Tag Archives: ranch wife

“Just a Wife”

Posted on by under country life, Writing

This has been heavy on my heart for a long time. A persistent conversation in my head. I’ve had so many one sided debates, hashing this out. I’ve written about it a little, here and there, but I can’t ever seem to find the words, or to feel that I have cohesively said my say. I have spent a lot of time in prayer and reflection on this topic. It saddens me. It confuses me. It brings a lump to my throat sometimes, and leaves little knots in my stomach.

Other times, it excites me, especially when I see the Biblical pattern for marriage so clearly and beautifully defined. And it never ceases to amaze me. How, in approximately 50 years, have women let themselves be convinced that being a wife and a homemaker is a lesser occupation than any other occupation? What used to be a woman’s goal and role in society, one that was viewed with pride, was the role of being a homemaker – of being a help to her husband, of cultivating skills that led to a beautiful home and nourishing meals and a contented life.

How did we let this go? And not just let it go, but turn on it so negatively?

Culturally, we have spent a lot of air time trying to prove that women can do everything men can do, fighting against nature to force women into a traditional workplace environment. But the irony is that women in general are so wired to be invested within their homes and families, the only way we’ve accomplished this culturally is by stripping the beauty and meaning from work within the home, convincing women that it is degrading and unworthy to be what women have been for hundreds of years.

And, frankly, I’m sick of sitting by, watching and listening and not saying anything as the role of the wife within the home is demeaned.

Because this topic touches me. It moves me. It weighs on me.

We have fielded so many questions about “whether we’re working,” and have smiled in response to the skeptical looks when we say we gave up a career for marriage. We have shed private tears because of the pressure to do what society wants versus what God wants, the pressure to do that which goes entirely against our nature and good desires, versus the desires God has put on our hearts. We have hoped for understanding from others. We have tried to defend ourselves and validate our work.

There are many women who have been speaking up with louder and sweeter voices lately about being stay-at-home mothers, but there aren’t a lot of women who speak up about being homemakers. Because sometimes the family-growing is delayed. But that doesn’t take away from the beauty and the need of the homemaking wife.

My husband and I were at a supper recently, and a sweet Christian woman we know but haven’t seen in awhile asked if I was still with the fire department and working as a paramedic, to which I gladly replied that I was not. Her response: “So, you’re just…a wife?” I was surprised, and I wasn’t. And then I was a little indignant. And then a little sad.

My initial response was to want to justify myself. To tell her how busy I am. How glad I am to be doing what I’m doing. But I don’t need to justify myself. Fifty years ago, the surprising thing was for a woman to leave her home to work. Now, the surprising thing is for a woman to want to build a home and work within her home.

How fast things changed.

“No!” I wanted to say. “I’m not ‘just a wife!’ I am a homemaker.”

A keeper of the home.

A domestic engineer.

A homemaking professional.

I’m a professional cleaner, and launderer, and cook. A home decorator. A hostess.

I care for my husband.

I am a homemaker.

If it is legitimate to dream of owning one’s own cleaning business, taking care of patients in a hospital, catering meals, then it is legitimate to have a homemaking dream. It is legitimate for a woman to want her best energy to go towards the building of a home and serving of a husband, rather than doing those things with what’s left of her energy after she gave the best of it to someone else.

I’m there when he needs my help with various projects. Whether that is working cows, fixing fence, taking a vehicle to the shop if we couldn’t fix it ourselves, re-roofing our house, re-siding our house, cooking meals, helping neighbors, and my list could go on.

I garden, and can, and bake, and sew, and sell eggs, and bring in side incomes with my writing, photography, and piano lessons.

And I am not unique. Maybe unseen, but there are many, many women like myself. Maybe we don’t all look the same, or do all the same things. But I’m certainly not unique.

I’m a wife. I’m not “just” anything.

How fast we have let ourselves get conned into thinking of being a wife as being “just” anything! How many women over the centuries have come alongside their husbands performing tasks similar or identical to the tasks I listed above? The homemaking idea isn’t a new idea. The help-meet wife isn’t a new idea. The husband and wife partnering in the building of a life isn’t new. What is new is taking the wife outside the home, telling her that the meeting of her potential will only happen outside her home, teaching her that her work within the home is lesser and illegitimate and isn’t really work, and that she is better off giving her best energy to someone else. And it is women who have done this to women.

Yes, sometimes necessity does dictate that a wife work outside the home to provide an income. Of course I understand that, and that’s absolutely not what I’m talking about in this article! I’m talking about how we as women have allowed this beautiful work to be demeaned, relegated to the inconvenience of what can be accomplished on a Saturday morning before the real weekend begins. We have allowed ourselves to think of being a housewife as a drudgery, as a snuffing out of our “potential,” and don’t even let me get started on the pet peeve of “potential!”

I look at the book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible, and I see how God created Adam first, and then Eve, “because there wasn’t a helper suitable to Adam.” Woman’s role from the beginning was to be the role of the helper! I find this inspiring. Adam needed someone to help him accomplish the work God had given him to do. So God gave him a wife. That is amazing. Eve’s role was to help facilitate Adam’s work. To be the support person. To come alongside him and assist in the ways that only a wife can assist. And I don’t know how we have lost the beauty of that! It isn’t lesser work. It is just different.

When you’re a homemaker, when you’re a wife, the work doesn’t stop for the weekends. You see the floors that need to be swept and mopped and the shelves that need dusting and the carpets that need vacuuming, the windows that need shined. You see the laundry to wash and fold and put away, the clothes to mend, the sinks that need to be wiped down, the cabinets that need organized. You see the bread to bake and the pantry items to be restocked and the meals to cook.

It isn’t an inconvenience that should be relegated to “when you have time”, but a beautiful pursuit worthy of pursuing.

Some women see the work of a homemaker and they see tedium. But how many women have jobs outside the home that are amazingly exciting day in and day out? Every single job I have had (I have worked retail, in a greenhouse, for a rancher, as a piano teacher, as a music teacher in a classroom, as a firefighter-paramedic, as a secretary, as a medical scribe), EVERY SINGLE JOB had boring days, days that didn’t stretch me or challenge me. So why do we look at homemaking with a special kind of scrutiny, as if homemaking is a problem because it isn’t exciting every day?

Some will speak of being a wife at home as “not working.” Yet, so many of the jobs wonderfully bound up in the role of being a homemaking wife are jobs that are hired out regularly. Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, caring for the sick, and so much more are jobs that are considered legitimate if you’re paying someone to do them or being paid to do them, but they aren’t considered legitimate if you do all of them within the context of your home! How strange.

Women will look disapprovingly on the wife who chooses to joyfully submit herself to her husband and to serve her husband (as all Christians are called to serve one another!), but will willingly go submit themselves to their male bosses in a workplace environment. How is it servitude to submit to one’s own husband, but it isn’t servitude to submit to one’s male bosses?

There is another confusing double-mindedness in the attitude towards being a homemaking wife that I have observed. On the one hand, women will speak of it as if it is “patriarchal,” demeaning, snuffing out women’s true potential, practically slavery. But then on the other hand, women will act as if it a luxury only the privileged can afford. Pardon my bluntness, but it can’t be both. It could be demeaning, or it could be a luxury, but it cannot be both at the same time.

If you really think being a homemaking wife is demeaning, fine, defend that position. But it can’t then also be a luxury you’re unable to afford. If you think it is a luxury you are unable to afford, I’d challenge you to not be able to find a number of optional expenses that could be cut from the monthly budget if you really wanted to be a homemaking wife.

Life is about more than excitement. It is about more than “meeting your potential.” It is about more than “fun” or pleasure or enjoyment. Actually, it isn’t about those things at all. It is about God, and about us glorifying Him in what we do, and in what He puts before us to do!

Maybe you as a wife as being called to a profession outside your home. That is fine! Only you can know that, and this article is not a condemnation of working outside the home, but rather a condemnation of the attitude that there is something innately inferior to the work of a wife. But if you are a wife and a mother, I promise you that He isn’t calling you to neglect your duties at home. Because all of us have duties at home, male or female, and there is a clear need to recognize the triage of responsibility within our lives. God, family, work, in that order, or your life will be a mess. Too many people, men and women, get that order wrong, and if work comes before family it is so easy to say that the pursuit of work is to meet the needs of the family, but if your family is suffering, if your relationships within your family are suffering, check yourself. Are you trying to meet the needs of your family, or are you trying to meet your perceived needs at the expense of your family’s needs?

But maybe He is calling you to a life of service within your home and to your husband with the beautiful mundanity of day-to-day life. And the amazing thing is that a life of service inside the home stretches into your community, if you let it, into your church and your extended family, in ways that a cog-in-the-wheel job does not.

As a wife, I am not just a cog in a wheel. Every single other job I have ever had, I was a cog in the wheel. Because that is what it means to work outside the home, and no, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. There is always (always!) someone else to replace you and the work you are doing. Period. It doesn’t matter how specialized you are, or how important you feel your job is in the company for which you are working. There is always (always!) someone else who can be trained to do what you do, can be hired when you leave, and there is always someone who can out-perform you.

But as a wife? There isn’t someone to replace me. There isn’t someone else who can do what I do within my home. There isn’t someone else who can bring the love and peace and beauty into our home that I can bring into our home. There isn’t someone else to be there for my husband when he needs help with a task or encouragement or someone to laugh with.

So no, I’m not “just a wife.” I’m a wife.

Soaking it all in

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, gardening, gratitude, Ordinary Joys, Photography, the homestead, Writing

I woke up last night to the lullaby of rain on the roof. Gentle rain. Peaceful rain. No hail, no devastating winds. Just music on the roof. We woke to 2 inches in the rain gauge and another inch has fallen since. It it one of those turning-inward kinds of days, where outside chores are accomplished as quickly as possible, and the oven and stove and dehydrator all warm the house and fill it with the tastes and smells of the season.

But fall really is less of a season and more of a sense, or an over-abundance of the senses. It is the time of gathering in, of putting up, of savoring and preserving.

The color palate shifts, in one last glorious display before the long winter sleep, as the last of the flowers send up their leaves and open their buds, and the trees, which in summer are a wonderful backdrop of green, burst into the most vivid of colors in a center-stage kind of a way. Living right inside the treeline of what becomes the Black Hills National Forest a little further west, a ponderosa pine forest, the hardwoods hide until the fall, at which point they come out of hiding in flamboyant style.

The last of the harvest is trickling in – the last of the fruit tasted sun-warm off the vine, the last of the shaking of the branches, the last eaten while perched in the branches to reach just one more. But even when the last of the harvest has trickled in, the work still isn’t done, and it continues in a pleasant flurry. The whirr of the dehydrator, the bubbling of the waterbath canner, the tastes and aromas of the summer, preserved for the winter. Every countertop surface is a chaos of things preserved and things to be preserved – The jams and jellies from the abundance of wild fruit, summertime salsas from the garden, enough to last us through next summer, bags and bags of dehydrated apples and zucchini, and jars of glassed eggs to get us through the winter slump. It is a delectable time of the year!

Flowers I thought wouldn’t bloom after the August hailstorm wiped out the gardens have flourished in the interim. One last bouquet was hastily cut last night, on the eve of what could still turn into our first winter storm if the temps drop tonight. Herbs were gathered in quickly – mint and thyme and lavender and dill – and are bundled neatly to dry.

But the savor of the season is mixed with the sweetness of routine – Baskets of eggs fresh from the coop, loaves of fresh bread, still warm.

Daily walks in the freshness of autumn, with a passel of dogs.

The company of a good pup.

Kittens in the barn, shades of cinnamon and the one little white one.

The view between a horse’s ears.

A certain pair of eyes in a sun-browned face.

Quiet evenings.

Beautiful sunrises.

Winter will be here before we know it. It is storing up the joy of times like this that keep the winter blues at bay. So I’m just listening to the whisper of the rain on the roof, and soaking it all in.

Ranch Wife Musings | When Summer’s Gone

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, gardening, gratitude, the homestead

The first day of fall came and went a few days ago, with a flurry of exciting activity, selling yearlings and enjoying the sweet coolness of the beginning of a new season. A lot of people brace for the end of the summer. I suppose I kind of understand it. I guess I do too, a little. Not every summer, but summers like this one. The warmth, the rainstorms that have kept us green, the ease of accomplishing basic tasks, the colors and sights and sounds and tastes of summertime. The fruitfulness.

I have enjoyed (almost) the last of the flowers of my hail-wrecked garden – To my delight, a number of my plants bloomed again, and I was able to cut yet another bouquet for the kitchen. There is something about fresh-cut flowers that touches my little soul and delights the eyes, and when I’ve grown them myself, cared for them and cultivated them, it is an even keener enjoyment.

The garden is slowly slowing down, as the fruit harvest is in full swing. This is where the fun really is…Because now the summer can wind itself away, and winter can wind itself up, and we’ll still be tasting the fruit of summertime. The early summer fruits like chokecherries prep us for the pouring-in of everything in the fall.

Salsa, and basil, dried apples and the abundance of apples that will be frozen for pies are just some of the evidence of the wonderful bounty of this year! Days have been filled with picking and washing and processing gallons upon gallons of fruit, hawthorn berries and plums and apples, into things we will enjoy for months and potentially years – butters and jams and juices and fruit for pies. A gallon jar of apple scrap vinegar is brewing on the counter, and I have finally started waterglassing eggs from the summer abundance, which will hopefully allow me to continue to fill customer orders with fresh eggs over the slump of the winter, and Brad and I can eat and use the glassed eggs.

Winter doesn’t seem as long, when you can continue to enjoy the summer, even after it is gone.

Ranch Wife Musings | When the Cows Come Home

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life

Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle, September 13, 2023

Down in the yard below the house, mama cows with their hale and hearty calves come in to water at the tank in the horse corral. Some do the cow version of a sneak, some run like they’ve got someplace to be, and some chit-chat as they mosey in. It is a pleasant sight, and one we haven’t seen for months. It signals a change.

The springtime branding season closes with cows and calves getting moved into their summer pastures – a bittersweet event but rather a relief to have them out from underfoot. They become obnoxiously like oversized pets, hanging around the yard all calving season and getting into things in significant and irritating ways. They spend the summer dispersed in the pastures farthest away from home, on the periphery of the ranch, or hauled to more remote leases as many ranchers do. The reasonably self-sufficient critters spend the summer eating and fattening, nursing a calf and growing another, with pretty minimal human contact, if they behave themselves, which inevitably they don’t.

Summertime is a constant flurry of activity—by turns exciting, fun, tiresome, defeating, delightful, and harrowing—something always happening, something always needing attention, whether it is the constant need to be flowing water to something somewhere, animal or plant, especially in drier parts of the summer, or the constant, endless tasks around the house and yard, or the constant harvesting from the garden, or working on weeds in the pastures, or cleaning up after a destructive storm. Work ends for the day notwhen there isn’t more work to do, but when you just have to be done. Then there’s the constant cropping up of half days spent fixing problems cows created. They create their share.

Gathering up animals that took a social day with the neighbor’s cows, for instance, or gathering up a neighbor’s animal that took a social day with ours, haphazardly steals anywhere from a few hours to a half day here and there. Working through a remote herd to find the handful that are sick and doctoring them in their summer pastures can easily become a half or a full day of work, if not several. Even regular water checks and patching holes in the fence take up a surprising amount of time. Then there are the bursts of neighborly days helping each other get done the necessary and larger tasks, trailing whole herds of cows in from their summer pastures, rounding them up on horseback and bringing them down to the corrals to vaccinate calves, treat everything for flies, and doctor any sick animals.

But all that shifts at the end of the summer, when the cows are brought home for good.

Summer has been wrapping itself up over the last few weeks, and we’ve had our first truly cool nights of the season, when temps have dipped down into blanket-worthy digits. We’ve been a mere handful of degrees away from a frost out here by Hermosa, and I can see breath on our early morning starts. Fruit is ripening everywhere, and the harvest is getting put up, evidenced by the gleaming jars on the countertops and bags of frozen produce in the freezer. One more time mowing the lawn and that’ll do it for the rest of the year.

We need the seasons. We need the shifting of the weather, the changes in the temperatures, the change in the work, the traditions and customs that come, each in its own time. We need the fire and flurry of summer, just like we need the chill and sleep of winter. We need the waking of springtime, just like we need the slowing down of autumn. Each season brings its own challenges and graces, as the year cycles through periods of renewal, of change, of struggle, of ease. The fiery heat to remind us of the beauty of the snow, and the bitter cold to make us long for the heat. The dry months to make us appreciate the rain. Relentless sun to cause us to enjoy the clouds. Bare trees of winter to make us dream of spring. The shadows have been lengthening out with that strange slant of the light that means chilly mornings, cozy evenings, and fingers warming around mugs of something hot. The Big Dipper has been righted in the northwestern sky, no longer pouring out constantly on a thirsty world. Soon Orion will greet us from his place above the eastern horizon in the later evening. There is that spice in the air, that unmistakable taste of fall. And down at the water tank, cows and their calves are coming in to drink, sleek with a layer of summer fat under their glossy black hides. Summer is coming to an end when the cows are coming home.

Plums

Posted on by under country life, the homestead

Not every year is a good plum year, so I am delighted to say we went a little wild with the plums the last few weeks…I wouldn’t be surprised if we were pushing twenty gallons of plums picked…easily fifteen.

A thicket in the hayfield that doesn’t generally produce produced like crazy, and we also had access to a beautiful plum tree on Hart Ranch that apparently was always thought to be a cherry tree but isn’t. It produced the most delicious plums I’ve ever had.

We now have plums in the freezer for pies and such, canned pie filling, plum butter, plum jam, and (today’s project) three gallons of juice, for kombucha making and for drinking. It is reminiscent of grapefruit juice and is great hot! I’m thinking hot cider, but plum juice…

Wild fruit and thunderstorms

Posted on by under Agriculture and Ranching, country life, the homestead

Brad was up north in the hayfield starting to move hay into the stackyard, and called me to let me know that the plum thickets in the hayfield were full of ripe fruit! I loaded up the fourwheeler with the three dogs and buckets for picking and up we buzzed, like a little mobile circus.

It turns out what Brad was seeing were actually hawthorns, beautiful, crimson berries in heavy clusters, but the plums were ripe as well, so we picked both until a thunderstorm shut us down. They were the best wild plums I have ever tasted! I’ll be going back for more.

We got home to no power, so it’ll be a cozy evening cuddled up on the sofa with my husband, watching the lightning and reading to the light of the oil lamps. “No Life for a Lady,” by Agnes Morley Cleaveland will be good company tonight.