There are lots of ways to think about housework. One way is to view it as unending drudgery to be avoided at all costs. I thought of it this way most of my adult life, and let’s face it, there’s a lot of evidence to back this up.

You tidy up – people (often you) mess things up again. You do the dishes – more dirty dishes appear. You put through a load of laundry – it doesn’t seem to put a dent in the pile. You feed people then turn around and they’re ready to be fed again.

Housework can be a grind. I used to think about my never-ending task list and feel crushed and exhausted before I’d even done anything. I don’t recommend this. It doesn’t get you anywhere and it’s a miserable way to live.

If you’re feeling resentful and crushed by the never-ending nature of housework you have two choices:

1. Give up on it. Truly – just do as little as possible as you need to get by. Get some help. Do other things. Consciously decide that you want to avoid housework and do everything you can to get out of it. Remember your early 20s? How much housework did you actually do? You survived. Go back to that. Just stop thinking about it in that crushing way – that’s the miserable part. Give up on housework and be happy.
2. Change your mind and use the never-ending nature of housework for you instead of against you.

 

 

 

When I was at uni I lived in a flat with four other students. It was a wonderful old house, and we had a great time living together. The place was always a mess, bordering on filthy, but it didn’t matter. We were too busy socialising and working and studying and growing up to care.

Later I travelled and shared various flats with a couple of friends. We never had fixed systems for cleaning up, everyone would do bits and pieces here and there, and it seemed to work out OK. Sometimes I’d get frustrated, usually on Saturday mornings when I’d pick up or do a little cleaning, and I’d feel like I was the only one who ever did anything. I wasn’t a student anymore, and I didn’t want to live like one. I was sick and tired to coming home to a tip. If only the other people who lived there weren’t such slobs and would pick up after themselves.

In my late 20s I got a little flat of my own. It was in a fantastic area – in a beautiful central city street, close to the river and the park and fabulous shops – it was a tiny flat in a building that was waiting to be pulled down and rebuilt, which is how I could afford to live there. It was wonderful to have my own little space. It would be a cosy little haven with no one else to worry about. However a strange thing was happening. I was still coming home to a tip.  It took me a little while to figure it out – there was no one else living there I could blame. I was the slob.

I moved on and had a family and forgot about my cosy little flat. Now I was permanently living with three other people, and two of them at least were impossible to live with. They threw food, they messed up clothes, sometimes several outfits a day, they left pieces of Lego and My Little Ponies in strange and unpredictable places. As the years passed the nature of the mess changed (half-finished science experiments, endless paper dolls, extensive rock and shell collections), but the complaint in my head did not. Other people live here too – they can pick up for a change.

Then I remembered my little flat. I stopped blaming other people for the mess and paid attention to what I was doing. I wanted to make sure that I was picking up after myself before I started blaming others.  I noticed that finishing tasks and putting things away, even after all these years, still wasn’t something that come naturally to me. I was still a slob. OK, not the only slob, but I was kidding myself when I was blaming the entire mess on my husband and kids.

Don’t get me wrong – it can be incredibly hard when you feel like you are constantly picking up after other people. I have cried (more than once) from frustration with this. At times I have felt like I’m in some kind of dark fairytale – Rupunzel spinning away in the room with the endless straw – that every time I  finish (finally!) getting a room halfway decent malevolent pixies rush in  immediately to scatter their mess around and ruin my hard work.

There are positive things you can do to encourage/train/force the people you live with to take good care of the space you live in, but start with yourself first. Gently observe. Hopefully you’ll discover that you’re a little bit of a slob, which is so much better than discovering you are, after all, blameless and perfect. If you’re a little bit of a slob you can give up wishing those other people could pick up after themselves for a change, and start the challenge of learning to pick up after yourself.

Housework is just not my thing. I used to say this all the time – usually when there was housework to be done and I wasn’t doing it.

There’s some pride attached to this, because if housework is just not your thing then:

• You’re probably too smart too clean
• You’re not one of those people who is stupid and boring with nothing better to do
• You can wait for someone else to take care of it.

It doesn’t make sense to claim that housework is just not your thing. Just like if you inhabit a body, you have to feed and water it, if you have a home, you have to take care of it. You might take bad care of it, you might be doing the bare minimum you need to get by, but it’s part of the fabric of life. You can’t just opt out by breezily deciding it’s not your thing. It’s not going to go away.

I started replacing the word ‘housework’ with some other words:

• Life is just not my thing
• Growing up is just not my thing
• Taking good care of myself is just not my thing
• Nurturing my family is just not my thing.

Then I changed my mind. I decided to stop thinking that housework was just not my thing. I decided to make it my thing.

Mornings used to be complete chaos in my house. We’d be rushing around, trying to find clothes in the laundry mountain , scrabbling to get food into ourselves and the kids, and I felt like everything I needed to do involved fighting through disorganised, unfinished, piles of amorphous STUFF.

I would kiss my husband goodbye, drop my son off at kindy, and walk home with a sinking feeling. I would turn the key in the lock, walk back into the mess, and think: Housework SUCKS!

The truth is, it wasn’t the housework that sucked. It was the lack of housework that sucked. When I had more energy, and started trying to do my household tasks mindfully instead of resentfully, things finally turned around. I got a little better at running my household, I felt on top of things, and liked my home a lot better. I would turn the key in the lock, and walk in, and feel happy to be home.

If you find yourself looking around your home and thinking “HOUSEWORK SUCKS!” I’d like to suggest this might be because you’re not doing it, or you’re not doing it as well as you could, or you’re doing it in a way which isn’t working for you. Maybe it’s a lack, not a surplus, of housework which is the problem.

Many times I have looked around at the mess and chaos and disorder of my home and thought how awesome it would be if I could just pay someone else to take care of this crap.

How awesome it would be if I could instantly arrive at the end of the long to-do list in my head without having to do any of the work required to get there, if all the tedious jobs were done and I wasn’t the one who had to do them.

However I am, (in Julia Child’s words), a servantless cook. I am also a servantless cleaner, a servantless driver, a servantless mother, and a servantless everything else.

There is no Mary Poppins or knight in shining armour or Samantha from Bewitched coming to wriggle her nose and make everything tidy and shiny. There is no help coming. I am the help.

My younger self would not believe this, but I no longer fantasise about getting a cleaner. I don’t want to pay someone else to clean up my mess. I don’t want to pay someone else to take care of my home or my family or myself. I’ve got so much out of learning to manage my home better, and I know I have a lot more to learn. My household tasks are my learning opportunities, my gifts to give, mindfulness practice, a constant renewable source of daily pleasure and satisfaction. If I paid someone else to do them I’d miss out on all that.

My younger self is in a state of shocked disbelief, so let me put this another way: if you’re no good at managing your home paying someone else to do it won’t help you in the long run. It’s like broke people who win Lotto and are back to where they were after a few years. If you pay someone else to take care of your home without learning to do it yourself you’re still living on the edge of chaos and you are giving up your power to others. You’re missing out on an opportunity to get better and stronger in ways you can’t imagine.

Household help is awesome – but managing your home well, learning how to truly inhabit your home, finally deciding to grow up and clean up your own mess – this is better.

I used to think I was too smart to clean.

I had an MA. I was an A student. I’d spent years at university reading Heidegger and Aristotle and Kant and Nietzsche and old English. I had better things to turn my attention to, things which were a far better use of my brain and talents than stupid housework and stupid cleaning.

When I thought I was too smart to pay attention to housework, naturally I didn’t pay attention to it. Later, when I did start to pay attention, to notice how my house felt and how it ran, and tried to run it well, I realised how much my lack of attention had cost me.

What could be better to pay attention to than your immediate surroundings and how you want to live? A home which is clean and well managed brings calm, joy, and all manner of good things to you. Isn’t that worth cultivating and paying attention to?

One of the many surprising things I’ve learnt is that keeping a house doesn’t need to take a great deal of time or energy. In fact, the better you are at it, the less time it takes, and the management of it seems to give you time rather than take it from you. However what it does take a lot of is attention. Attention is the most important ingredient. When you believe that you have better things to turn your attention to (Big Brother, French philosophy, pretty much anything and everything else), then you starve your home of the one thing it needs and benefits from most.

What I realise now is that it’s not an either/or proposition. It’s not a choice you have to make: use your brain and live in squalor, or pay attention to the cleaning and somehow become a brain dead moron. You don’t have to choose one. You can choose both.

I used to think I was too smart to pay attention to the running of my home. Hopefully I’m smarter now.

Housework used to make me feel frustrated. I thought I should be doing something else with my time – something better, more worthy, more important.  I would put another load of baby clothes in the washing machine and I would feel dissatisfied. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything valuable, that I should be doing something else. Something like curing cancer, saving lives, inventing new technologies, or making art. Something that mattered to the world at large.

The world at large doesn’t care if your pantry is full and everyone in your household has clean clothes to wear. The world at large couldn’t give a stuff that the kids books are coversealed and ready for the new term and you have a gift wrapped and ready for that 7^th birthday party on Saturday. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

Here are some other things the world at large doesn’t care about: your daughter getting into trouble at school, your mother getting sick, your husband leaving you, your best friend’s son being diagnosed with autism. Just because something isn’t important to the world at large doesn’t mean it’s not important to you.

It doesn’t matter to the world if I’ve run out of coffee, or if I can find the kids goggles before swimming, or if my pantry is messy, but I have finally recognised and accepted that these things matter to me. They might not matter to the world at large, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important and worth paying attention to.

When we’re dissatisfied with our household tasks, I think part of the reason is that we don’t want to acknowledge that these small domestic things are the fabric of our life. We’re seduced into thinking that life, REAL LIFE, is happening somewhere else. It’s bigger and brighter and a lot more important, and it’s definitely happening outside the home.

Having a home that is clean, tidy, organised and well-run can make more of a difference to the daily happiness and wellbeing of you and your family than just about anything else. I don’t know about you, but I’m not curing cancer or fixing global warming on a daily basis. I’m taking care of my family and doing my best to create a happy home. It might not be important to the world at large, but it is important to me.

There’s a fridge magnet which says “Stupid women have tidy homes”. I used to think this was funny and I used to think it was true.

Having a clean house: boring! Having clean and ironed clothes: stupid! Taking care of the space you live in: what a waste of time!

My friends and I were dismissive of women who were good at taking care of their homes. The funny thing is, we didn’t know many actual people who were good at this, so we were mainly being dismissive of imaginary people. These imaginary women were 50’s style housewives who were nothing like us and who we had to avoid being like at all costs.

Looking back now I can see the few good housekeepers I knew in person weren’t boring, or stupid, and they were getting more done in the world than I was. They had more fun and they were a lot less stressed.

There was never a correlation between being good at managing a home and being stupid. However there was a clear correlation between being good at managing a home and being calmer, less flustered, and more present in the world.

I was the stupid one. Learning how to take care of your home has immediate tangible benefits for you and the people you love and share your life with. Mocking people who have mastered this is stupid. Mocking imaginary people who have mastered this is REALLY stupid. If you have a home, the smart thing to do is to learn to manage it well.

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.