them into bread to share, uses her abundance, and passes it on. When women are fruitful, we build stronger families and tighter-knit communities. And this fruitfulness isn’t only from our gardens but can be found in any of the domestic arts. Any skill, gift, or blessing you have can be grown and shared with others, even if it is knowledge and not a skill or a thing.
Gentle Strength: Fruitfulness has a sense of gentleness that production doesn’t. When we think of chicken production, we get an image of the big shed filled with thousands of chickens who have never touched grass or seen the sky. They eat and lay, and the minute the laying stops, they die. When we think of fruitful chickens, we think of plump hens out in the sunshine, eating grass and bugs, golden-orange egg yolks, and a patience with the natural order of her yearly cycle between brooding, laying, and molting. Yes, we have to sometimes face them with more of a production mindset because people are more important than chickens, but there is a gentleness to fruitfulness that sees other things the chicken might do beyond laying eggs, like create fantastic compost, help guard the next round of laying hens, or simply provide companionship. Fruitfulness carries a great strength as well. Look at the dandelions growing up through the cracks in the cement. They laugh at man and our attempt to dominate our environment, but they don’t do that by screaming. They do it by beautifully blooming in the cracks. That is fruitfulness. A gentle strength that endures and grows herself and others.
Laying up for Hard Times: Fruitfulness requires use. If you plant flowers, you will use them. You will either use them to delight your view outside or cut them and bring them inside. Either way, the flowers will be used. If you plant a vegetable garden, the same is true. You will eat, preserve, and share. Why? Because this is part of fruitfulness. It is not fruitful if it isn’t used. Part of this use is knowing that seasons come and go, and that means hard times come and go. A fruitful woman will store up for the hard times when times are good. She will put to use all that she can so that the hard times aren’t as hard. For some this is actual cans of food on the shelf, and for others this is a treasure trove of stories to pull from or songs to sing. Sometimes this means savings and retirement plans. Other times it is a rain barrel. A fruitful woman looks at all that is before her and puts it to use. Some of that use will be spent now, but some of it should also be stored up.
Feminine Art: Fruitfulness is a truly feminine art. It is what it means to be a domestic artist. It is what it means to be a woman. It is to take all we have and make it beautiful and bountiful. It is turning money, time, knowledge, and wisdom into nourishment for family and community. We do this without even trying. Turn a young girl loose in Hobby Lobby, I dare you. She will take everything like a crazy magpie and turn it into art, jewelry, decorations, and more, which she will hang haphazardly all over her room and then start giving to others. Turn an adult woman loose in Home Depot, and you will get much the same result. Women naturally take their resources and create beauty with them. Think about the thousands upon thousands of cookbooks written throughout the decades. Women taking flour, sugar, and salt, mixed with what they have on hand, to create cookies, cakes, and pies for those around us. This is what we do, ladies. We are fruitful.
How we think about our work, what words we use in our heads and in our speech, is important. Words have flavor, implications, and feelings. They produce certain flavors, implications, and feelings. This is why writers agonize over words. One wrong word and you can miscommunicate everything. One wrong word and you can alter the atmosphere of a story entirely. If this is true for writers, it is true for our inner monologue and our conversations. We believe in guarding our hearts and gardening them. This is fruitfulness. Shifting our words to something more inspiring and in tune with our nature can change everything around us. It can convict us of places where we’ve been wasteful and selfish. It can open our eyes to places of abundance that we might have overlooked. It can lift our heads on hard days and soothe our souls when all is not well. This is a change I’m making in my own heart and mind. I want to shift my thoughts from a productive home to a fruitful home, from a productive homemaker to a fruitful homemaker, because I believe it will inspire me to tackle things I tend to put aside and see new areas of growth, while keeping me from chronic franticness. I believe it will help me be strong but gentle as well. And I believe it will inspire me to give more to others.
She learned to trade in kindness and discovered the tremendous value in small mercies and selfless giving.
The more she gave, the more she seemed to have.
It was the best sort of magic.
The Ogress and The Orphans by Kim Barnhill
[1] I actually love this in regards to womanhood. Are we nourishable? That implies a willingness to accept nourishment. This flies in the face of doing it all and being it all. We can’t and shouldn’t. We should be people who can accept nourishment from others.
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