in February 2020 I had my second baby. Having struggled with
postpartum anxiety in a previous pregnancy and knowing that my husband’s new job was going to have him working seven days a week, I set up a comprehensive postpartum support plan for myself.
My toddler would go to preschool four days a week, family would rotate in every week for the first two months, a cleaning service
would come in once a month, and the new moms group I had helped form would drop off food and stop by to offer a hand. I was so proud of my plan—and it ended before it even began. Three weeks after I gave birth, covid lockdowns were announced and the entire thing collapsed overnight.
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The world got very small. Very fast. Days rolled into each other in a sleepless strand of breastfeeding difficulties, toddler meltdowns, and, soon, depression. Numb and overwhelmed by the isolation, I watched my house crumble around me. I tried every day to figure out how to take care of both babies’ needs at once, and I went to bed
every night haunted by my failure. As I lay in bed I dared to think things I was too frightened to say out loud: “What if I have made a
huge mistake? Maybe I am only capable of being a good mom to one kid. Maybe I’m not cut out for caring for two. I don’t understand how anyone does this. I am failing them.” One day my sister began
sending me funny TikTok videos. “You have to get on this video app. I feel like it would cheer you up to laugh.” I relented and even got the courage one day to make a post of my own: a video making light of the house turned disaster we had been living in. To the background of a viral audio that sang about all the shit that wasn’t going to get
done that day, I showed shots of my messy living room, my
overflowing sink, and the enchilada pan I had left to fend for itself for three days. “No pipe dreams here!” I quipped in the description,
tacking on the hashtag #breastfeeding. Surely, from the annals of the internet, moms everywhere would rally to chuckle in solidarity at how hard it is to have a newborn baby. Instead, I got this comment:
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There it was. The word that had haunted me for so much of my
life. As I was a messy and creative woman with undiagnosed ADHD, that word held a deep and cutting power. Like a snake, I felt the voice that visited me nightly crawl up my throat, wrap its body around my neck, and hiss into my ear, “See? I told you you were failing.” My
professional experience as a therapist had shown me time and time again that being overwhelmed is not a personal failure, but as most of you may know, the gulf between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts is often an insurmountable distance. In
that moment, I couldn’t help but absorb that lie that my inability to keep a clean home was direct evidence of my deep character failing of laziness.
In reality, this could not be further from the truth. I’d birthed a baby with no pain medication after meticulous research and planning; I’d
pumped breast milk every three hours to get her through her NICU stay and continued to wake six times a night to breastfeed after
bringing her home. I got up every day despite the postpartum
depression to care for my newborn and my toddler all day long. I even managed to make homemade enchiladas. And I did all of that while my vagina was literally being held together by stitches.
But to this person on the internet, because my home wasn’t clean, I was failing. I was lazy.
Were the dishes sky-high and the laundry unfinished? Yes. Did I feel like I was drowning when it came to accomplishing even simple tasks around my home? Absolutely.
I was tired.
I was depressed.
I was overwhelmed.
I was in need of help. But I was not lazy.
And neither are you.
what are care tasks and why are they so hard for people?
Care tasks are the “chores” of life: cooking, cleaning, laundry, feeding, dishes, and hygiene. These may seem like noncomplex tasks. But when you actually break down the amount of time, energy, skill, planning, and maintenance that go into care tasks, they no longer seem simple. For example, the care task of feeding yourself involves more than just putting food into your mouth. You must also make time to figure out the nutritional needs and
preferences of everyone you’re feeding, plan and execute a shopping trip, decide how you’re going to prepare that food and set aside the
time to do so, and ensure that mealtimes come at correct intervals.
You need energy and skill to plan, execute, and follow through on these steps every day, multiple times a day, and to deal with any
barriers related to your relationship with food and weight, or a lack of appetite due to medical or emotional factors. You must have the
emotional energy to deal with the feeling of being overwhelmed when you don’t know what to cook and the anxiety it can produce to create a kitchen mess. You may also need the skills to multitask
while working, dealing with physical pain, or watching over children.
Now let’s look at cleaning: an ongoing task made up of hundreds of small skills that must be practiced every day at the right time and manner in order to “keep going on the business of life.” First, you
must have the executive functioning to deal with sequentially
ordering and prioritizing tasks.1 You must learn which cleaning must be done daily and which can be done on an interval. You must
remember those intervals. You must be familiar with cleaning products and remember to purchase them. You must have the
physical energy and time to complete these tasks and the mental health to engage in a low-dopamine errand for an extended period of time. You must have the emotional energy and ability to process any sensory discomfort that comes with dealing with any dirty or soiled materials. “Just clean as you go” sounds nice and efficient, but most people don’t appreciate the hundreds of skills it takes to operate that way and the thousands of barriers that can interfere with execution.
Health and hygiene are far more complex than “eat healthy and shower.” You must possess the social skills to call the doctor and attend appointments. You must have the time and energy to fill
prescriptions and, again, the executive functioning to take the medications every day. Even tasks that appear to be secondhand thoughts to most people—brushing your teeth, washing your hair,
changing your clothes—can become almost impossible in the face of functional barriers.
In my work as a therapist I have seen hundreds of clients who
struggle with these issues, and I am convinced now more than ever of one simple truth: they are not lazy. In fact, I do not think laziness exists.
You know what does exist? Executive dysfunction, procrastination, feeling overwhelmed, perfectionism, trauma, amotivation, chronic pain, energy fatigue, depression, lack of skills, lack of support, and
differing priorities.
ADHD, autism, depression, traumatic brain injury, and bipolar and anxiety disorders are just some of the conditions that affect
executive function, making planning, time management, working memory, and organization more difficult, and tasks with multiple steps intimidating or boring.
There is an old saying that neurons that fire together wire together. It simply means that your brain can start associating
feelings with certain experiences. This means that if a person was in an abusive situation either as a child or in a domestic partnership
where cleaning or mess was used as punishment or was the subject of abuse then that person is going to have post-traumatic stress
around housekeeping and they may avoid it because it triggers their nervous system.
When barriers to functioning make completing care tasks difficult, a person can experience an immense amount of shame. “How can I be failing at something so simple?” they think to themselves. The critical internal dialogue quickly forms a vicious cycle, paralyzing the person even further. They are unlikely to reach out for help with these tasks due to intense fear of judgment and rejection. As shame and isolation increase, mental health plummets. Self-loathing sets in and motivation vanishes. Sadly, this is often compounded by critical and cruel comments that friends and family make. Being labeled as lazy cements the belief that struggling to complete these simple tasks is, at its core, a moral failure.
If you are crying (or wincing internally) right now, this book is for you. You are not lazy or dirty or gross. You are not a failure. You just need nonjudgmental and compassionate help.
slow, quiet, gentle
So how is this book different from other self-help books? For one, I don’t have a program; I have a philosophy: You don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.
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.
I arrived at this philosophy both through my training and work as a therapist and through my own experience of thinking, for decades,
that the way I presented myself and my home determined my worthiness as a person. Even when this motivated me to make
“positive” or “productive” changes, they didn’t solve my dislike of myself—and the “life improvements” didn’t stick for long.
As a teenager, I was so ferociously obsessed with being seen as worth saving that I tried to embody the tragically broken drug addict archetype of Nirvana fame. When I was sent to rehab for a year and a half at the age of sixteen, I was able to crawl out of the addiction but found myself just anxious to be thought of as the poster child of a “good client” as a substitute for genuine self-worth. Even a very real experience of religious faith was hijacked by my need to fill this hole. After becoming a missionary and attending seminary, I was quietly ashamed to discover that a majority of my motivation for
doing so was again to become a person who was seen as good enough by those around me.
I realized in my late twenties that I’d been playing out the same pattern over and over without realizing it: looking for a role to fill that would finally make me worthy of kindness and love and belonging.
When I viewed getting my life together as a way for trying to
atone for the sin of falling apart, I stayed stuck in a shame-fueled cycle of performance, perfectionism, and failure.
The year I spent stuck inside with my kids during the beginning of the pandemic, while painful in many respects, created an opportunity for me to reexamine my relationship with my space. Our feelings of
failure after not living up to the newest self-care movement or
organizational system stem from fundamental misunderstanding about what kind of journey we are on. There is a big difference
between being on a journey of worthiness and being on a journey of care. If you want to adapt the systems you read about because you feel like if you can finally get on top of your housework or have that rainbow-colored bookcase and perfectly matched socks you’ll finally
be a person worthy of kindness and love and belonging, you are always going to feel inadequate. Because you are never going to find those things that way. More than likely you are going to set up those systems, cosplay like an adult who has their life together, only to have all those new habits fall apart in a matter of days or weeks.
What we need here is a paradigm shift on how we look at ourselves and our space.
I’ll say it again: you don’t exist to serve your space; your space exists to serve you.
In this book, I’m going to help you find your way of keeping a functional home—whatever “functional” means for you. Together, we are going to build a foundation of self-compassion and learn how to stop negative self-talk and shame. Then, and only then, can we begin to look into ways to maneuver around our functional barriers. I have so many tips for how to clean a room when you are overwhelmed, how to hack motivation for times when you feel like doing nothing, how to organize without feeling overwhelmed, ideas for getting the dishes and the laundry done on hard days, and lots of creative hacks for working with a body that doesn’t always cooperate. And we are
going to do it without endless checklists and overwhelming routines.
As you embark on this journey I invite you to remember these words: “slow,” “quiet,” “gentle.” You are already worthy of love and
belonging. This is not a journey of worthiness but a journey of care.
A journey of learning how we can care for ourselves when we feel like we are drowning.
Because you must know, dear heart, that you are worthy of care whether your house is immaculate or a mess.
