Why is Ma Inglls Happier than You? (Part 2 of a series)

In which we discuss why if  your life is all about maintenance, it will suck!

This series is inspired by the well-known Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  As a young girl, I read and re-read these books countless times, seeing life on the prairie through the eyes of Laura and Mary.  Sometimes their lives seemed so different from mine:  I couldn’t imagine life without electricity, or the fact that an orange could be so exotic and rare that it was a special Christmas treat.  And of course some things were so similar.  Being the new kid in school can be hard, and it seems like there’s always some obnoxious Nellie Olesen around to contend with.

Reading these books with my son, I now find myself fascinated by the woman Ma Ingalls must have been.  Although the basic work of tending to children and the household have remained constant for ages, Ma’s life was so different from my own.  She repeatedly moved her family to the very edges of civilization.  Along with Pa, she grew most of what her family ate.  She made their clothes.  She faced the illnesses of childhood without the benefit of vaccines or medical care nearby.  Her contact with family and friends was sometimes frequent and sometimes quite limited.

And yet, she doesn’t seem to suffer in the ways that I see moms, particularly stay at home moms suffer these days.  Her physical circumstances were much more difficult than those that moms today face, and yet, Ma Ingalls (at least as portrayed in the books) does not seem to experience the kind of existential angst that the moms I know often do.

I’m not really interested in a debate about whether women had it harder ‘back then’ or whether women today who live in circumstances analogous to hers have it harder than privileged women in developed countries.

What interests me is looking at why women living in contemporary society seem so much less satisfied with our lives than women of earlier generations and other times.

I have a few thoughts- and maybe you do too.

In the previous post, I wrote about how Ma Ingall’s life had more productive activity and less maintenance than today’s moms have.  Today, I want to spell out in more detail just exactly why a life filled with maintenance is not likely to be a very satisfying life.  In fact, if your days are filled with nothing but maintenance, life will really suck.  Seems obvious- but if we dig a little bit into why this is, we can come up with some remedies.

To do this, I’ll go back to the work of Mihaly Csikszemtmihalyi on flow.  We’ve all experienced some level of flow at some point or other.  It’s that feeling of being ‘in the groove’, ‘in the zone,’ acting intuitively and responding to the emerging situation with perfect awareness but without conscious thought.

Just for a moment- think about a time you experienced something like this whether it lasted moments or hours.  Maybe you were painting, or absorbed in making jewelry.  Maybe you were cruising down the slopes or climbing a mountain.  Maybe you were brainstorming a killer fundraiser and the ideas were just popping like popcorn.

These experiences can come to us in a wide variety of contexts.  Artists and athletes are especially likely to talk about these moments, but they can happen anytime we are fully engaged- mentally, physically and emotionally- in what we’re doing.

In his extensive research, Csikszemtmihalyi identified several common elements of flow activities.

• They have a clear goal or set of goals with a fairly clear set of appropriate responses or moves to get to the goal.
• There is immediate feedback so you know how you are doing.
• They engage our skills (physical and/or mental) fully in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable

With these criteria in mind, it’s easy to see why sports might lend themselves to flow states easily.  Playing a game of tennis or chess, you have a defined goal and a set of rules to follow to guide your actions.  You know immediately how you’re doing- whether that last shot was a good one or not.  And assuming you’re playing someone who is at or slightly above your own skill level, it will take all you’ve got to prevail.

Being in the grip of the creative process can also be a flow state.  The words, images or notes simply flow with no effort on the part of the artist.  Artists speak of losing themselves in the process, the song singing them rather than the other way around.

But flow can happen in business or educational contexts.  When you have a big exam or presentation due there’s a similar opportunity to meet a challenging situation with the best your mind has to offer.  And when you get the results- whether it’s the grade on the exam or the contract from the client- you know you’ve succeeded.

What seems so distinctive about these experiences is that our thoughts, actions and emotions are all in alignment.  It’s not like we’re doing one thing, and thinking about something else.

Maintenance = Low Flow

Thinking about what’s actually involved in maintenance, it’s pretty clear that the conditions of flow are not usually in place.

No clear goals

When you consider the work of housekeeping, it’s easy to see that there is no clear set of goals with an identifiable endpoint.  For one thing, housework is never done.  The laundry basket never stays empty for more than a couple of hours.  Ditto the sink or dishwasher.

It’s like that old Nike tag line:  There is no finish line.  No top of the mountain.  No contract signed or project completed.  It just goes on and on and on.

No clear feedback

Another thing about the work of moms that makes it so hard is the lack of feedback.  I wrote a bit about this here, but the point is that it’s often damned hard to see that what we’re doing makes any difference in the grand scheme of things.  And sometimes the feedback we get is downright contrarian.

Say your teenager is pissed because you’ve grounded her for missing curfew.

Does that mean you’re scarring her for life or that you’re doing a good job as her mom?  It will be years before you know- if you ever really know!  The feedback loops on parenting are not at all transparent!

No Challenge

And then there’s the biggie as far as I’m concerned: the gap between skill and challenge.  Part of what makes flow states so remarkable is that they call on skills and capacities we didn’t know we had.  And for my money, there’s really not much that’s more satisfying than that.

Here may be the biggest difference between Ma Ingalls and today’s moms.  I’m not saying she wasn’t a smart cookie- because she was.  But moms today have had so many more educational opportunities than she had, and so many more helpful appliances, that the gap between our skills and the challenges of maintaining a household is greater than ever.

On occasion you may need a degree in tech-speak in order to record your favorite TV show, but generally speaking housework does not call on our greatest capacities.  It may be physically taxing, but it is highly repetitive and offers virtually no intellectual challenge or reward in and of itself.  It may be somewhat emotionally rewarding, knowing that you’re providing a clean and pleasant atmosphere for yourself and your family, but the work itself is not really conducive to flow.

And if the vast majority of your time is spent in maintenance activities- life might get to be a bit of a drag.

So what’s a modern mom to do?

Reduce maintenance

As discussed in the previous post, one of the reason’s Ma’s life was more satisfying is that she spent more time being productive and less time doing maintenance.  This suggests that one possibility would be to reduce the time required on maintenance in our own lives.

This is a favorite of ‘home management’ experts everywhere, and for good reason.

Part one of this bit of advice is usually something like lower your standards.  Well this might help some moms, but the truth is, my standards really can’t get much lower.  The bathroom gets cleaned about once a month whether it needs it or not!  And the beds get made when I change the sheets.  My kitchen is the one place that is kept in pretty good shape, but that’s because I’m in there preparing meals three times a day.  But still there are some days when I have to clean up from breakfast before I can make dinner.  Or vice versa.

The second piece of advice to decrease time spent on maintenance is to simplify your life, by which they usually mean getting rid of a lot of the crap you have.  The idea is that if you have fewer bathrooms to clean, fewer clothes to wash, fewer toys, books, pets, cars, bedrooms, etc… there’s less to maintain.

This seems fine as far as it goes, but honestly, for me and most of the moms I know, it only goes so far.  Yeah, I can clear out the clothes that don’t fit anymore, and take the books I’m not likely to read again to the library, but I’ve still got a house full of STUFF, and I don’t really see that changing drastically.

So if you’ve gone as far as you can in decreasing the amount of maintenance you do, what else can make it less onerous?

Play with maintenance

If you read Flylady or similar books, one of their favorite pieces of advice is to use a timer for each of your various household chores.  I have used this method with some success, and so agree that it can really help.  But let’s think about why for just a minute.  One reason is that no matter how disagreeable the task, you can probably stand to do it for 10 or 15 minutes.  And if you really focus, many of the every-day things that have to be done can be done in this small time frame.

Understanding the conditions of flow gives another possible reason that this strategy helps.  Namely, that it narrows the gap between skills and challenge.  Making the bed, or unloading the dishwasher are not especially challenging tasks, but add a time constraint, and now things get a bit more interesting!

(If you haven’t tried this, it works with kids too!  Challenge them to “Beat the Clock” and you’ll be amazed how fast the legos get swept up.  At least until they catch on to the game.  Then you might have to offer incentives!)

Finding some kind of immediate feedback mechanism can help as well.  When we moved to Colorado, I needed a new vacuum cleaner.  The one I got has a ‘dirt detector’ feature that supposedly tells you when the carpet is truly clean.  It has lights on it that start out red (super dirty) changes to yellow (moderately dirty) and finally to green (clean).  It sounds like such a goofy thing, but I enjoy vacuuming much more with this little bit of feedback.  It lets me know I’m actually moving in the right direction.

Transform Maintenance

Also known as The Martha Stewart Strategy.

I’ll have to admit, for many years I just didn’t get Martha or the women who read her magazine religiously.

But now I do.

The ‘cult of domesticity’ is actually a fairly effective way to transform what could be seen as the drudgery of maintaining a house into an expression of one’s aesthetic vision.  It still doesn’t help with the most repetitive and dull tasks such as cleaning the bathrooms or doing the laundry, but having a nice place to do the laundry, and lovely smelling cleaning products would certainly upgrade the experience.

Taking this even further, for many women, their homes become a living work of art.  Carefully considering just the right combination of paint color and fabric pattern might seem trivial, but it might be exactly the kind of challenge that calls a woman to exhibit or develop her skills.  If you consider your home a 3D canvas where you can arrange (and rearrange) things you find beautiful or meaningful to your heart’s content, it makes dusting the knick knacks a little easier to bear.

The same strategy can also be applied to meal preparation.  Some nights it’s all I can do to get something on the table that will keep body and soul together until morning.  Other times, cooking is a great creative process, whether it’s trying a new recipe or playing with color, flavor and presentation.

These are all ways to make what are necessary maintenance activities into something much more satisfying.

Back to Productivity

One strategy many moms employ, especially as their children themselves don’t require quite as much maintenance, is to shift some of their time into production i.e.  generating the energy (usually in the form of income) their family needs to survive.  The conditions of flow are certainly not part of every job every day, but the presence of clear goals and procedures to achieve them, the promise of receiving some kind of feedback on your actions and the possibility of using one’s skills or even developing new ones to meet interesting and novel challenges are powerful reasons to seek employment outside the home.

There’s also the possibility of production within the home.

Think about the reasons for  the upswing in all kinds of home crafting.  Women making their own jams and jellies, scarves and sweaters, slipcovers and shower curtains.  Not because they have to.  Not because it’s cheaper or easier (it’s very rarely either!).

But because it’s fun.

As fast as my son wears holes in his socks, I can’t imagine having to knit every pair the kid wears.  But I can tell you that the hours I spend knitting are much more satisfying than the hours spent sorting and folding laundry, never mind looking for that eternally missing sock.

It is much more satisfying to knit a sock than to wash the same damn one over and over and over because making a sock is productive.  It brings something into existence that wasn’t there before.  That generates energy.  Tending to the socks that already exist- that’s maintenance.

But is this actually productive or is it leisure?

Ma made jam because she had to.  It was the only way to preserve the summer harvest so that her family could eat through the winter.  Ma made her families clothes because she had to.  There was no mall up the road.

On one hand, I’m so grateful that I don’t have to grow everything my family needs to eat, or to make all my son’s socks!  On the other hand, these very satisfying activities have been stripped of their respectable place in our lives.  When I sit and knit, I’m acutely aware that there’s something else I ‘should’ be doing.  My knitting is recreation and so there’s a tinge of guilt that accompanies my knitting that I’m sure Ma never felt because her knitting was productive.

Next time we’ll take up the notion of leisure and what the quality of our leisure has to do with the quality of our lives.

Meantime- what do you think? Is maintenance necessarily low-flow?  What helps for you?

Please share in the comments!

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Tagged as: Why is Ma Happier than You?