Thanks to my burning desire to be a homesteader, despite my lack of green thumb for anything but medicinal herbs, I follow a fair amount of homesteading ladies on Instagram.

My feed now mostly consists of homestead videos, the ties between neuroscience and what Jesus taught, fun facts about Catholic saints, simple living inspo and the occasional AI cat video slop.

I love it.

What I don’t love, though, is how much of the content centered around homemaking (cooking, cleaning) had me feeling like I was somehow doing it all wrong and that maybe there was something wrong with me because I don’t have an organized home management system that I follow religiously.

Was I *gasp* just a lazy homemaker?

(Lazy, like rest, is one of the only four letter words I find offensive. I’m an Enneagram 3, what can I say?)

It took me a while to figure out something was off with it - mostly after I tried to put a lot of this stuff into practice and got really frustrated.

Here’s what I eventually realized, after one particular attempt to systematize something that ended in a lot of swearing:

The problem I kept running into with my attempts to be like the Insta moms (my first mistake, TBH) is that I don’t do everything for my family.

We also value creative projects at home more than outside extracurricular activities so we are home most nights of the week, thus eliminating the need for high levels of planning and efficiency for busy nights.

(Although this priority has forced me to get okay with ongoing creative projects at the various craft stations around the house instead of keeping everything perfectly clean and clear all the time.)

Since my kids are no longer small, they don’t need nearly as much hands-on help from me. However, even when they did, my focus was not on being as organized as possible to do it all.

It was on equipping them with the skills they needed to confidently do it themselves.

I focused on teaching them how to cook and bake, how to clean up after themselves, how to do their own laundry, how to fix things, how to get creative with what they had instead of running to the store, how to look up things they needed to know.

They are my adolescent, foul-mouthed monks (that’s my fault, mostly).

I learned early on that one of the biggest obstacles that stood in the way of them being able to do that, was too much stuff.

They struggled to keep their rooms clean because they were overwhelmed with all the toys and clothes.

When we did a major decluttering and got rid of most of our possessions (my husband was on board … mostly), it was suddenly easier for my kids to clean up after themselves.

I went from being an overwhelmed stay-at-home mom who could never get on top of the mess, to having so much ease with keeping things clean because only the things that mattered stayed and everything had its place, so putting it away was easy.

Because I’ve been inadvertently living like a monk for nearly two decades, with the goal of owning only the essentials for what I value most (I traded in minimalism for essentialism somewhere along the way), I don’t have a lot of stuff to take care of.

So I don’t really need a system if I’m only washing clothes when our (small) basket gets full.

Because there’s so little, putting it away immediately is easy - it was a habit I intentionally developed.

And since my kids do their own laundry, I just wash mine and my husband’s stuff (or he does - whoever gets to it first).

I discovered many years ago that I would often get annoyed at myself because the meal I had planned just didn’t sound good the night of. I’m particular. *shrug*

Instead, I follow a very loose weekly meal schedule and love potato night because my youngest son always has an idea and we roll with it and he makes dinner with me.

This connection and collaboration is far more important to me than a streamlined menu prepared weeks in advance.

We sweep as needed, which is often because it’s so dusty where we live. And dogs. The kitchen gets cleaned every night before bed. The living room is tidied then, too.

And if I do feel the need to deep clean something, like at the end of last year when I was hit with this urge to clean out every space that I had ignored over the years, I was able to pick one or two things to address in a day because I have the free time to do that.

I’m not saying this as a flex, because, really, all I did was get rid of a lot of stuff and disciplined myself to spend my time more intentionally.

Anyone can do that.

It’s more of a reminder to myself that I’ve been doing things differently for a long time and the initial effort of getting rid of stuff and learning to make do and build new habits and teaching my kids even when it was a really big pain has paid off.

(Also, that comparing myself to others, especially on social media, pretty much guarantees frustration.)

Because, as God has reminded me in prayer, He didn’t call me home to be a glorified housekeeper and personal chef. He called me home so that I could focus on the things that matter most:

So these days, I feel less like an overwhelmed housewife and more like a lady of leisure.

Except, you know, more monk-like.

Does that make me lazy? Hmmm.