How To Keep House While Drowning
A Gentle Approach While Cleaning and Organizing
How To Keep House While Drowning – 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 mom’s 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.
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:
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 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.
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