Domestic Development

Sometimes I get a twitch. A need to know I know not what.
Sometimes I take a look at my domestic life and I think could do better and award myself five out of ten.
You see we aren’t born homemakers and our education doesn’t end when we flee the family nest to start lining our own in lavender and love. Cannot end. Mustn’t end. Because there is so much to know. So much that can help us to elevate homemaking to the art we know it can be.
While we may be a genius with a whisk or a whiz with a duster, we could also be learning how to create home-made herbal balms to do battle with hayfever, or teaching ourselves how to pipe the most exquisite of embroidered patterns on to sugar cookies. We could be taking bookkeeping classes that transform our family finances or learning how to take amazing portraits, make the finest, most fragrant of Indian curries or teaching ourselves how to fashion teeny flowers from vintage ribbon.
There is so much we could be learning. So much more we could be filling the empty space we are all too often tempted to fill up admiring other people’s domestic efforts on Pinterest.
We don’t have to serve up the same timetable of meals for the rest of our days.
We don’t have to fill our heads with mindless celebrity gossip or watch other people’s family’s tear their hair out on Jeremy Kyle.
We don’t have to carry on harbouring the belief that crocheting is impossible when across the land swoon-worthy patterns are being followed daily.
We don’t have to simply admire flower arrangements/Kondo worthy storage solutions/homemaking rotas when we could be creating them ourselves.
We don’t have to believe that learning ended when our school days did.
We can learn how. We can teach ourselves. Through the myriad of online courses available or one of the billions of YouTube channels. We can dedicate time in our calendar to domestic development. We can decide that if homemaking is the thing we love best in the world then we can make an effort to be as good at it as we are capable. To learning new skills. Trying. Experimenting. Making a complete hash out of the pattern/recipe but doing it over and over again until we get it right.
You see life feels better when we are still learning. It keeps our minds young and our brains active. And not resting on our domestic laurels means that homemaking becomes a daily challenge: not just the humdrum of the same-old, same-old but something new everyday until we can declare ourselves as accomplished as Martha Stewart.
While routine is all well and utterly scrumptious, elevating that same routine so that year on year it becomes a truer reflection of our authentic selves, enhanced by skills we are proud to have honed and crafted as our own, means that year on year our interest in a life less ordinary at home never wanes for there is always, always, always, always something new to learn.
This then is Domestic Development. No shirkers please.