‍ The only thing that really kept me on the rails was my chickens living by the sun—I need to let them out early in the mornings and lock up behind them in the evenings—and my own chronic fatigue issues. Otherwise, those ten days would have been a much bigger disaster with my husband coming home to a strung-out wife. As single ladies, you don’t want to live a strung-out life. You may not have a husband coming home, but that doesn’t make it wise to live without schedules, rhythms, and routines. You need consistency now, not sometime in the possible future. You need to sleep, work, rest, recreate in a rhythm that works for your physical and mental abilities now, not sometime down the road.

The struggle you face, single homemakers, is buying in. You have to buy in that beauty, coziness, and order are important. They’re not some far-off thing you’ll do when God blesses you with a family. They’re something you need to do right now. Nourish yourself so you can nourish others! Build a home now so that you can welcome people in permanently or just for the evening. This space that you own or rent is yours to play with, and by playing with it, you can learn how to help the homemakers around you. If you have practiced creating beauty, you can join the conversation about how to decorate. If you have practiced making a space cozy, you can help others make their space cozy. If you have created order, you can help others be organized. Doing these things in your home for yourself will help you be a sturdier woman. Beauty, coziness, and order are a calm, albeit finite, refuge from the Lord. Don’t neglect them just because it’s only you.

When you’re home alone, it’s easy to ask yourself, or feel the discouraging question of, “What is even the point?” No one is there to care if you eat cold pizza or that whole bag of tortilla chips, or if you pour that extra glass of wine, or if you even made your bed. It’s easy to become disenchanted with homemaking when you’re only expressing self-love, not husband-love, or children-love with your work. I get it. I 100% get it. And I’m here to tell you that the domestic arts and all they entail are important.  

All the media and modern myths you imbibe act as if feminism is an accepted truth filled with good, as the above quote says. It’s the modern philosophy we aren’t supposed to question. You will have to do the hard hard work of digging it out of your own heart, because believe me, it’s there.