Practical wisdom for making a home and raising a family
Practical wisdom for making a home and raising a family
L eila Lawler is the mother of seven children and is a blogger, speaker, and author. Her most recent book, The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life, is a three-volume set full of practical wisdom for women. Leila recently sat down with me to discuss the mission of her project, the importance of education and humor in family life, and more. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Sarah Schutte: You have just written a book set, which I imagine took quite some time. Can you please tell me a little bit about this project and what your goal was in writing the book?
Leila Lawler: Well, the project came about because I have always wanted to say things about family life and women’s role in the family. When we started the [Like Mother, Like Daughter] blog, my daughters and I, I began writing on it in sort of a desultory “This is maybe the opportunity for me to make a draft-type-thing for my future book” manner. I was trying to take a very incremental approach that did not overwhelm anyone with a lot of sudden information. I saw a niche for myself in the blogosphere, which is that, when I started, I was already older than many mommy bloggers who were doing this sort of advice-giving without necessarily having the experience that would maybe be more helpful in the long run.
And part of that is that I raised my family at a time when things were in upheaval, and so there were a lot of new ideas — new ideas about child-rearing, explicitly anti-traditional ideas about child-rearing. I myself was raised with those ideas. And then that was what was available when my children were young. I really cringed to see another generation falling prey to what I characterize as a sort of “expert” rule of family life. What really is the motivation of these experts? Are they all themselves starting families? What have they thrown out with the bathwater? It drove me to feel that I needed to write.
Partly what I was writing about was just answering questions that I often got in real life, such as: How do you start homeschooling? And seeing that really educating your children is the vocation of family life and has to be set in this larger context of creating the environment of the home, nurturing the home. So a decade went by, and suddenly it was more of a question of wrestling it all into some sort of digestible format. It really took me five years to get it into shape because I wanted to present something that wasn’t just blog posts slapped together.
SS: The artwork sprinkled throughout all the volumes is so charming. Can you please tell me about it? And do you have a particular favorite illustration?
LL: The artwork is done by my daughter, Deirdre, and she also illustrated The Little Oratory. She just has a very sweet and charming touch, and she knows how to provide that homey yet very polished feel. I couldn’t say if I have a favorite, but I love them all, I think. Do you have a favorite?
SS: There is one that caught my attention, actually. I can’t remember what page it’s on now, but it’s this view of a path leading down to a river or a lake.
LL: Oh, yes, that one is really beautiful. She does have a way of drawing you in. They’re kind of like the illustrations of a really beloved children’s book that one had in one’s youth. And I think that that is really what I was trying to convey.
SS: These books are aimed, or they seem to be aimed, at married women and mothers, but how can single women use them or benefit from them as well?
LL: Well, I am trying in these books to do two things. One is to tell the woman who has decided to be home how to do that. How to be home. What are the actual skills and routines and thoughts you need to be at home and to do a good job of it. To use your spirited, intelligent mind to attack all the problems. But the other aim of the book is: Why is the home important to make and keep? And why is it the woman who does it?
I think that the woman who is not yet married will benefit greatly from being told something that she is not going to be told anywhere else, which is that, if you are going to embark on this, you have to understand its importance, you have to understand the sacrifices that are necessary for it; and what it means to the world for the spirited woman, the intelligent woman, even the intellectual and academic woman, to put all her efforts and energies into this and not to view it as something that she has to do, that it somehow prevents her from doing what she really would like to do or is otherwise called to do, but to see that it’s actually central to what it means to be a woman and of vital importance to society. The more that we get away from the home as anything important, the more we see how important it is.
We’re now living off of the capital of all the women who did actually devote themselves to home. And we are now in a deficit. So now our neighborhoods are empty, our children are not really cared for, and our old people are not really cared for. That creates a vacuum, and into that vacuum will step the state. That has ultimate consequences for the well-being of each and every person. Because what that means is that power will become the overriding force in our lives instead.
SS: I always find a lovely spot of humor in your writing. Can you talk about the role of humor in family life?
LL: I don’t know how you can survive family life without humor. If I had one piece of advice to give to anyone getting married, it would be “Does this person have a sense of humor?” I guess it just is in my nature to make light of things or see the humor in things, and I’m blessed to be surrounded by people who are pretty funny. But I cannot imagine going about all these questions without being able to see the funny side of things.
SS: You write so beautifully about homeschooling, and I was homeschooled myself. What do you say to those who can’t or choose not to homeschool for one reason or another? How can you have a vision for your children’s education in any circumstance?
LL: When a man and a woman marry, they really are undertaking two tasks that are connected to each other. One is to make a family. Marriage at base is procreative and fruitful, and arising from that fruitfulness is the need to educate the children who are brought into this world. If we just say, “Oh, no, there’s no reason to educate the children,” we can see how absurd that is. The husband and the wife by nature, and by God’s plan, are made to want to transmit who they are and what they are to the child. The child ultimately is going to take his place in the world, and for that, he requires a lot of formation. And that formation in the family is primarily a result of being loved and nurtured and guided. The parents want what is good for the child, and they also love the child. And so those two things together create the ideal circumstances — as ideal as we can have in this world — for the child learning anything.
We all know that a person learns best when he feels that he is loved and also when he has a sense of his place in the hierarchy. And in this case, the hierarchy of the family, there’s a firm hand that is guiding him and that will keep him from doing things to harm himself and others, setting him on the path to do what is good and right. When we think about a curriculum for reading, writing, and arithmetic, that is just a small, small part of this larger educational project. So whether the family decides to apply that narrow academic curriculum in the home or not, that is really a specific decision that doesn’t affect this larger duty to educate the child and especially to educate the child in a moral way.
SS: People in literature seem to always name their homes. Did your family ever do this?
LL: Well, we have a joke. So, speaking of having a sense of humor, a very famous massacre happened on the hillside where we live. Because in colonial times, this was a garrison in my town, and one day the Indians came — this was in the 1600s — and they massacred and kidnapped a bunch of the townspeople. So we named our house Massacre Hillside.
SS: My sister and I named our house too, but it was nothing quite like that! I find it funny, because many people seem to take so much time and say, “Oh, well, it should be something deep and literary,” and you guys are like, “No, it’s gonna be Massacre Hillside.”
This next one is a two-part question: How has your faith informed both the books and your blogging? And while your work has deep Catholic roots, how can people of other faiths apply your methods and wisdom?
LL: So our faith is hierarchical. And for me, the most important thing to convey about family life within the home, and the home within God’s plan for the world and for our understanding of Heaven, is that it’s all hierarchical. I’m trying to convey, as the subtitle of the book says, order and wonder. I believe that we can be peaceful if we connect with this order and this pattern that God has laid out for us, and that then we’ll experience the wonder we crave. You can’t really seek the wonder directly — it has to be accessed through the patterns that are given to us. But so much of that, in God’s goodness, is just embedded in the way the world is made. Anyone who is open to reality can benefit from thinking about all these things.
I have many readers who are not Catholic, many who are Protestant, many who are Jewish. I have readers who do not have faith. And yet, I find that years later, they will write to me and say that they were drawn closer to the faith, through realizing that reality has a pattern and this pattern must correspond to something that is very deeply true. So that is a big, tall order for me on my little mommy blog. But that is what I try to convey and to remember as I’m writing.
SS: You have a line about the author P. G. Wodehouse and how, to actually get his jokes, you need to have “a deep background for reference.” This seems to be a theme in your work, of connecting past and present. Can you speak to this?
LL: This is a very important theme for me. It’s a theme about our own enjoyment, just as adults in being able to pick up a book and read it and enjoy it. But also, especially in the idea of education, that we are really in the position of transmitting to children what we have received. That means taking very seriously how we are connected to the past and not severing that connection. That’s what we mean by the collective memory. And the truth is that we will not be well educated if we do not see that we have to be connected to the past.
Something that is a sad result of our society right now is that education is being sold as something very different from that. When people realized you can monetize education, they realized that you have to constantly be coming up with new and improved things, when really the opposite is true. You really should not be cluttering up your children’s bookshelves, minds, and curriculum materials with what is “new and improved,” but rather they need what is old and time-tested, because we really are trying to give them the tools for learning.
SS: Your reminding mothers to sing to their babies was very striking to me, and you have a longer section on music in the home. What made you put that in? And why is it so important?
LL: Well, it’s very important because we think of music as an add-on and something that in education we can do without. But actually music is the one pursuit that connects us, connects beauty, with the objective world. I often quote C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man when he talks about the ancients saying that the task of education is, before the age of reason, to teach the child to like and dislike what he ought. That’s a very profound idea, that beauty is not a matter of preference, solely. Beauty, which is in the world that we can see, is objective. And music is the art form that connects us with that objectivity because harmony is grounded in physics. So our experience of beauty in music is much more direct than in any other art form, making it vitally important that children learn music. Sometimes the parents are not capable of transmitting this to the child; they just don’t know how. And sometimes they’re in a situation where they can’t find someone to do it. In the book, I’m trying to show that this is actually more accessible than you think. And it starts, it really starts with singing to your children.
SS: Yes, I heartily agree with this. I grew up in a musical family, so that was a real blessing. The other day, I was thinking about what my life would look like without music in it, and it was pretty much impossible to imagine because it’s just been such a major part. If I tried to tell somebody about my life and leave all references to music out, I don’t think I could do it.
LL: It’s really important. One thing that greatly distresses me is the knowledge that the vast majority of children today do not hear music that is not amplified. And they approach music as an entertainment, instead of in the “I can produce this” category. And I think that in this way, today’s childhood is vastly impoverished compared with say, the childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She grew up with her father playing the fiddle and her family singing songs. They lived just about as primitive a life as any American has lived. And yet music, authentic music made by people in the family, was more a part of their life than I would say of 99 percent of the children today.
SS: This three-volume set is packed with wisdom and practical knowledge, but there is quite a lot of it! How do you intend people to use the books?
LL: Well, I do begin with a chapter that is “how to use this book.” I really recommend reading that. And I would say that it’s a kind of book that could be dipped into. The way I started really, truly diving into the whole project was by saying, “You really have to know what is for dinner. If you’re gonna live your life, you just have to know what’s for dinner.” It’s all very well and good not to really know what’s for dinner when it’s just you and your husband. But when you have three little children who are going to melt into a puddle of misery at five, you need to buckle down and know what is for dinner. And if you want to just start there, then you can get dinner in line, and then you’ll have the leisure to read the rest of the books.