care tasks are morally neutral

morality concerns itself with the goodness or badness of your character and the rightness or wrongness of decisions. 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.

When you view care tasks as moral, the motivation for completing them is often shame. When everything is in place, you don’t feel like a failure; when it’s messy or untidy, you do.

If you are completing care tasks from a motivation of shame, you are probably also relaxing in shame too—because care tasks never end and you view rest as a reward for good boys and girls. So if you ever actually let yourself sit down and rest, you’re thinking, “I don’t

deserve to do this. There is more to do.”

This is an incredibly painful way to live. It affects your entire life: your mental health, your relationships, your friendships, your work or schooling, your physical health. It is impossible for the kindness or affirmation of others to penetrate your heart when you are thinking, “If you only knew…” But it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, I have very good news for you.

Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman,

spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.