How to Keep House While Drowning: 31 Days of Compassionate Help

by K.C. Davis

What you say to yourself when your house is clean fuels what you say to yourself when it’s dirty. If you’re good when it’s clean you must then be bad when it’s not.

If care tasks are morally neutral, then having not showered or brushed your hair in three weeks does not mean “I am disgusting,” but instead simply means “I am having a hard time right now.”

Although it looks like a lot, there are actually only 5 things in any room: (1) trash; (2) dishes; (3) laundry; (4) things that have a place and are not in their place; and (5) things that do not have a place.

1. The first step is to take a trash bag and pick up all the trash. Throw it away into the bag. Take large trash items like boxes and stack them together and place the trash bag with it. Do not take the trash out. 2. Next gather all of the dishes and place them in your sink or on your counter. Do not do the dishes. 3. Take a laundry basket and pick up all the clothes and shoes. Place the laundry basket next to the trash pile. Do not do the laundry. 4. Next pick a space in the room like a corner or a desk, and put all the items there that have a place back in their place. Then put the items that have no place in a pile. Move to the next space and repeat until all things are back in their spots. 5. Now you will have a pile of things that do not have a place. It will be easier now that the space is clear to tackle this category. You may choose to get rid of some items that have no place and are contributing to clutter. For important things, you can find them a permanent place. 6. Take out your trash to the bin, throw laundry into the wash or laundry room. Now your space is livable. I always save the dishes for another day.

So many people will say to this, “But I don’t feel any better or more cared for after I do the dishes or change my sheets.” That’s because you view care tasks as moral. It’s the “right” thing to do. It’s what a “good” partner or parent or child does. This moral value saps the caring power from the task. If a task is viewed this way, not doing it causes shame and guilt. So doing the task doesn’t do much more than give you a day-long reprieve from the guilt until it’s time to do it again. In this mode, completing a care task only takes you from distress to neutral and sets up a cycle of constantly running from distressing emotions. If we are overwhelmed by the dishes and feel like a failure the more they stack up, we avoid them further because facing the failure is painful. Eventually, we bully ourselves into doing the dishes. It takes every ounce of energy we have, but we finish. We feel better after they are done, but only because we don’t have to feel the crushing shame of “being so bad at all of this.” But you use dishes every day, and you don’t have the energy to fight this battle every day. This way of doing care tasks does not work.

The irony is that care tasks can only be caring when they are morally neutral. If changing your sheets means nothing morally, then the decision to change them from a motivation of kindness to yourself takes you from neutral to “wow that feels good!” You didn’t have to do it but you did. It’s the same concept behind why you feel so loved when a partner chooses to do something kind for you when they didn’t have to. If you know someone is doing something because they have to, it doesn’t have much positive impact. It works the same way with your relationship to yourself.

You do not have to earn the right to rest, connect, or recreate. Unlearn the idea that “chores” (a/k/a care tasks) must be totally complete before you can sit down. Care tasks are a never-ending list, and if you wait until everything is done to rest, you will never rest.

As children, many of us are taught we cannot rest or recreate until our chores are done. This is because our parents desire to teach us the good values of responsibility, delayed gratification, care for our environment, and respect for our family. This arrangement works quite well because as a child your chores are finite. Usually a short list: make your bed, take out the trash, and fold your laundry, etc. So we finish this list and move on without guilt. However, when we become an adult, soon this list of care tasks is not finite. It is a never-ending list of tasks that repeat themselves daily. How many of us have internalized the message that we cannot move on to rest or recreate until this list is done? And if we do we feel guilt. How will we raise our children (or re-parent ourselves) to learn both responsibility and rest?

Maids are not moral and therefore are not something to be deserved.

You do not exist to maintain a space of static perfection. Care tasks exist for one reason only....to make your body and space functional enough for you to easily experience the joy this world has to offer.