I Will Not Clean For You
The Importance of Seeing Household Tasks as Self-Care
For most of my life, my relationship with cleaning has been one of domestic torture. It’s not that I don’t like when things are clean. It does help my ADHD brain when my external environment doesn’t have the same chaos as my internal environment. When things get out of control, I tell myself I HAVE to clean. I have often asked myself where to start. How do I balance cleaning responsibilities with other responsibilities as well as selfcare. But one question I never really asked myself recently is,
“Is cleaning a responsibility or is it selfcare?”
How Cleaning is Self-Care
Many people think of self-care as a bubble bath, a good book in a comfy chair, or a massage. While these things definitely fall under the self-care umbrella, and having all three in one day may just be what heaven is like, there is more to it than that. When most of us learned to clean, it was with the purpose of pleasing someone else, usually a parent. With women, this is often taken further as many areas of society still expect women to be the domestic keepers of households. Domestic “chores” are done to please husbands, the neighbors, to make sure the kids’ friends don’t report less than tidiness. Some can make a clear and easy shift from cleaning according to what others expect and…
