A Little About Me

Sharing my story and testimony for anyone who might be interested

I’ve been a full-time keeper of the home for more than a decade, but the path has been neither straight nor easy.

I’m a Gen-Xer raised by parents from the Silent Generation who, bless them, parented with hearts yearning for the culture of their youth - the 50s. They parented accordingly, meaning they provided love, food, clothing, and shelter, but in many ways I raised myself. I grew up in the 80s and early 90s and, while my mother stayed home, I had a great deal of freedom and time to get into all sorts of things I had no business getting into.

I was raised in a Nazarene church, which I loved and from which I learned much of God and His word. It was a quiet, traditional, conservative setting with a small youth group that I’m fairly certain saved my life. For me, junior high was the Seventh Circle of Hell, and by high school I was jaded and pretty angry.

After (barely) graduating and through a series of bad decisions and unfortunate events, I fumbled my way through a (very) young marriage, living in Florida and New York, divorcing and finally finding my way back home at the ripe old age of 20.

I continued building my life according to the feminist model - though I never considered myself a feminist - and made less-bad decisions as I found a job and slowly worked my way up the proverbial ladder. I met my husband in 1997 and together we made more less-bad decisions until we married in 1999. He remains the love of my life.

From age 15 until 30, my faith journey was stagnant. I became one of those people who was going to live my life the way I darn well pleased, and God was welcome to join me. I still pale with shame that I once lived this way. My husband shared my views back then. We cried out to God in crises, like when when he lost his father when we were 28, but otherwise there was little prayer and zero church. I guess you could say we behaved, toward God, like horribly toxic friends.

We waited until 30 to have children (there’s that pesky feminist worldview again), a decision we now bitterly regret. The birth of my oldest son as this experience that changed everything for me.

I won’t trouble you with a lengthy labor story, but suffice it to say that after a surprise breech presentation, a fever, spiking blood pressure, infection and a blood transfusion, well, there I was crying out to Jesus again. In the quiet of my alien-looking room/operating theater, somewhere after the second hemorrhage and before the blood transfusion, laid in my bed and whispered, “Jesus, I need you.”

I should have been blind with terror. I should have flown apart for fear of my son’s health and my own mortality. Instead, I felt the presence of Jesus. I didn’t hear any words, I didn’t see anything supernatural, but a peace that surpasses all human understanding washed over that hospital room, and I was still. Blessed peace and stillness as a doctor hurried in to tell me that my newborn son was doing quite well and they’d found a blood match for me. I sat dumbfounded. I was so calm I even asked if they’d given me something to settle me, but no. It was Jesus. After the way I’d treated Him over the past 1.5 decades, there He stood in my hospital room, quieting and comforting this undeserving heart.

I don’t have to tell you that this was my moment. My husband, who had also had a doozy of a night, and I decided that night to start figuring out what it looked like to pick up our respective crosses and follow Christ.

We found and joined a church, recommitted our lives to Christ and got baptized. We began searching scripture and seeking counsel to discern the ways in which God would have us order our lives.

So, starting from level zero, with plenty of debt and a two-income lifestyle that we’d been suckered into believing was just “how it is,” we started making hard changes. We knew within the first six months of shipping our infant son off to the grandparents (and as I spent my days commuting, working, pumping, crying, spending 2 hours daily (tops) with my husband and son)…let’s just say we quickly understood why God calls us women to be keepers at home.

Sadly, it took us three years to pay off debt and make the painstaking changes needed to pare down to a single-income family. I pressed on, but I was so tired during that time and missed my son so much that sometimes it felt hard to breathe.

My daughter was born six months before I quit my job. That birth was blessedly ordinary, by the way. That’s when the rubber met the road. From a full-time career, carry-out and a cleaning lady, I plunged into the depths of domesticity with little to no experience and very few people to learn from.

For a variety of reasons, I struggled. I struggled a lot. A wise friend who had walked in my shoes said, “Anne, this is a huge life change. You need to give yourself at least six months to adjust.” Understatement of the year.

I persevered. I read books and talked to older women and learned new skills and tried (and wrecked so many) new recipes…I learned about child development and character training. I realized that public school isn’t for everyone. I found out that homeschooling can be both wonderful and lonely. I figured out how to be frugal and to stretch our income farther than we ever imagined. I learned that, with God, all things are possible.

Some young women are blessed with women in their lives who pass on the knowledge and experience to faithfully manage a household, to raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Many, like me, are not - and unless we start doing a better job of passing down this knowledge and wisdom, our families and our culture will diminish. Aged Woman was born because I want to follow God’s commands - and because I want to be, for any young woman who might need it, the older woman I desperately needed back then.