Reflecting on “Grandma”
Today is an anniversary of sorts for My Grandma Was Green. I have been writing this blog for exactly three months and have managed to see my way through twelve Grandma Challenges.
It is time for me to pause.
The chair in the picture is my favorite reading chair. It is tucked into a corner in my living room next to a table with a lamp. I love to sit in this chair at night when the house is quiet and my kids are in bed. It is a precious moment of the day when I can read, reflect and rest.
I have not been able to sit in my favorite chair nearly as much since starting My Grandma Was Green. I am okay with that since I knew this would be a season of action. However, I do feel the need to take a little break in order to rest, regroup and reflect on what I have learned so far.
Stay tuned for for my next post on Tuesday, October 7. I will share some of my reflections and return with a new set of Grandma Challenges as well as some updates on the ones I have already implemented.
In the meantime, please continue to collect your best “grandma” stories and dig around in the archives if you are new to my site. Although I am taking a little break, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a note at april@mygrandmwasgreen.com I will still check my site and take time to respond to your comments and stories!
My Dad has told me many stories about my grandparents. One of them is that my grandma was a very smart business woman. My grandpa owned a hardware store in the Netherlands but was not very good at running the business. My grandma on the other hand was a business genious. However, because of very strong gender roles my grandpa ran the business into the ground while my grandma managed the home and ten children. What would life have been like if my grandma could have taken over the business . . . there was no option for that in those days.
How far we have come and I am thankful. But I wrestle with learning from my grandparents sustainable history and yet being thankful for so many of my modern conveniences that allow both my husband and I to work outside the home while juggling three children and a household.
I hope you can continue exploring these issues April. That alone is a major challenge.
Great comment, Lavonne! Stay tuned because I think you will appreciate what I plan to write about in the near future!
Take care of yourself dear friend. I just sent your blog to a friend…actually a customer of Gerry’s and he was telling her about you and your blog. I am proud of you that you can recognize when you need to sit and read.
I think in the rural communities it was a bit more of a working side by side. Though men usually did the milking the women often did share in the feeding of the animals and from what I understand the women sometimes helped with the record keeping. I know that was true for Gerry’s parents who are in the generation of your grandparents. But definitely the house work and meals fell were left to the women.
I will wait anxiously for the next post!
PS.. I was at Target today.. i hate shopping there..but necessities at the inn causes me to go every once in a while..I walked down the clothes isle.. my first mistake..so tempted to pick up a new shirt..but then I remembered my commitment to the Grandma Challenge! Way to go April.. I saved my self some money too!
I am glad I could save you some money, Karen! There is a book that I referred to awhile ago called, Go Green, Live Rich. The simplicity/frugality/green movment certainly have a lot of overlap because I am finding that making green changes is saving me money too!
I wish I could go back for a moment in time to really see how men and women negotiated all of the work that needed to be done just to survive. I can’t imagine anyone did much of any sitting around! Just the thought of it has given me a very different perspective on my life/work today.
Yes, the green changes do add up in the pocket-book, but the realistic view is that they do cost something…almost always it is TIME!
What are we willing to sacrifice or change? It takes more our time to prepare and can our foods than to go to the local market. It takes more of our time to use cloth diapers than using disposables. It takes more of our time to prepare meals from scratch (or at home) versus buying a “fastfood” meal, restaurant or pre-made at the deli.
It will time to reflect and assess what it is we actually do in a day and what is necessary versus what is our drive to have more, do more, be more. The worldly standard of those of us who have “arrived” or have we?
My 2 cents for the day.
Gender roles are a really interesting thing to study. The “traditional” gender roles as we know them are actually sort of recent, I think. I don’t think they were so rigid 100 or so years ago. I believe everyone just did what needed doing. So that even though the kitchen was a woman’s domain traditionally, if she was canning large amounts of food, killing and processing animals, or any other work that was too much for her to handle on her own, the men helped. And women did the same with caring for animals, chopping wood, even field work sometimes. All available hands were needed to do an overwhelming amount of work, and so everyone did what they had to do to keep going.
Not that I’m a historian, but this is what I’ve gleaned from a lot of reading and stories from older people around here.
Oh, I’m wondering what you are reading? That chair look comfy.