Sunday Occupation Ideas for Mother Culture

My friend, Joy Cherrick, inspires me on so many levels, but especially lately in her pursuit of Mother Culture! Going along with the series all about Mother Culture that I’ve been offering this summer, Joy was kind enough to write this post about how she has included Mother Culture in her “Sunday occupations.” This term and the idea of setting time aside for special activities on Sundays comes from the Parents’ National Education Union programmes in which books and other “occupations” were suggested for students of different ages. This idea, however, extends to mothers as well! I hope you find Joy’s way of implementing this practice as inspiring as I have!

For several years, I’ve taken up the habit of setting aside one hour each Sunday to do one thing that restores my soul. In Masonland, we call this “Sunday Occupations,” and it is lovingly classified as a Mother Culture activity. I really do love these Mother Culture practices because they give me permission to remember my own personhood, interests, and the need for growth as a daughter of the King. This golden hour each Sunday has taken on many different forms over the years. Pregnancy, nursing a baby, and having a toddler about have all impacted what that time each week can look like. My own energy and brain power all play into what I can and want to do with that special time.

In this post, I’m sharing some of the ways I’ve used this time over the years, and you will see that I tend to follow two categories for my Mother Culture hour: Books and Art. Nowadays, I may even be able to get both books and art into one Sunday afternoon block. But that hasn’t always been the case, especially when a long Sunday nap was required for survival.

Let’s begin with the Mother Culture Bookish Hour, and then I will show you what Mother Culture Artist Hour can look like for the mother looking to grow a bit more blessed Sunday by Sunday.

The Bookish Hour

Mother’s Educational Reads

I sometimes reserve Sundays for those books that I “must read” or “want dearly to read” but require my concentration to actually get anything out of the pages. Last year, I spent four months reading through Norms and Nobility by David Hicks each Sunday afternoon. (It has recently been re-published at a more reasonable price tag!) I’ve had several books that have changed my thinking about myself, the world, God, and His world. This book has been the most formative in recent years. I wish I would have read it sooner. Anyone teaching middle or high school students would benefit greatly by reading it because he is able to speak to the challenges we face educating children in a modern world that treats children like machines in a system.

He helped me see that some of the ways I was looking at my children and their education were with a utilitarian mindset and not one that honored their personhood and the dignity they hold as image bearers of God. He shows how taking a utilitarian view of man and only focusing on a child’s future career potential (one aspect of their personhood – the career) actually leads to apathy. We know as Charlotte Mason educators that we want to move ourselves and our children into a relationship with God’s world and not just give them information and get them to be wage earners for the economy. We want them to be good men and women who can govern themselves. Hicks reminds us that education is character formation and that each child needs to be brought into a relationship with God, God’s world, mankind, and himself. 

If you want to be changed forever, read this book.

Mother’s Spiritual Reads

The next sort of books I’ve taken up as a Sunday read are the Bible commentaries to help me prepare for our Bible lessons for school. The two I’m reading through now are The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis: A Commentary Paperback by Matthieu Pageau and Saved: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Acts by Nancy Guthrie. Both are from a Reformed perspective and heavily use scripture to support their comments on the passages. Both books are opening up the scriptures to me in new ways and provide so many rich ideas to think about and consider.

The Language of Creation begins by showing how reading through Genesis with our literal mindset doesn’t allow us to get all of the meaning out of the text. The biblical authors used symbolism and metaphor to communicate. When we read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” We think, yup, he made the earth and the skies. But it also holds the meaning that God created all that is physical, material, and terrestrial, and he created all that is spiritual, immaterial, and cosmic. It makes that sentence more rich with power, doesn’t it? 

With each book, I think, “Oh, I want to read this to my kids,” but really, that’s not going to hit them the way it hits me. The point is to help me come into a deeper relationship with the scriptures so that I can help my children learn and grow in their knowledge of scripture in a developmentally appropriate way. 

Saved: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Acts gives me the context and helps me understand how to help guide my children through this book. Guthrie has a way of simplifying complicated theological truths in ways that I can understand. I’ve loved every book and Bible study I’ve done by her. This one is proving to be extremely helpful in equipping me to guide my children through the book of Acts.

The Artistic Hour

Mother Learns to Paint

During each of my pregnancies, I found that if I was learning something new, I could feel a little bit more in control of the process and not despair over the ailment of the day. Learning a new skill kept my mind positively engaged on things that I could control. With my seventh pregnancy, I took up botanical watercolor painting and used the Sunday afternoon hour to practice my craft and improve my skills.

I chose botanical watercolor because I was so curious about how artists were able to make a flower or a leaf jump off the page, as if I could hold it in my hand, when each of my paintings looked so flat and boring. So, I signed up for Anna Mason’s Nature Studio to get me started. I started with her free videos and moved into the paid membership. As I improved, I wanted to adjust my style. That’s when I found The Billy Showell School of Botanical Art. Her art was more in the style I wanted to imitate because she has more movement and emotion in her pieces than I found with Anna Mason. (Both could be appropriate for teens but not younger children as the amount of detail and patience required is great.)

You’ll be surprised at how just a little bit of time set aside each week can add up to learning something as intimidating as painting realistically. The golden hour on Sundays helped me stay consistent.

Mother Keeps a Notebook

Since I already had the hour set aside for painting on Sundays, when a need cropped up in our homeschool for me to focus my creative powers to improve as a teacher, I already had a place in the week where I could set aside. After reviewing our exams at the end of school, I noticed that all of my children were rushing through their work and weren’t taking the time needed to engage with their studies. I saw this as an issue with my teaching methods since the problem was present in all of my children. So, I spent time researching how in the world to fix this problem since I’ve known about the issue but have been puzzled by the solution. I go into more detail in my post on Pre Reading as Mother Culture over on Substack, but the short answer is that I needed to be more engaged as a teacher through reading, narrating, and keeping a notebook so that I could understand how to lead my children into these practices with interest and engagement. I learned about using pre-reading and notebook-keeping as a means of becoming a more effective teacher by Celeste Cruz with the CMEC 2018 Retreat package.

Once I spent time learning what to do next, it was up to me to do my pre-reading a little bit each day and then to use my hour each Sunday to make entries into my pre-reading notebook. So far, the results have been extremely fruitful. I now have a better vision for what assignments to give my children, how to lead them to dig into their work so they get more out of each lesson, and how to organize their school time so they have time for reflection and notebook work. I am able to be a more effective guide and teacher since I’ve entered into the posture of a student to understand what I’m asking my children to do. And since they are my children with similar strengths and weaknesses, I’m able to pair down the amount of work I require so that we are able to take the time needed to do the work well and not rush. 

Mother Culture time is hard to carve out as a busy mother with many responsibilities to juggle. Taking an hour once a week on a lazy Sunday afternoon to find time to enjoy a good book or learn a new skill can bring refreshment and vitality to a weary mother. I find that I often anticipate my hour throughout the week by thinking of what I want to put into my pre-reading notebook or which painting I want to work on. In this way, the hour multiples by creeping unsuspecting time and places through the power of reflection

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