How to Keep House While Drowning

by K.C. Davis

you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.

Lots of decisions are moral decisions, but cleaning your car regularly is not one of them. You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be very good at cleaning your dishes in a timely manner or have an organized home. How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.

Next time you are trying to talk yourself into doing a care task, what would it be like to replace the voice that says, “Ugh, I should really go clean my house right now because it’s a disaster,” with “It would be such a kindness to future me if I were to get up right now and do _______. That task will allow me to experience comfort, convenience, and pleasure later.” It isn’t a hack, really. It’s not a formula guaranteed to make you get up. Sometimes you may not get up even with the change in self-talk. But you know what? You weren’t getting up when you were being mean to yourself either, so at least you can be nice to yourself. No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

success depends not on having strong willpower, but in developing mental and emotional tools to help you experience the world differently.

Begin to notice how you speak to yourself on days when you feel you have fallen behind. You can set up the best systems in the world and they won’t change your life if you still hate yourself on days when you can’t keep up.

When we understand what really matters to us in terms of safety, comfort, and happiness, we can begin to let go of others’ judgments of how our spaces must look.

But with a functional rather than moral view, my brain may go, “Let’s sweep a path from the bedroom to the kitchen because I deserve to walk that path without tripping or getting dirt on my feet.” All of a sudden, the task isn’t about measuring up but instead about caring for self.

Trying to clean up every mess as it’s made fractures my attention span and makes me feel frazzled. The concentration it takes to keep track of every item I use and return it to its home immediately makes it difficult to enjoy the moment.

when you have functional barriers, things pile up fast. It’s not uncommon to suddenly find yourself in an overwhelming mess. The more you stare at it, the more defeated you feel, the less motivation you have, the more you avoid it, and the more it piles up.

This is me every single day

It’s stressful to try to summon up 100 percent of the momentum to do something while sitting on the couch. Let yourself use 5 percent energy to do 5 percent of the task. Maybe you keep going. Maybe you don’t. That’s okay. Anything worth doing is worth doing partially.

when I became a stay-at-home mom, I signed up to make sure my family always had clean clothes, not that they never had dirty ones.

Dude this is a revolutionary thought

Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here and we create mess. And if tomorrow’s mess on top of today’s mess is going to make my space not function for me, then it’s time to reset the space.

you are not responsible for saving the world if you are struggling to save yourself. If you must use paper plates for meals or throw away recycling in order to gain better functioning, you should do so.

You do not have to wait to care about your body to care for your body. In fact, caring for your body can often cause you to start liking it more.

One day I just start asking, “What if I am? What if I am deserving of kindness? What if I am worthy of love? What if I am someone who deserves a functioning space? What if I am allowed to make mistakes?” It doesn’t matter what you think the answer is. Just start making room for the possibility you are wrong when you say you aren’t worthy.

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.

right; even if you have the “easier” job, you still need rest. Care tasks by nature are fundamentally different from paid work. Not harder or easier. Different. They are cyclical and never ending. There is never a moment, especially in the care of children, when everything is “done” and you can clock out. Think of the “easiest” job you can imagine and ask yourself if you would want to work it sixteen hours a day while being on call overnight for 365 days a year. No person can do this and be healthy.

How we speak to each other, enjoy each other, and love each other in the million non–care task spheres of our lives sets a foundation of trust. Michael doesn’t wake up early to get kids ready for the day and that’s fine with me; I assume that means he needs the extra sleep. Likewise, our home is never picture-perfect when he comes home and that’s just fine with him; he assumes that means the kids and I must have had either a really fun or really difficult day.

I really really love and respect this take on teamwork

I want my kids to grow up to care for others and treat them fairly without being crushed by the false guilt of thinking their worth is tied to how much they can produce or contribute.

having a limited capacity is not the same as being entitled and accepting help is not the same as exploiting others.

If you have a particularly rude or pushy person in your life, you can use my favorite boundary phrase, which is “thank you for your concern, but I am not taking any feedback on this issue right now.”

“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.”

Ooooooop

The best way to do something is the way it gets done.

If a system never becomes easy or automatic for you, then it just means either the system isn’t the right one for you or you need more tips and tools to get the system to work. The issue is never that you are failing or not good enough.

a simple plan to keep a space livable is better than an overwhelming plan to keep a space perfect.

Striving to “be better” will exhaust the little energy you have, and it’s probably time better spent letting yourself cry and sleep and finding small pockets of joy to keep you going.

It is not their mental health you are responsible for but your own.

YUP

You don’t have to meet a diagnostic criterion to deserve to hire someone to help you with domestic tasks any more than you have to meet a criterion to not have to churn your own butter or knit your own sweaters.

Being kind to yourself while eating ice cream is healthier than hating yourself while eating a salad.

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.

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.