On housework

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

I’m really not surprised the kids haven’t bee wanting to help with the housework lately.

Firstly I’ve been yelling at them almost constantly. Secondly there’s been this pervasive, pointless obsession with “getting shit done” to the point where my lovely husband would much rather force them to watch a video and “get shit done” as quicky as possible because he’s sick of [everything] and keeps repeating the “getting shit done” mantra when I point out that most of the reason kids probably don’t feel so inclined to help with the housework was precisely because they weren’t allowed to and then al of a sudden were forced to rather than growing into it as part of life and how you live in a family unit.

The last couple of nights I’ve been up too late and was thus short tempered. Today I was too caught up in the “getting shit done” ridiculousness and again yelled a lot. Mostly at Cub because every time I was in a different room he’d teleport to the pantry and throw some random object (usually an onion but recently also a pair of baby shoes and the brush part of the dustpan-and-brush set).

Now I’m wondering when the hell I got so uptight. I used to be pretty relaxed about everything and quite happy to let the kids help with the housework even though it made everything take longer and a lot of the time, especially when they were just learning how to sweep and mop and dust and whatnot they tended to make a bigger mess.

The lack of spotlessness though seemed to put a bit of a strain on my relationship, which I think is where I then tried to make it cleaner to make him happy but it made me extremely depressed as keeping showroom house takes a hell of a lot more effort than I care to put into a house. I’m not house proud by any stretch, the state of the house does not affect my mindset at all and I have a lot of other things that I prefer to be doing.

The words of wisdom I got was that I would just have to put off some things until this mythical time when the kids were older. In other words put off the stuff that made me happy and stopped me from being depressed (web work and project work, which is all I do now, everything else I have ever loved has been put off til this mythical time when I’ll have more time, so maybe when I’m 85 and too decrepit to be able to do anything).

Anyway I had a cleaner house with a happier husband but more depressed me and sadder kids who were getting yelled at all the time, which then ended up with very short-lived happiness on husband’s part.

So in the nicest possible way, fuck “getting things done” with a red hot poker. It’ll get done when it bloody well gets done. The kids are having a great time drawing on the floor with the Oates mop. The eucalyptus floo cleaner I squirted into the bucket (and hoping it doesn’t count as a chemical) smells nice. They can spray stuff with the Orange Power as it’s not likely to make their skin fall off (it doesn’t seem to bother me anyway) and spread grime around with their cleaning cloths. There will be less of it for me to pick up as they’re ot terrible at cleaning.

Other people can keep showroom houses if they so desire, I like my house clean but looking like we do stuff. So there :)~

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License