I used to hate a messy house. I was a card-carrying member of the “overdo it” club. I am actively recovering from my need to over-clean. If I’m honest, I’ll admit I am working through my need to be an over-doer of all things. And I am here to help you join me in this blissful place.
For a very long time, I did too much; too much cleaning, too much cooking, too much life organizing, too much of all the things. I was the living breathing example of the ultimate stressed out Black woman. As the statistics around chronic illnesses show, that doesn’t tend to end well for us.
For the last 2-3 years, I have chosen to dramatically change my approach to parenting while adulting.
Well, ok, in the spirit of full transparency, I was forced to change.
Neglecting the parts of adulting that suck started out of necessity.
In early 2020, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. Within a week or two of his diagnosis, a global pandemic was officially declared.
Schools announced they would shut down and my children would need to complete their coursework at home.
My husband would need invasive surgery and require several weeks of recovery, treatment, and follow-up appointments while my children would need supervision and help with school work.
Mandatory quarantines were announced. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t hire any additional help with cleaning the house or managing yard work. We lived on a beautiful property with a long driveway for shoveling and a great big lawn for mowing. All in a lovely area that, at the time, had next to no takeout, meal, or grocery delivery services.
On the plus side, I worked for myself which I was able to put on hold. And we were fortunate enough to have great benefits and the support of my husband’s company to focus on his recovery. Plus the kid’s sports were canceled so I didn’t have 5-6 days a week of practices to get to.
That was something.
But still, I would be solo parenting, through a pandemic, in quarantine with the kids home all day while caring for my high-risk and immobile husband.
Even my over-doer brain comprehended that something about how I typically managed home and life was going to have to give.
It turned out that everything gave. And it was fine.
We settled into our new “routine” – and I certainly use that term loosely – and things changed. A lot.
Cooking the kind of well-balanced dinner I usually aspired to was just not possible. While I was the tribute selected for grocery store Hunger Games, it was not possible to go with any kind of regular frequency.
I got up up multiple times a night with my husband. I was falling asleep at odd hours and really didn’t know – or care – when my children went to bed.
And cleaning the house was – well, it was what it was. I ensured the areas my husband was in were sterile but I no longer tidied up incessantly, I just didn’t have the energy. The kids and I did our best, my son is a whiz at cleaning the toilets, and my daughter vacuums like a boss. But the house still looked like they lived there. A lot.
Then there was laundry – ugh. Thankfully since we weren’t going anywhere this was a much lighter load than usual. Yet we still we ended up with laundry mountain faster than I could have imagined.
And the kitchen. Again, the kids were home all the time, and seemed to always be eating so the countertop never seemed to stay clean. It seemed like crumbs and rings of juice self-replicated.
As for yard work well, we did much as we could. Luckily since it was early Spring there was occasionally snow that needed shoveling but no mowing or raking to do so overall, we managed to keep things respectable.
After all of this, imagine my surprise, when we crawled out of our time in this special place in the pandemic purgatory, to discover the house was still standing.
When we crawled out of our time in pandemic purgatory, the house was still standing.
The children had grown, evidenced by the new clothes and shoes they required – thus despite my irregular cooking and infrequent grocery shopping they had managed to be nourished.
Furthermore, even though I did not manage to consistently have the dishes washed every night and the kitchen clean before bed, I was not swallowed up by an angry Antiguan kitchen troll who took away my West Indian heritage ID card.
I had slowed down, done less of everything, and been more present. I didn’t feel guilty about it – because I knew it was what I needed to do to meet my priority.
Best of all, the world did not end.
Once I got a taste of sweet freedom, no way was I going back.
I had been ok with making surviving through one of the hardest times in my family’s life, my priority. However, once I had done so, it occurred to me that I could make thriving during the best times in our family’s life my priority.
Why couldn’t I slow down, do less, and be present, not when times were at their hardest but so that life overall would be less stressed, and less of the things that took me away from who, what, and where I wanted to be?
This was a turning point. A lesson that long after those early days of the pandemic stuck with me.
I could slow the f*ck down. I should slow the f*ck down.
I will be honest, it has taken some diligence and a lot of adjusting on my part. I always “had” to have the kitchen clean before going to bed.
There had been days when due to practices, work, or just life I would stay up until 1 am to clean the kitchen even though I worked the next day.
So yeah, I had a lot to unlearn. And I learned it the hard way.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: you can go to bed without doing the dishes. AND – you may want to sit down for this one: it’s totally ok for your house to be untidy, messy even.
I’m here to help. When you are ready there are a few things you have to do to embrace less-than-perfect life.
Step one: Give yourself permission to stop doing all the things.
When I’m between conference calls and I walk through my untidy kitchen to get another coffee, I actively choose to ignore the sticky ring on the counter.
I might pick up the dog’s water dish and refill it ignoring the pile of dishes resting in the sink and on the counter. To the untrained eye, this full sink might suggest a broken or nonexistent dishwasher, but I know this is not the case.
My dishwasher is totally in order. It’s my family that isn’t.
In the first few weeks of living your best untidy life, these moments present some difficult choices.
On the one hand, you might think – wow, I should be better at this by now.
Personally, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe my house shouldn’t look like the set of a sitcom about a deranged but loving family of hoarders. I wondered if perhaps my family should be more able – and willing- to see a load of laundry through to completion.
Maybe instead of the wine rack being well-stocked, the fruit crisper should be full. Maybe I should be confident I know what the hell a fruit crisper is.
But then I think, why should I be better at this? Why does it matter what a fruit crisper is if fruit sits in bags on the fridge shelves?
Step two: Let go of the lies you tell yourself .
There are so many lies we tell ourselves when we are pushing ourselves to burnout.
For me, I told myself I could not sleep if the kitchen was not cleaned before I went to bed.
I also believed that if the dishes were dirty I couldn’t cook, so I had to clean them so I could cook.
Lies.
Cleaning can be done as a family later. Or maybe not at all. The kids can eat cheese and crackers for dinner until you or someone else is willing, able, and ready to return the kitchen to a state of working order.
You are also lying to yourself when you say “cleaning helps you relax”. This is just some bullsh*t. Cleaning is not relaxing. It’s work. Cleaning is dirty, smelly, thankless, and repetitive work.
Even if you clean while listening to music you love, or drinking wine – those are coping mechanisms you are mistaking for joy.
You do not enjoy a clean house more than sitting and reading. If you do, you’re doing the sitting and reading part wrong. Bring wine in with you the next time you quietly read and see if you still “enjoy” cleaning, laundry, or cooking more.
You can just ignore the mess.
Stop it.
Yes, you can.
Also – please note, y’all know I am not talking about gross messy here, ok?
Decide what are your deal breakers – the hard lines you won’t cross that will cause you stress. For me that’s my bathrooms, they must be clean. But the laundry that is not done can be easily hidden in the spare bedroom or inside the dryer … shoes left in the front hall or that backpack that was not put away well, they will use it tomorrow… or it will end up in their room and I will shut the door and pretend it’s not there. Out of sight, out of mind.
Pick your battles.
Step three: Let go of the lies other people tell you about a messy house.
If anyone tells you that you should be “happy” with or grateful for a family to clean up after or a house to worry about – or any other bullsh*t remotely similar and intended to stoke the fires of your mama guilt – back out of the room slowly.
Scratch that, full-on turn your back to them and run – don’t walk – the f*ck out of the room.
A family member of mine saw this article I wrote about my pandemic life. When she reached out about it, she didn’t ask if I needed help or how my husband’s recovery was going.
She asked if I didn’t feel bad writing publicly about having a messy house.
So yeah – people might judge, but guess what? Even when my house was clean, I was judged for that!
Once, back in my cleaning heyday, someone said to me: “Wow, it must be nice to have so much time on your hands to keep your house this clean”.
At the time, I was working full-time, commuting an hour each way, with two kids in competitive sports and my husband traveling 50% of the year. Time to clean? I barely had time to pee. Yet, at the time, this passive-aggressive bullshit passed as a compliment to me. It meant someone was noticing I was damn near killing myself to keep up appearances.
Yey me!
Let it go.
If you live by other people’s standards you absolutely cannot win. The truth is that these folks are likely jealous af. But that’s a them problem.
These folks love reading but haven’t had time to read a book in years. They make no time for anything that brings them joy and have talked themselves into believing the lie that a clean home makes them happy. Deep down they’d rather find be reading My Sister, the Serial Killer instead of knowing exactly why Black girls Must Die Exhausted.
Eventually, you won’t let this nonsense sink in. Life gets better once you accept that other people holding you up as a matriarch while simultaneously tearing you down is one of the evils of patriarchy.
You can never win, so just move on.
It shouldn’t take a life crisis to give yourself permission to chill.
I had to nearly break before I checked my exhaustion, my frustration, and my unrealistic expectations at the door.
I am still recovering and occasionally will take a day to just do all the laundry. I love organizing closets and typically book a day off every turn of the season to sit in my happy place and organize.
But as for my obsession with order and perfection, for the most part, I’m better at realizing what matters to me and my family is not that my house is messy or tidy.
What matters to us is that my wine cabinet is reliably stocked and that even though I am still not sure what the hell a fruit crisper is, we are all ok.
