care tasks are cyclical

when I became a stay-at-home mom, I signed up to make sure my family always had clean clothes, not that they never had dirty ones.

This is your gentle reminder that mounds of dirty laundry are not a failure. It doesn’t matter if you’re “never caught up on laundry.” It only matters if everyone has clean clothes to wear when they need them. If your laundry system produces clean clothes, then it’s working. If you’d like to make it more efficient, then get creative! But remember

that upgrading your laundry system can only increase your functioning, not your worth.

you do not have to line up every care cycle

This was a comment I received on one of my videos on TikTok where I was talking about cleaning my house. It’s always funny to me how “clean house” and “dirty house” are presented as these absolute states with no gray area in between.

You are not morally obligated to make every single care cycle line up at the “just done” state and hold it there always. As I write this my kitchen island is messy and my living room floors are immaculate.

My laundry hasn’t been put away for three days and my playroom is dust-free. Eventually I will get around to cleaning the island, and by then there will be dust in the playroom and dirt on the floors. My kids will come home from school today and get busy destroying the

playroom while I put up the laundry. Not everything has to be clean at the same time.

I could exhaust myself making it look like a showroom all the time, but then I wouldn’t have time to take my kids to go get Halloween costumes today, or talk to a friend on the phone for an hour, or write this book.

why clean when it will look like this tomorrow?

A really common defeating message that we say to ourselves is “What’s the point of picking up? It’s just going to look like this again tomorrow.” I find this stems from that binary view of care tasks that they can be only either done or not done and that done is the

superior state. But keeping everything done isn’t the point. Keeping things functional is the point because here’s the thing: it will look like that again tomorrow only if I clean it today. If I don’t clean it, it will be even more messy because we live here and we create mess. And if tomorrow’s mess on top of today’s mess is going to make my space not function for me, then it’s time to reset the space.

I tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.

Shortcut: skip to chapter 13.