How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

But to this person on the internet, because my home wasn’t clean, I was failing. I was lazy.

Internalizing this belief will help you a) shift your perspective of care tasks from a moral obligation to a functional errand, b) see what changes you actually want to make, and c) weave them into your life with minimal effort, relying not on self-loathing but on self-compassion.

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.”

And occasionally mess means I’m struggling with depression or stress.

i want you to stop caring for your home. You might think it’s important to care for your home, but your home is an inanimate object—it’s building materials and paint. It might need maintenance, but it doesn’t deserve to be cared for. You are a person. You deserve to be cared for. I want your home to care for you. How do we do that? By focusing on function.

Cleaning up the breakfast mess may only take ten minutes, but in that time my oldest has taken her pajamas off on the kitchen floor, pulled out a box of LEGOs, and fallen and scraped her knee. Cleaning up breakfast, picking up floor pj’s, tidying LEGOs, and getting a Band-Aid cannot physically happen all at once. Just as I get done kissing boo-boos and putting clothes on the oldest, the youngest has asked for more milk and shat her pants. The list of things that needs to be cleaned simply grows faster than any one person can move. Not to mention I must get these children out the door in the next five minutes or we won’t have time to go to the park before nap time.

This is what the constant chaos in my head feels like.

This right here is an abusive relationship and someone needs to step in. That someone is you. Wait, you are bullying yourself and you are going to step in? Yes. There is a third voice in there. Think back to the last kind thing you did for another human or animal. Remember the compassion you felt? The gentleness with which you helped them? That person. This is your compassionate self. This self feels empathy for others because they are worthy of love, and this self wants to give it to them.

Let yourself get a little done. Say, “I am going to do one dish.” Often you’ll find that motivation kicks in after you have already started.

timed cleaning One of my favorite tools is the visual timer. It helps in so many ways! Sometimes when we think of a task that seems unpleasant, like unloading the dishwasher, our brain tells us that the task is going to take much longer than it actually does. Other times tasks like cleaning our bedroom feel so huge it’s overwhelming to even start. In those instances it’s helpful to set a timer for a small increment of time that you feel you can stomach. Usually between five and fifteen minutes.

When you are cleaning your bedroom, the timer gives you permission to stop after fifteen minutes regardless of whether the task is done.

regardless of how tightly we embrace the functional view of care tasks, the reality is there are seasons of life when there are more care tasks to do than there is time in the day (or energy in the body). Work, relationships, activism, care tasks, hobbies, and, for some, parenting all compete for that same time and energy.4 Even if we understand that doing everything perfectly is impossible, most of us still have a hard time shaking the constant guilt about how things should look. It can be a struggle deciding exactly what to prioritize when time and energy are short.

“Why am I folding baby onesies?” I had no answer. They didn’t really wrinkle and even if they did it’s not like anyone cares if a baby is wearing a wrinkled onesie. I’d probably change it four times before lunch anyways. “These… don’t… need to be folded.” I said it out loud, bracing myself for… the laundry police? I’m not sure. There were rules to laundry, but for the first time I stopped asking myself how laundry should be done and started questioning in what way laundry could be functional for me.

“Almost none of this… almost none of this needs to be folded.”

Oh my god. What other rules am I following that don’t make sense?

So throw away what you think care tasks “should” look like and work towards a way of doing them that works for you. The goal is not to do them to Martha Stewart’s standards. Your goal should be to get something functional out of your space. So while doing a pile of laundry may feel like an accomplishment, it is valid to launder three pairs of underwear as a form of self-care. You have full permission to do a little, do it with shortcuts, and do the bare minimum. Perfectionism is debilitating. I want you to embrace adaptive imperfection. We aren’t settling for less; we are engaging in adaptive routines that help us live and function and thrive. Good enough is perfect.

If you experienced neglect and abuse as a child and that abuse happened in a very dirty or cluttered environment, you may feel it is your utmost duty as a parent to never let your kids feel the way you did as a child. It’s important to remember that your children do not have the same emotional context around mess or dirt as you. Mess to you was chaos and danger. It was a lack of safety, and being unloved and uncared for. No parent wants their children to feel this way, which is why you may go overboard ensuring there is never any mess or clutter—maybe even to the point of exhaustion or emotional distress. Let me offer you some comfort. Your children will never experience mess the way you did if you are safe and loving. Toys on the floor will mean nothing to them but a parent who cared enough to buy them. Dishes in the sink will represent to them a parent who always fed them. Stains on their clothes will remind them of how cool it is to have a parent who lets them use art supplies or play in the mud.

Or my personal favorite: “The key for me being able to begin to run a functioning home was when I stopped talking to myself the way you are talking to me right now.”

Here is what to do if you find yourself not doing your closing duties list: (1) Make a shorter list. Even if there is just one thing on it. (2) Change what is on the list. If you have things on there you think you are “supposed” to do but don’t really care about, of course you will not feel motivated. Put something on there you really care about. Maybe you should do the dishes every night so you don’t get bugs. But maybe you actually care about having coffee ready to brew first thing in the morning. (3) Change the timing of when you do closing duties. Perhaps it works better if you do them right as you walk in the door from work. Don’t even take off your shoes; just roll right into it. Maybe doing them as opening duties suits you better because you have more energy and motivation then. This isn’t about doing what you are supposed to; it’s about being kind to yourself. You can grow and change the list once you have gained momentum.

I so often look back on these seasons of limping through and say to myself with tenderness, “Wow, I was really doing the best I could with what I had.” And that’s the funny thing about doing your best; it never feels like your best at the time. In fact, it almost always feels like failing when you’re in it. When I look back at sixteen-year-old me in rehab, sobbing alone and feeling worthless, constantly being told I wasn’t making enough progress, I see now she was doing her best. I sometimes wish someone at the time could have seen it and told me so. But that’s okay. I tell her myself now all the time.

i blame PE class as the first offender. I really do. At such an early age kids who love to play active games are made to run laps instead. Okay, maybe that isn’t every school, but it was certainly the first time I remember someone divorcing physical activity from fun and creating the demon that is exercise. Then diet culture came along and told us the reason we should be engaging this exercise is primarily to keep our bodies thin and attractive. These things have really wrecked our relationship to joyful body movement. If you are motivated to an activity by body shame, experience the activity as a chorus of unpleasant sensory experiences (pain, boredom, and sweat are my three least favorite things in the world), and then end with no immediate results, why on earth would you like that activity or want to do it ever again?

even as my journey to hack the house started making care tasks easier for me, I still had days when I just… couldn’t. After a particularly long stretch of no preschool, one of my kids got sick and I woke up feeling completely fatigued and unable to motivate. We stayed in our pj’s, watched Trolls five times, and I put us all to bed (myself included) at 7:00 pm.

I woke up the next morning feeling rested and ready to have a day that was more organized. I felt motivated and able to do some care tasks that day and even catch up on what was left undone from the previous day. A big part of that was how I chose to speak to myself about the day before. If I viewed a day of screen time and not doing any scheduled care tasks as a failure, it would be a lot harder to “get back into routine.” But I didn’t. Trolls and pj’s day was a day when we were being gentle with ourselves, allowing ourselves to take it easy and rest—a day of kindness. Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.