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It was recently pointed out to me by someone, who may have been a bit defensive about the subject matter of this blog, that Martha Stewart’s quite smart. I agree with this statement, wholeheartedly in fact. I think Stewart is an amazing business woman and entrepreneur. I have at least one of her cookbooks and receive (and read) one of her magazines. I am also addicted to her Halloween issues. I have on more than one occasion turned to her recipes to make a family event special. I respect her immensely for having made her fortune and her livelihood out of domestic and household arts. Martha is a cultural icon and, therefore, an easy target when anyone starts to talk about or criticize domesticity these days.
What I hope is that we begin to question together our bombardment of cultural images that make us believe that we can have a perfectly organized, color coded, neatly indexed life. Pick up any women’s magazine and you will see articles on how to better organize a closet, an office, and a pantry. And then when our life, inevitably, resists easy classification for faster filing, we believe that we have failed somehow, that we were not as disciplined or as organized as we needed to be. Reading Real Simple even makes me feel guilty when I look up from the pages and see the piles of mail or cloth diapers.
The key is to be aware of these cultural influences and of course resist them!
Yesterday, I flipped to the back pages of April MS Living and was enticed by her cookie of the month, Cheesecake Brownies. Now, my son loves all our appliances, screeches in delight at the prospect of using them. So while many toddler parents may look wistfully at such a recipe and think maybe in a few years, I thought that maybe we could have fun while using the mixer. But, it was definitely a bit fussier than I like, requiring the brownie base to be cooked and cooled before the cheesecake topping could be baked on it. I forged ahead, reminding myself aloud that we need to have fun while making it. My son helped by adding ingredients into the mixer and turning it on, even if his preference is to keep the mixer on high and for several minutes. We managed to avoid over-beating the brownie base, and I let him have his fill of beating the cream cheese mixture as fast and as long as he wanted. We had fun watching it bake in the oven. And my husband and I enjoyed the brownies that night with a glass of Layer Cake Primitivo.
But when our backs were turned, our 75 lb. weim/lab mix, surfed the counter and licked off all of the cream cheese frosting, that same night. And while I had a great time making it and believe in seeing the value of the process, I still really really like the result of getting to eat the brownies! For me, striking a balance between the fun of the process (definitely high priority) with the result (high yield) is important. This time, the dog got the yield!
Isn’t this often the way when we put a lot of effort into some organizing projects? We buy all these supplies, spend a weekend re-organizing, labelling, and de-cluttering and then life happens, and pretty soon it’s back to the piles again. Was it the organizational system that failed? Did you not buy the right products or enough of them? Were you too busy to put stuff back right? Or did the “dog” get the yield? How many times did someone else get the yield from your expenditure of time and resources? How many times have you put in 25 hours of work on a 15-page report only to find out 10 hours and a report of half its length would have sufficed? What do you think you could do to stop the dog from getting the yield? Share your ideas! Share your own stories of the “dog” eating your results!
March 13th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I totally agree with the fact that Martha Stewart is a highly intelligent woman. She has brought her face and knowledge into every household in American. She has taken the “poor homemaker wife” into the era of “professional homemakers who are business women”. She has shown women how they can capitalize on their knowledge of homemaking skills that can help educate others. I think she is wonderful!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:12 am
While I think that Martha absolutely has a knack for the domestic arts, as you said, I think a lot has to be said for her marketing skills. I am sure that she has a marketing department now, but she had to start out somewhere and she did a great job of getting herself out there.
As for the dog eating moments….we all have them. I just laugh about them, because otherwise they would nag at me and I don’t like to dwell.
March 14th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Martha always seemed kind of brittle to me. Its not that she’s not clever. I believe she’s brilliant. It is just that she doesn’t seem, has never seemed, particularly happy. I suspect that her desire for perfection was something of a burden for her. It may be that the few months she spent in prison turned out to be something of a rather austere “vacation”. I doubt she wants to go back, but I suspect she’s glad she had the time to reflect.
March 15th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Every year we are celeberating women’s day and it is a pride for every woman more so with powerful woman like Martha Stewart. Her ideas would take an ordinary woman to great professional heights. Let us use the skills taught by her to become an active homemaker.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Wow isn’t that ever true… Well put. After 17 months of parenthood, I am just now beginning to understand the ‘high priority/high yield’ concept. I should really print this post and tape it to my wall as a reminder to live life and quit fussing over the unimportant things.
For the record, I idolize Martha Stewart and I love how she just keeps on keepin’ on and kickin’ butt all the way!
March 16th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Thanks for your submission to the advice for women from women blog carnival.