Are you struggling as a homemaker or a stay at home mom to really enjoy your role? Do you find yourself easily discouraged or depressed about all that needs to be done? One way to motivate and inspire yourself is to romanticize your life as a homemaker!

Homemaking is hard and there are seasons where it is really really hard like…

• During pregnancy
• Post-partum and the newborn stage of motherhood
• Parenting little ones
• When you have to work outside of the home
• When you or another member of your household is sick
• When you have lost a loved one
• When you are dealing with health issues
• During a move

These are really hard seasons of life, and as a homemaker you are no doubt in one or more of these seasons. 

I have had many seasons of ups and downs in my homemaking journey. It is honestly too easy to be depressed when you think about the workload that rests on your shoulders. Not to mention the chaos that children bring even though you love the little darlings.

There are so many instances that I could tell you about where I set out determined to have a good day, but then…

• I ran a load of laundry not realizing that the kids had thrown a cereal box into the washer and it disintegrated all over everything.
• The kids ran over my foot with their bike
• The toilet flooded the bathroom

You get the picture! No doubt you have your own “lovely adventures” that you could add to the list.

The truth is that it’s too easy to let negative emotions get the better of us. It’s just so easy to choose them even when we know better.

But I’m not here to push you farther down the rabbit hole of negativity. I’m here to encourage you and help you find a bit of joy even in the hard seasons of homemaking.

There is so much to enjoy in life and one thing that has helped me personally in my homemaking journey is to romanticize my life as a homemaker!

What does it mean to romanticize your life?

To romanticize is to “believe that something is better, more interesting, or more exciting than it really is.” (Cambridge Dictionary) In light of that definition, to romanticize your life is to choose to believe that your life is better than what it currently appears to be. 

It is the intentional choice of seeing your life in a lovely light instead of being discouraged about what it feels like or actually looks like. It’s like elevating life to a whole new and wonderful level!

Is romanticizing your life healthy?

Yes, romanticizing your life can be healthy. It can help you stop being discouraged or overwhelmed when things are hard or not going as you expected. 

A bit of romanticizing can help you love where you are at in life and still dream about where you could be without being discontent. It helps you forget about the negative components of life and prepare your heart to live life with a smile no matter what the circumstances.

Too much of this though can be unhealthy and cause discontentment. If you were to embellish your life in your mind to the point where you never had housework and did not have to do the hard work of parenting, for example, this would be romanticizing your life in an unrealistic way and direct your heart towards unhappiness and despair.

As with all things, there is a balance to romanticizing your life. When it is done well, a romanticizing mindset can be a handy tool to pull you out of the dumps and help you be a more virtuous homemaker. 

How to romanticize your life realistically

Let’s talk about how you can do this realistically. Here are 9 ways that you can romanticize your life so that you can flourish even in the hard times!

Look for the beauty in everyday life.

Are there little things that make you smile?

The other day, my two year old had what we have affectionately called a “yogurt beard”. Yogurt was smothered all over her mouth and when she caught my eye, her adorable dimpled grin and scrunched up nose made me almost laugh. 

She was a mess, a mess that I would have to clean up, but seeing that beautiful smile gave me a smile in a moment when I really wanted to be disgruntled.

It is ridiculous and unrealistic, but I often struggle when children cannot eat without spilling food everywhere including their face. It’s one more thing to add to my already loaded plate as a homemaker, but when I focus on that cute little smile and on the fact that she is not going hungry and that she is enjoying her food and her life, that beauty often brings me out of the grumps.

Sometimes beauty finds you like my little girl’s smile found me, but it wouldn’t hurt to seek it out more often. Make it a point to disengage with life for a moment no matter how it’s going and look for something beautiful, something that will make you smile.

Define what you find to be lovely.

Every homemaker has their own preferences, and while there are principles of beauty that are objective (never change), there’s still a part of beauty that is subjective to the individual. As the phrase goes, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.“ 

If you don’t know what you find to be lovely, that’s okay! Discovering this is one of the wonderful adventures of being a stay at home mom. 

It’s easy to fit in a little time to stop and think or google an idea so that you can see a picture, and it doesn’t have to happen in a day. In truth, most of the things that I find to be lovely came to me over time as I was watching a youtube video or daydreaming here and there. 

While I can’t say what you will find to be exceptionally lovely, I can tell you what is lovely to me. Loveliness or everyday beauty to me looks like…

• Ruffles
• Lace
• Fine China-especially red transfer ware
• Floral linens
• White and cream linens
• Decorative books
• Tablecloths and Cloth napkins
• Flowers
• Dresses

These are a few of the tangible things that bring me delight, but what are some things that bring delight to you and your home? What are some things when you see them or think about them that bring a smile to your face?

Surrounding yourself with things that you find lovely will make it even easier to see beauty in the everyday.

Dream.

There was a time in my life that I didn’t know how to dream because I didn’t know what I wanted in life. Life is really really sad if there isn’t something to dream about.

Since then, I have learned so much about myself and homemaking and have all kinds of dreams of what I want to accomplish with my children, in my home, in my online business, gardening, etc. You name it! 

At one point or another, I have stopped and dreamed about what our lives could look like in the future and it motivates me today to learn and grow in my skills as a homemaker and do all that I can so that that dream can come true.

Some specific things I have dreamed about are…

• Designing the interiors of our home – I have fallen in love with the old world/English cottage/Victorian style of decor and I have lots and lots of ideas, but I have no idea what I am doing, lol. There is a lot that goes into designing a room, and I am not prepared to completely commit to any serious project yet. So for now, I stick to dreaming it all up and letting the thoughts roll around until it’s time to act on it.
• Creating a garden – not just a vegetable garden, but maybe one with lots of flowers and hedges and maybe a bench or two. A little bit of beauty in the backyard is what I ‘m going for.
• Creating a handmade home – I’m currently in the middle of learning to sew or make myself every linen object that we need in our home. It’s part of the interior design dream, but also a smaller more tangible dream that I have already started working on. Check out my handmade home category of posts to see what I have done so far! 
• Cooking completely from scratch – I often dream about this when I am putting our meals together. It would be so wonderful (and healthy) to start with nothing but raw unprepared ingredients, learn how to prepare them myself, and feed my family real good food. It will happen someday, I know it! We are taking some steps towards making this dream a reality. It’s a really slow process, but dreaming about it keeps looking forward to that day while still enjoying what we have already accomplished.

Some of these dreams, I have started taking action on already and some won’t be started for many years, but it has taken a lot of dreaming and planning to even get to where I am now and it has been a delightful little adventure even if it has been slow.

One should always have something that they are looking forward to!

Dress up not down.

In today’s world, we are horrible about dressing down for the everyday! It’s hard to take pride or feel like you are doing a lovely job of making a home if you don’t look lovely. 

It didn’t used to be acceptable to not dress well even while at home. Obviously, it was understood that you would dress for whatever work you had to accomplish that day, but isn’t it more delightful to dress up instead of down?!

I am passionate about wearing dresses around the house not because I’m against other types of apparel. I have always just liked dresses. Perhaps this comes from watching too much Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskill growing up, but I absolutely adore dresses!

I love that it is trendy to wear dresses right now, but even if it wasn’t, you would still find me wearing my dresses.

I would love to be in a place where I know how to wear a dress no matter the weather outside or the task I’m working on. Until then though, I’m still making do in the winter months and when I garden and such with whatever I can make work for the occasion.

Somedays, I wear whatever I need to during the day and then try to change and gett a little more dressed up right before my man gets home. It makes it feel like I’m going on a date with him even though we aren’t leaving the house and are probably eating soup or pasta with toddlers. 

Learning to dress up and not down even for the nitty gritty everyday of homemaking puts me in a much more delighted mood and helps me aspire to be a more virtuous homemaker!

Dress for your profession.

We are homemakers. We clean, we dust, scrub floors, wipe spit up off our shoulders, dig in the dirt, and romp around with children. Our clothes get stained really really easy.

I’m loving the old fashioned apron life! Especially because it pairs so well with wearing dresses! 

Aprons are practical and can keep your clothes looking nicer for longer. Some provide extra pockets which are handy for picking up stuff that ended up in the wrong room or carrying around a dusting rag. I have often thought about using them to hold BIble verses that I am trying to memorize so I can just whip it out when I am resting on the cough for a few minutes or nursing my babies. 

They are super practical, but they can be pretty, too! You could buy simple aprons that accent your dresses or if you can’t find what you are looking for, you could always make some. They are super easy and that way you could pick out the exact fabric you want, too! 

Here’s a lovely little post I came across that really fueled my desire to start wearing aprons everyday. 

Pursue virtue.

There is something so lovely about being in the presence of a true lady. Not someone who gives off airs or is super rich necessarily, but a down to earth virtuous woman. 

You can hear kindness in her tone, feel loved by her embrace, see understanding in her eyes. This is the type of homemaker that I dream to be. There is something so lovely about being a lady, but I know I often put the cultivating of my heart and spirit on the back burner while I take care of more pressing matters.

This year I decided that I was going to purposefully pursue virtue because I want to be a lovely person that others enjoy being around and that has a personality that refreshes others. For each quarter of the year, I am focusing on cultivating one virtue. 

I am not able to do a huge study or read a lot on them since I am a busy little homemaker, but I have been amazed at the deep growth when I surrender my heart to God and ask him to teach me that virtue on a day to day basis.

I have memorized some key verse about that virtue and meditate on them throughout the day. Occasionally, I try to stop and think about the areas of my life that I lack that virtue and how I’m going to try to work on it.

It’s a long slow process, but even the few months I have been doing this has been very enriching.

Perhaps that wasn’t at all helpful to you in your own homemaking journey, but what are some ways that you can pursue a good and beautiful spirit?

Set the table.

When I say set the table, I don’t just mean put the plates and silverware on the table. I mean go all out even if you are just eating soup or pasta, some quick meal that you barely had the energy to put together. 

I wish I could remember which old homemaking book I got this from, but I found this idea in a book from the internet archive that I was perusing. It mentioned a housekeeper setting the table before getting started at all with the meal so I tried it. Life changing! 

After I have done the hard work of preparing a meal, it takes everything in me just to sit down and eat the meal I just prepared. I rarely have the energy or the bandwidth to think about preparing the table setting, but if I start with the table while I still have energy before I move off to make the meal, I can just bring the food to the table once its done and we can eat while it’s still warm.

You could set the table any way you like. Have fun with it! I like to use…

• Tablecloths
• Napkins
• My grandma’s silverware
• Nice plastic glasses – Someday, we’ll use actual glass, but we have little kids which is why I’m so glad I found these US Acrylic Tumblers. They are the best of both worlds, practical but look nice!
• Flowers
• Candles – I have used unlit real ones and battery operated ones that flicker for safety reasons around the kids.

Setting the table turns any meal into a feast no matter how frugal you had to be with your food budget. Why not spruce up this thing we do three times a day called eating?!

“People grow refined first in their eating.” ~ The Home Cook Book p. 14, 1882

Cultivate the art of a handmade home.

If you are surrounded by beautiful things you crafted yourself, would you take more pride in your homemaking? 

I recently made curtains for our living room. I couldn’t find some floral ones that I liked or could afford so I ordered some fabric from Hobby Lobby, pulled out my sewing machine, and sewed for 3 days straight.

It was so worth it though!! Without fail every time I look at my creation, I’m inspired to create more and love my home more by creating more things for it!

Creating a handmade home can look however it needs to for you. It is defined by the unique skills and abilities of the homemaker that lives there.

What skills do you have or want to learn so that you can craft a handmade home?

Some skills I have or want to cultivate are…

• Sewing
• Candle Making
• Lace Making
• Crocheting
• Knitting
• DIY Decor

Start old fashioned homemaking.

If you are struggling to love and enjoy being the keeper and maker of a home, start homemaking like homemakers used to before devices or social media. Remove the distractions and embrace the beauty and wisdom of homemaking like women in years gone by.

Old fashioned homemaking is a passion of mine because I am hopelessly old fashioned. I grew up overseas in a third world country and when I came to the states, got married, and started keeping my home, I struggled so hard!!

The breakthrough came when I fell across old fashioned homemaking or homemaking using the wisdom of women from years gone by. This enables you to tap into a wholesome way of living based on wise principles like…

• Cooking from scratch
• Crafting your home with your own two hands
• Growing your own food
• Living slowly

…and much much more! It doesn’t have to look a certain way. You don’t have to do it all.

Be as old fashioned or not as you like. Take what is practical for your life and leave the rest.

That’s the beauty of really leaning into homemaking and the wisdom of homemakers gone by. It’s unique to you and your passions and it’s highly effective in helping you romanticize your life as a homemaker!

Final Thoughts!

Homemaking can be hard. It’s harder in some seasons than others. One way to ease the burden and be a more happy homemaker is to romanticize your life! 

It can help you be joyful and really delight in your role as the keeper of your home. If you are struggling to get out of a rut or simply enjoy your homemaking, I highly encourage you to try romanticizing your life. It’s a game changer!

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