These tips are for the wrong person
My son is now old enough to watch a lot of fun, grown up stuff. But, he’s still just 13. I asked my husband if we could dial it back a little. He has the rest of his life to watch and relate to grown up stuff and only a short time to be a kid. I want to include shows and movies starring 13, 14, and 15 year old boys who aren’t emulating adult narratives. I’ve asked my husband to rent Malcom in the Middle from Vidiots or Videotheque. I can think of many movies for this age group that star girls, and we watch these too, but I’d like to add more teen boy protagonists. What have you seen that fits the bill?
Motivational housecleaning tips are fun. I love them. I eat them up and try them all out. But I don’t give them because these tips generally assume that a female reader is the one who should be doing the job. I would never assume this about you. This is why my tips are about lightening your load or making housework easier in some way.
It’s great when things are clean, but it’s not something we should always be thinking about. Motivational cleaning tips accumulate in our minds and make housework a constant pressure. They seem to assume you’re procrastinating, that you just need a push to be less lazy and have a clean house. The problem is usually time, energy, equal division of labor, and lack of a good framework, not motivation. If you’re the only one doing the housework, please do not set a timer on yourself.
Who motivational cleaning tips are for
Motivational cleaning tips are fine if you live alone. My favorite is: Tidy the kitchen while you boil water for tea. I just did this because I have been alone for a few days, and the mess is my own. Maybe that’s why it only took 4 minutes to get the job done. When I’m on my own I take a break from the schedule and bounce around more. But the pressure eventually trickles back in, and I return to the schedule because it relieves me from thinking about housework.
The problem with pressure
If you signed up for Neurospicy Housekeeping, odds are pressure doesn’t work well on you. It’s even unpleasant for diagnosed neurotypicals. If you feel a vague, constant pressure to clean and follow a million housekeeping tips, you will never want to do housework. It’s as if all of your energy goes to coping with constant low level pressure. There are so many tips, following you around and weighing on you. Even if you complete one or two, you feel no real relief.
The solution
The solution is to exorcise all the tips. Define the tasks. Pick the ones that matter, distribute them evenly among all members of the household, and let go of the rest. Only clean the kitchen while you brew your tea if it’s your task and its designated time. It’s either time for the task or it isn’t, and if you miss the time, it will come around again.
I’ll help your household define and divvy up the tasks to create your Housekeeping Chart in future posts (and in my book in 2028).
These paintings show the same location about a decade apart. I painted the one on the left as a new mother, using paints I found at a garage sale. During that time, I had to paint whenever I could using whatever I could find. There wasn’t time to plan and shop for materials. Today, this painting is flaking away because of this. My early work focused more on specific objects, like pipes. Then, I transitioned to “roof lines,” compositions found where buildings meet the sky. This painting combines both object focus and roof lines. My recent work, right, utilizes complex compositions that include sky, building, ground, and even people. To be honest, I find the complexity daunting, and for my next body of work, plan to zoom in again. You can see how the building changed over the years. The vent pipes are gone, but the covered skylight was still there. If I remember correctly, it used to be a toy factory, and then it became Withrow Bros. Today, this is the location of LA River Studios.
Thank you for reading. My book comes out in 2028. Follow my work here:
If you prefer, read on Substack.
Click here to see my rat doll sewing pattern.
Keep reading:
