A few years ago I completely changed the way I thought about housework, and I know this sounds like a cliché, but it truly did change my life. I can trace the change to one thought: if housework is so easy, why am I so bad at it?

I used to think housework was easy. I thought it was menial and trivial and anyone could do it. I thought it wasn’t important, that it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t worth paying attention to.

Managing my home has been many things: tedious, difficult, frustrating, challenging, depressing, energising, joyful, satisfying. Sometimes it has been all of these things in one day.

One thing it has never been is easy.

I used to be miserable in my home and ashamed to let anyone in to the mess and chaos of my life. A big part of my misery stemmed from this false idea that housework was easy. I used to think there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t seem to manage this trivial easy thing.

I was wrong. Managing a household, like raising a family, is not easy. It is not like a neverending television ad. There may some television ad moments, but these moments are few and far between. Managing a home well requires dedication, and persistence, and a range of skills, many of which I did not have.

I asked myself: what if managing a home wasn’t easy? What if it was really hard? That would explain why I was so bad it. I wasn’t missing some tidy gene, there wasn’t something wrong with me, I was just trying to do something really, really hard.