Say no to a life of unpaid drudgery

~ Housework Disciple ~ Leave a comment

I was picking up some furniture in my station wagon, and the sales guy stood by holding a big flat pack box while I rearranged a few things and put down the back seats to make room. He was good looking and in his early twenties, and couldn’t hide his horror when I took out the kids’ car seats to reveal a dirty, tacky, mouldy mixture of crumbs, dirt, sticks, and something I think was a pear. There was a lego man half submerged in the gunk, a smiley head with a hard hat sticking out with one outstretched arm like he was signalling for a lifeguard to come and rescue him from the sludge.

When I got home I cleaned it up, as I have done many times before, getting in there down the back of the seat, scrubbing away, vaguely having a go with a series of different methods and techniques, none of which really worked, but somehow together made the back seat look approximately clean and hygienic.

There’s not a lot of romance in this.

You can say no to a life of unpaid drudgery by just saying no to housework. Don’t do it – or do the bare minimum you need to get by. Unfortunately, as we’ve ascertained, this means you miss out on the (substantial) benefits and pleasures of having a pleasant home that nurtures and supports you.

You can also say no to a life on unpaid drudgery by changing your mind about the drudgery part. There are as many ways to take care of your home as there are ways to live. When I imagine myself doing the housework I can see myself sighing – getting it over with as quickly as I can – dragging myself along and forcing myself to do it. There’s no fun in that.

Can’t you imagine yourself as something other than a household drudge? You can be all earth mothery, Martha Stewarty, a home executive with ruthless efficiency, a paragon of Scandi cool or French chic, you can see yourself as flowing energy blessing the world around you as you move through your days. You can listen to whatever music you like, podcast interesting conversations from around the globe, learn Hindi or Hungarian as you go. No one is the boss of you. You can be whoever you choose – so choose a better option than drudge. Isn’t that more fun?

Housework is boring

~ Housework Disciple ~ Leave a comment

When I was at home with small children, I would wake up in the morning and think about my day and what was ahead of me and I would feel so bored it hurt.

The picking up, the feeding people, the putting yet another load of laundry through the machine – I was screaming in my head with the repetition and inevitability of it all.

I look back on those days now and I don’t think the housework itself was boring. It was the way I thought about the housework which was boring.

I was always running through a list in my mind of unfinished tasks,  and adding to that list constantly, and although I was always adding to the list it somehow seemed to be essentially unmoving and unchanging. There was always a load of laundry to put on. There were always people to feed. There were always things to clean and fix and pick up and put away.

Thinking about that list all the time was really boring. It made me boring. I was bored with myself.  Just writing about that neverending list I used to have in my head is boring to me now, and I feel a little shiver of horror at the terrible familiarity of this list which ran through my head for so many days and weeks and years and which I’ve only recently escaped from.

There are plenty of things people do every day which don’t feel boring. I brush my teeth morning and night and I just do it without thinking about it. I get in my car and turn the key in the ignition – I must have performed this small action thousands of times, and the outcome is always the same. It never occurs to me to consider this boring. I’ve certainly never dreaded it, the way I’ve dreaded emptying the dishwasher or folding a load of laundry.

I’ve never had the thought: Oh God – another day and I have to turn that key in the ignition yet again. Yet the mechanical task of putting the key in the ignition and turning it is not that different from lifting clothes into the washing machine and turning the button to ‘Quick wash’.

The difference, for me, was in how I thought about the tasks. I had to shift the way I thought about housework, and when I did this, my life at home and my quality of life changed for the better.

I am writing this for my younger self, and I wonder if she would believe me if I could tell her that housework could become a source of pleasure, interest and joy in her life. She would probably think I’d gone completely mad, joined a cult, or been brainwashed in some terrible Stepford wife/Martha Stewart takeover which eradicated my true self. The unexpected truth is that changing my mind about housework didn’t eradicate my true self but somehow strengthened it, clarified it, and given me a peace and confidence I wasn’t expecting.

If you are living in complete chaos and hating the stupid boring repetitive tasks you are stuck doing every day – stay with me. I’m not sure exactly what it was that helped me change my mind but this blog is my attempt to figure it out.