January 18, 2024 / Well-Read Mom / Comments Off on The Thoughtful Home
The Thoughtful Home
by Dia Boyle
Dia Boyle is a wife, freelance speaker and writer from St. Paul, MN.
In Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away, young Tarwater, an orphaned boy who has been raised in a backwoods cabin by his mad moonshine-making great uncle, leaves his home and goes to the city for the first time. Looking around, he observes,
“You have to do something particular here to make them look at you… They ain’t going to look at you just because [you’re here]” (308).
The boy senses what should characterize the home, even Tarwater’s eccentric and impoverished one. In a home one should expect to be looked at, thought about, and cared for, “just because you’re here.”
We all need to be thought about—paid attention to. We need to live in thoughtful homes. Thoughtful is a word with two meanings. It means marked by careful thought or consideration, as in a thoughtful essay. And it means showing consideration for the needs and well-being of others, as in a thoughtful gesture. Both senses of the word describe a good home, and we would do well to consider the essentials of such a thoughtful home.
Of course, a home does not think any more than an essay thinks. A home does not consider the needs of others any more than a gesture does. In each of these cases, the use of the word thoughtful implies an agent, a person who thinks carefully and consequently produces a thoughtful essay; who pays attention to those around him and therefore makes a thoughtful gesture. Likewise, a thoughtful home requires a person who carefully considers the needs and well-being of those who live in the home; who gives careful thought to making a home that can provide for those needs.
A thoughtful home requires a homemaker.
We want to have thoughtful homes; we need to have thoughtful homes. Every human being has needs—fundamental and yet specific to the individual. A toddler’s needs are not identical to a teenager’s; an extrovert’s are not identical to an introvert’s; and one elderly woman’s needs are not identical to her elderly neighbor’s needs.
These needs must be perceived, understood, and met in order for the person to live in accord with human dignity. When someone lives on the street and is without a home, we can see with our own eyes that he is unable to live according to the dignity of his human nature. However, these needs are not limited to our physical needs.
We know that there are many people, young and old, who have more than adequate food, clothing, and shelter, but who do not live in a thoughtful home, a place where their wellbeing is thought about, where they look at you “just because you’re here.” Such people, although not materially deprived, are in a sense ‘homeless’—they do not flourish; they do not live in a way worthy of the dignity of their human nature.
How do we make our own homes thoughtful homes?
How do we ensure that our families live in homes where their needs—physical needs but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs—are observed and attended to?
What does a homemaker need for this work?
Our culture urges us to think immediately of what we can purchase to make this happen. We ‘need’ an updated kitchen, another app on our smartphone, a better homeschool curriculum, a closet organizing system, a Vitamix juicer, or a backyard fire pit. If we think for just a moment, however, about Ma Ingall’s little house in the big woods, we realize that a thoughtful home does not require (which is to say that it could not benefit from) any of these things.
What the homemaker does require, whether she lives in a middle-class home in the Midwest, in an elegant Park Avenue apartment, in a nineteenth-century cabin on the American frontier, or in a grass hut in Africa, is adequate time to carry out this project. Not just barely enough time to do the cooking and the laundry, but time enough to spend with those who live in her home; time enough to be available to them, to pay attention to them, to notice things, to think things over; time enough for making plans and carrying out those plans; and time enough for getting the necessary work done.
Let me offer an example. When my son was little, I noticed that if his father was away from home more than usual or was unusually distracted by work, then my son would start to misbehave. I learned that if I found a way for the two of them to spend time together, the problems would disappear. The next time my husband came home from work, I told him that his son needed a little dad time and suggested that he play Legos with him instead of chatting with me while I made dinner. The problem was small, a solution was easy—but it required time. Time spent with my son to recognize that his behavior had changed. Time spent thinking about what might be going on. Time spent to come up with a solution and implement it. Had I only barely enough time to attend to our home, I might never have noticed the problem—I might have reacted to it with frustration and anger.
How much time is enough?
The answer to this question will vary widely depending on the number and age of those living in the home, the temperament and energy level of the homemaker, the amount of help she has, and so on. Adequate time might be ten hours in a week or eighty. Certainly, much of this necessary attention and thought can happen while the homemaker’s hands are busy with other things: she can pay attention at the dinner table, she can notice things while supervising homework, and she can think things over while driving to work or folding the laundry. A homemaker can do all these things best if her attention is not diverted to her smartphone or dulled by lack of sleep.
Is it not true that we often shortchange the family meal for the sake of outside activities or that we easily exchange the sleep we need in order to be patient with our family’s needs for the sake of meeting a deadline at work? It is a difficult negotiation, but we must arrange our own lives and our family’s lives in such a way that this essential requirement of the thoughtful home, the requirement of time, is given pride of place.
Time is our treasure. We must invest our time in and spend our time on the things that matter most—there is no other way to have a thoughtful home.
“How do we ensure that our families live in homes where their needs— physical needs but also emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs— are observed and attended to?”
A sense of professionalism
In addition to adequate time, the homemaker who wants to have a thoughtful home must bring a sense of professionalism to her work. In other lines of work, we distinguish our professional work from work that is just-a-job. The distinction is one of thoughtful consideration. Just-a-job is work that we do merely for the money or for the sake of getting it done. Our profession, on the other hand, is work that we have trained for, that we care about, and that we make an effort to improve in. Making a thoughtful home must be carried out in a professional way. It requires training (not necessarily formal) where we gain a body of knowledge and skills. It’s a continuing education that requires hours of careful thought and practice.
Like other professional lines of work, the professional homemaker has colleagues: perhaps her mother, her friends, Martha Stewart, or Julia Child. With the help and support of these colleagues, she applies her training, talent, and hard work to a complicated and constantly changing project. On the other hand, however, if the work of creating a home is considered just-a-job, the homemaker will do just enough to get by. The just-a-job homemaker will distract herself from the inherent problems and challenges rather than improve her abilities and seek out solutions. Her home will not be thoughtful and she, along with her family, will suffer from her lack of time, effort, and training.
A thoughtful home must be organized in a way to maximize human contact.
Like our consumer-oriented society, this also goes counter to our cultural ethos. We are encouraged to desire privacy, personal space, individualized services, and independence—to want these things for ourselves and for those we care for. In my desirable neighborhood, the houses were built in the first half of the twentieth century. They are small by middle-class standards with fewer bathrooms and bedrooms, smaller kitchens, and less closet space than the modern family is trained to want and expect. For example, my neighbors, who might only have one or two children, will knock out walls and expand up and out the same houses in which—only a generation or two ago—families raised six or seven children.
It is true that a certain amount of space and privacy is conducive to human dignity. Yet we will do well to organize our homes and the family life therein to minimize isolation and increase human contact. Our efforts to create a thoughtful home are fruitless if those who live under our roof spend their days alone and behind a closed bedroom door where they are absorbed by the private entertainment of their own television, computer, iPod, or phone. We must find ways to draw our family members out of their private spaces and into a shared life of human fellowship.
Our culture is fast losing the practices and routines that for generations fostered this necessary human contact: breakfast together at the start of the day and dinner together at the end of the day, Sunday as a day together unbroken by the demands of work and school, and the common use of the family bathroom, telephone, television, automobile, and computer. A shared television means that entertainment is more likely to be enjoyed with brothers, sisters, and parents; that a conversation must be had about what will be watched; that the taste and maturity of everyone must be accounted for; and that the popcorn bowl must be shared.
A thoughtful home provides an atmosphere that draws people together rather than isolates them. A thoughtful home offers regular and frequent periods of shared family life around which individual schedules and private needs can be arranged.
Clearly, the thoughtful home will not be achieved without hard work, sacrifice, and a willingness to push back against an individualistic and con sumer-oriented society.
Yet we who choose to undertake this project can hope for rich rewards. We need to embrace wholeheartedly the work of caring for those we love“just because you’re here,” paying attention to them and thinking about them, being available to them, and perceiving their needs. By this work, we help form whole and happy people who are capable of living a richly human life. We will find ourselves living among people who know how to give us the attention, care, and love that we, in turn, require. We will be happy to find ourselves living in thoughtful homes.
Want to learn more about fostering a thoughtful home? Check out Well-Read Mom’s interview with Dia Boyle on our Read More Read Well Podcast. Click here to listen.
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like to have us help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along with us. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
