Professional Hockey and the Art of Homemaking
by Carolyn Ellis

Description: One mom's homemaking inspiration comes from an interest in professional hockey.
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About six years ago our two boys, then 10 and 15, got very interested in street hockey. For upwards of six months our house was overflowing with hockey books from the library on the topic of hockey! Dutiful homeschooling mother that I am, to try and share in the boys passion I scanned virtually every hockey book they brought into the house. Who would have guessed that my reading would end up changing my whole life!

So just how did reading about hockey transform my life? It pretty much comes down to this: The thinking described in the particular hockey books that our boys brought home was so profound, meditative and analytical it took my breath away. My response at the time was, “Hey, if these sports jocks can be this reflective and focused about hockey surely I should be able to do the same thing as a wife and mother!”

Armed with my new “hockey insights” about thinking my way through life I immediately decided to start looking at anything and everything related to family life with an entirely new attentiveness. From a distance of six years I’m not sure what issue I landed on as my first trial case to solve, so to speak, so I’ll just pick one that I know I worked on at some point: library books!

Applying my "hockey lessons" I right away stopped being pushed around by the 40–50 books our six children usually haul from the library each week and took charge of a situation that had been bugging me for years! What I did was buy a large rectangular plastic tub, put it in the family room and let it be known that this tub was for library books only. Inspired by the success I had with the library tub, I then bought each of the children two tubs each: One tub for stuff they wanted to save but did not need to have in their room (These tubs went into the attic or in the garage.), another tub for stuff they did want in their rooms! (To further reduce clutter I eventaully got to the point where I started paying kids to fill a trash bag with stuff to donate or throw away!)

You get the idea I hope: Identify a problem or an issue and then think, really think, as deeply as you can about how to solve the problem, permanently if at all possible. As a freelance writer I have further applied my hockey lessons by challenging myself to apply the same serious analysis to everything that I write. Admittedly my topics are usually quite mundane—raising teenagers, patience in the home, room arrangement, etc.—but the results of laboring to meditate and reflect at length on a topic are real and surprisingly satisfying.

Unbelievably I have taken these very same hockey lessons to virtually every part of my life, from how I ponder over current events to how I pray! And to think all this started with professional hockey! O the wonder!

Carolyn Ellis paints watercolors, passionately plays the piano, and writes from rural Texas. Carolyn's latest offering, “Florence/Memoirs of a Piano,” is a charming family illustrated 26 page affair that crackles with creativity, wit and not a little insight! Checks payable to Carolyn Ellis for $5 ($3 + $2 p/h) to 16786 CR 4057, Kemp, TX 75143 will get you a copy.

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