When You're Always Looking for A Better Place
I was about three years into marriage, mothering, and homemaking when I first encountered Wendell Berry on the page. My heart burned within me as I read his collection, Bringing it to the Table.
The collection includes essays and excerpts from his fiction which especially excited my imagination.
The main question I had about housewifery was: why does it all matter? What is it for? Is it worthwhile?
The Homemaker is Essential to Society
Berry illustrates in his stories the way the table brings us together. He gave me a vision to aim toward. The labor of the home is not an end in itself, but it is essential to our existence and sustenance.
What fascinates me about our culture is that preparing food in and of itself is not disdained as long as you are not preparing it for your family in the confines of your own home. Think of all the personalities on The Food Network or YouTube with whole shows around making food. One form is considered artistry; the other drudgery. And this—Berry says—is our fundamental problem (or one of them): we despise the home economy when it involves hard work without a paycheck.
The need for food is not something to begrudge; it is actually an avenue for art, beauty, and satisfaction from the fruit of our labors. Financial compensation is not the only measure of value.
Our Hidden Wound Causes Us to Begrudge Physical Labor
Secondly, I had a big attitude problem when I became a homemaker. One day as I was reading a book to my children called Scuffy the Tugboat, I had a revelation. This little tugboat made for the bathtub throughout the story repeated, “I was made for bigger things.” He was not content to be a bathtub toy. He was not content as he moved from a stream, to a river, to a harbor, to the ocean. His refrain remained, “I was made for bigger things.”
In that moment, a flashlight shone on my heart where I repeated that same refrain: I was made for bigger things than washing dishes and cleaning clothes and preparing food.
It turns out Scuffy did not need boundless water in fast-flowing rivers or ocean waves. He needed contentment. As did I.
Around the same time, I read Berry’s essay, “Racism and the Economy.” (Not where you’d expect to get homemaking encouragement!)
He said, “the root [of slavery] is in our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjugation of people—but to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country.”
This passage was the key that unlocked self-understanding. I finally realized why I had such a fundamental grievance against housework.
He said it best when he concluded saying, “It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people’s money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.”
Society prefers to ignore the necessity required for the context of a well-lived life, and so the person who spends their life caring for physical needs. Contrary to popular culture however there is nothing wrong with the work of homemaking. There is something wrong with us when we belittle such labor. Indeed, we have a hidden wound, as Berry famously said.
A portal opened, and I found a pathway to valuing the work of homemaking.
There is No Other Better Place
Lastly, I will end with my most beloved of Berry’s novels, Hannah Coulter. It is remarkable how accurately Wendell Berry—a man—wrote from the feminine perspective so convincingly. His talent shined forth, and I am sure we have his wife, Tanya, to thank as well.
In the story, Hannah Coulter tells her life story. Now an elderly woman looking back over her life, she tells about her childhood, love lost, her marriage to Nathan, their children, and the farm they made together.
Chapter 15 is called A Better Chance, and it has always been a favorite of mine. When I first read the book, I was struggling with contentment. Like a grandmotherly mentor, Hannah spoke to my heart as she shared her own wrestlings with it.
When their children were old enough, Hannah and her husband, Nathan, encouraged them to go to college, to give them “a better chance.” In retrospect, Hannah realized that in sending them away they communicated deficiencies in the life their small town and farm had to offer. She said,
“The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
And so Hannah, and by extension Wendell, taught me how to see, look at my life, take stock of it, and move forward with the right instructions.
The Better Place Isn't Somewhere Else
In a word, Wendell Berry taught me to cultivate contentment after showing me many of the obstacles standing in my way. Like Hannah, I am not all the way capable of so much, but I have the right instructions at least.
I wish I had written a note to him while he was alive. In all likelihood he would have responded—that’s who he was.
Regardless, my life has been profoundly impacted by Wendell Berry’s words. I return to them again and again and again. He continues to challenge me to think little, cultivate the earth under my feet, and live within the bounds of my humanity for the affection of God’s creation.
