Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006)
Article: Homemaking Internship
Author: Carolyn Mahaney

JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006) p. 80

Homemaking Internship1

Carolyn Mahaney

Homemaker, Author, Speaker
Gaithersburg, Maryland

Imagine preparing your whole life for a career in medicine. In high school you volunteer at the local hospital and spend your evenings reading medical journals. You make the honor roll and head off to a prestigious medical school. After eight years of only study and no social life, you finally graduate. Then you spend two, maybe three years in your chosen field—not even enough time to pay off the school loans.

But the more you practice medicine, the less you enjoy it. Suddenly you realize the truth. Your real calling is to be a teacher. You want to work with kids, small ones. So now with a mostly useless set of skills (at least you would know how to do the Heimlich maneuver if a kid choked on his hot dog in the school cafeteria), you want to enroll again at the university and study to be a teacher. But you can’t. Your time and money have run out.

You can’t afford to give six more years of your life to study, and you certainly can’t afford the extra school debt. The years and the funds allotted for career preparation have already been spent on another profession. You have to accept the reality that you didn’t graduate with the right degree to teach.

All too often we stumble onto homemaking the way this student stumbled onto teaching. We devote ourselves to studying for a particular career, but suddenly discover we want to enter an entirely different field for which we never prepared. Surprise! We find ourselves engaged to be married but without a degree in homemaking.

But unlike all other professions, we aren’t forbidden from marrying simply because we aren’t prepared. While teachers are not allowed to enter a classroom unless they have a diploma, every day women become wives, mothers, and homemakers with little or no preparation.

Girls often spend years of intensive study for other professions and yet are completely unprepared to assume the career of homemaking. As I wrote in my

JBMW 11:2 (Fall 2006) p. 81

book Feminine Appeal, “Isn’t it telling that our culture requires training and certification for so many vocations of lesser importance, but hands us marriage and motherhood without instruction?”2 One author lamented,

The fact is, our girls have no home education. When quite young they are sent to school where no feminine employment, no domestic habits, can be learned.. .. After this, few find any time to arrange, and make use of, the mass of elementary k...