Post-Estrangement Housekeeping
Objects are naughty when I own them. Books helped me tame my mind and space.
My mom didn’t pass on many housekeeping skills to me. Family lore contained tales of her organizing my three teen half-siblings into a military cleaning operation, but by the time I came around, she was exhausted.
Bipolar and unmedicated, Mom kept house in the manner of a bipolar, unmedicated feminist: erratically, frenzy alternating with laxity, and without any enthusiasm that wasn’t spurred by anger.
She would ignore me for weeks on end, during which I created a safe burrow out of cereal bowls with the spoons stuck to them, papers, rubber bands, art supplies, clothes that were both dirty and clean, pens, notebooks and chip bags. Then when she snapped into gear, she’d descend on my burrow and clean it herself in a flurry. I would try to clean it, but to do so made my brain fuzzy, and the insulation that the mess-burrow gave me was gone.
So I learned a process where I could go without tidying for a really long time, tunneling in on literally anything besides staying tidy, until I reached a state of self-disgust and spun around like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil in whatever room or dwelling I was in until it was clean.
When I am in a state of anxiety and/or depression, like I was when my parents were dying and my siblings were blowing up my phone with threats and demands, I prioritize having clean toilets, sinks, floors, and counters; and tend to let the dusting go. A problem with letting dust go is that it eventually turns to grime and one can’t just dust, one has to wipe and polish. Another problem is that it turns out a lot of people are allergic to dust, including myself and my child.
For myself, as for many a childhood trauma survivor; the dust, grime, and dirt are tied up in shame, guilt, and grief.
At a certain point, definitely only reached when my kid got older, I figured out how to limp through the working mom thing, and I had thought I was getting to a good place with having a weekly routine with which to corral my self-employment work/life balance, which included accessing help from a cleaner. But after my parents died, I ended up with boxes and piles of both of their stuff that got shoved into the garage and various nooks in my home. When I was being legally challenged by Tiffany and Mervyn, I could barely hang on and go to work, let alone think through and project- manage a household re-org.
And then came the pandemic, and like so many women, I cut way way down on paid work in order to home-school. It was a choice, sure, but it didn’t feel like I had that many.
Eventually when I returned to the hustle, I knew things would have to be different.
So I did something I did learn from my mother: I bought some books, then began to read them.
How to Keep House When You’re Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, LPC, was like a gentle hug by a nice grandmother in a soft parka.
The methods in that book, which are really good for getting through a difficult life period, keeping house while coping with a mental disorder or illness or new baby or other big life change. That got me through for a few years. The book made me feel seen as a person who was in the midst of life chaos but still wanted to try to keep house. Just hearing some of the methods, like if you have all your clothes in a pile, just wash the pile every week, gave me permission to not be my best self, but also not devolve into my worst self just because I was treading water. Being untidy has risks and costs: perishable food items can get lost, causing mildew. Dust exacerbates asthma. Unclean counters are petri dishes for bacteria, viruses, and other things we probably should not be touching.
Eventually I “graduated” to a new set of books. The one I affectionately call “The Big Yellow Book,” otherwise known as Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping Home by Cheryl Mendelson. Oh Cheryl. What a chord you struck. Herself a lawyer by trade, she noticed a knowledge gap among career women in basic housekeeping skills (including prodding busy career men to do their share, often requiring convincing them they did indeed have a share.) The mothers of said career gals mistakenly thought that anything they themselves would teach their daughters would be out of date in the future. They also gave no advice on how to convince men that housework was also their job, because they did not believe that it was.
Mendelson makes a knife-edge feminist analysis here, saying that back when women were forced to consider their homes their domain (and for women of the global majority this was and is in addition to the work they did and do outside of the home,) it actually was their domain, run with pride and efficiency to truly feel like a home. It is not the idea of women being domestic servants that appeals to Mendelson, but the idea that we have the control to make our homes feel homey, instead of what we see now.
“Most men and many women do not want to identify themselves with homes that they create through their housekeeping and through which they offer of themselves to others.” Yes. Women are stretched thin, and all we need is another things to judge ourselves by. Except, we already do, and so does the world.
Ouch. Memories float to the surface of my mind, of my mother on her knees, scrubbing a floor and crying. My mother, who, like Cheryl Mendelson, practiced law, but (was also expected to) keep the household running and raise three children and three stepchildren. Another memory: my mother, telling me to get an education, no matter what. Domestic work was drudgery, a prison, an unpaid trap. And I so get it. It is. It was. It can be. And yet: how did we get to the point where the idea of caring for others was not masculine? This creates a world deprived of the care of men as well as that of women who believe we will not be considered equal if we take too much pride in “feminine” things, like, ostensibly, homemaking.
Even tradwives on the internet are doing tradfotainment for a side hustle: nobody makes a lifestyle blog because they actually approve of their own lifestyle.
My Nonna was my father’s mother. From what I gather from the old family stories, she was basically a serf and a child laborer who was forced to pick olives that went to make someone else richer. Her mother pilfered olives to help get ahead. And then she moved to America in the Industrial Revolution and ended up under my grandfather’s thumb, even though she was the one who economically kept the family afloat with her side hustles when he was unable or physically incapable of finding work as a laborer.
Nonna, spent way too much time forced onto her knees doing various chores, telling me that I am like my mother—educated, with the stress on the fourth syllable, in her Sicilian accent. Nonna, who still knew how to make things homey. My mom, who also did. Both of them seeing a way out of a world trapped in the home for me, both also sort of chiding me for not knowing how to do things they thought I should know.
I couldn’t make a feast from scratch without looking at a book. I couldn’t sew. I couldn’t knit. I couldn’t crochet. I couldn’t wash a floor without getting scolded for doing it wrong. I couldn’t keep my room tidy. I couldn’t keep my schoolwork neat. Everything was either an indictment against me because I was not taking advantage of the opportunities afforded past generations, or because I was not taking advantage of the freedoms of the present one.
Grandmother, my mother’s mother, kept a very tidy home. Her guest room had orange slipcovers that went over the twin beds every day, right on top of the sheets and covers, which had to be folded and tucked in quite precisely in order to make the whole thing fit properly. So, so much fuss. She liked geraniums, and fussed over them on her clean deck, but I don’t remember seeing her heave or sweat. Order just happened magically, independent of her labor. She was the kind of woman who could pull off wearing white, the color of the tastefully rich. Maybe that’s why one is not supposed to wear white after Labor Day. It would not be seemly to invoke whiteness after labor.
None of these foremothers foresaw a world where I would come to feel alienated from home, it’s management, and how that contributes to the care of the daily lives of those who reside within it’s walls. Over the years, the objects have changed but the burrow is the same-papers, books, notebooks, cookbooks, kitchen tools, counter messes left too long, dirty dishes, laundry, and an entire kid with an entire room containing it’s own entire burrow. Ironically, the most healthy workplace for my paid work (and work/life/parenting balance) is still inside of my home.
That means (by design) I’m the one home the most. I am the one most likely to clean a mess but also quite likely to make one. Even though my male partner does see a lot of the work as his to do, the intervals at which he does them are different than mine. And while I am in the flow of my very multi-tasked existence, the remnants of half-finished tasks around the house can be quite irritating to the others with whom I live. Meaning I’m still the house manager, the—(cue to this writer spending a bunch of time searching through the Downton Abbey wiki trying to find my counterpart, and giving up, because why compare myself to one part of a huge household staff unless I want to feel intimidated and depressed?)—house manager.
Ms. Cheryl Mendelson has gently informed me that I kind of suck at being a house manager. She insists that “domesticity does not take time or effort but helps save both.” She introduced me to the joy of assigning on major chore to it’s own day of the week-laundry and shopping, for example.
Where Cheryl really got me was her section on home cooking, though. Besides saving money, your health, your fitness, and ultimately, ironically—time, cooking at home creates a center of gravity that, I have to reluctantly agree with Cheryl here, is often missing from modern homes.
“Cooking at home links your past and future and solidifies your sense of identity and place. When a home gives up its hearth, which in the modern world is its kitchen, it gives up its focus.”
Oof. I know this isn’t true for all of us, and if you have a cooking-free life that works for you, please disregard my ramblings and don’t take them on as an admonishment to change what you’re doing.
But for those of us women, men and gender nonconforming folks who are childhood trauma survivors, we are often dysregulated when it comes to routines. Creating a housekeeping routine of sorts, whether we work from home or have to do chores around work outside the home, actually does create regulation and control. In the very least, it reduces one more thing that can make us feel out-of-control.
On a personal note, food, caregiving, and hospitality is in my DNA, on both sides. Both of my grandmothers were experienced hosts and cooks. When I was shunned by my family of origin, one of the biggest griefs I had was a feeling of loss at being cut off from my family culture and traditions (even though many of those traditions—I’m looking at you, Catholicism—are the driving forces behind my shunning.) Slowly, I have been doing a lot of internal work on generational trauma, which on the outside looks a lot like me developing a new interest in home cooking, creating household management systems, fiber arts, textiles, maker-ism, and budgets. So by reaching back, I ended up moving forward, not only with a sense of how to manage things (like designated days of the week for laundry, groceries, meal planning, for one) but also with more free time to do my actual paid work from home because I’m not living in two worlds and winging them both. Also, by having a routine I am more able to successfully offload several chores to my partner that worked with his rhythms, increasing his knowledge of and stake in the household routines.
The more I learn about how to do things, the more empowered I feel. The more empowered I feel, the more gracious I become towards myself. It’s not my fault that my mom was bipolar and inconsistent and unable to pass on a lot of her skills. It’s not my fault that I watched her lose interest in keeping house as her illness and alcohism progressed when she was in her seventies. It’s not my fault that my father did tasks and chores completely on his own schedule and independent of anyone else’s convenience or needs, nor is it my fault that he was a misogynist who wanted me to be a lawyer but also felt fundamentally that women belonged in the home. In short, it’s not my fault that I was abused as a kid and that it delayed my housekeeping skills. It’s not my fault that we live in a world filled with gender roles based on inequity and inferiority.
Our society loves to moralize issues of cleanliness and tidiness, equating it with our character. But if you look deeper than the surface-level shaming and narrative creation, you will see that there is work to be done to keep a home as a human being, and that work must be done by those in the home. The last book in my cache of books, found by doing a search on “Feminist Housekeeping,” Radical Homemakers, by Shannon Hayes, brings in the much-needed class analysis in all of this. She points out that the Industrial Revolution was the beginning of the “Woman’s place is in the home” narrative, and that prior, many households were more self-sustaining, requiring more work within the home by both men and women. However, when the Industrial Revolution came along, men were the ones encouraged into the paid workforce while women were charged with the home, and any side hustles they could manage. Nonna had a poultry business, a dairy business, a pork business and a produce market at various times, not to mention the alcohol she bootlegged.
As Hayes points out, “the men were the first to lose their domestic skills as their successive generations forgot how to butcher the family hog, how to sew leather, how to chop firewood.” I think about my husband’s stories of his own father, calling his sons to spot him while in a tree with a chainsaw, then to stack cord after cord of wood throughout their Ohio childhood. We buy our wood from the grocery store and start a fire in our fireplace twice a year, as we live in a warm climate that is only getting warmer, and have central heat.
Wistful wood-stacking stories aside, Hayes reminds me, “the more a man worked outside the home, the more the household would have to buy in order to have needs met.” And that specialization is a good thing for my particular husband, who would resent stacking wood instead of code.
And yet…
Being out in the workforce while trying to manage things at home that my partner also could not manage due to his own time spent in the workforce, while not having any kind of state-funded childcare, or even trustworthy paid-through-the-nose childcare, if I’m being honest, sucked. I felt like a failure at work and home. I kind of was a mess at both.
Not like it’s all fixed. I get anxious. I get depressed. I have to deeply lean into self-care and emotional regulation which clashes with my post-industrial-revolution-puritan-work-ethic social conditioning, and my family-of-origin conditioning to do all of the emotional labor. Things go to shit. Lateness occurs. Mistakes happen.
But the difference is that I’m finally finding some softness for myself about it, seeing the societally stacked deck, the impossibility of neoliberal-grindhustlecore and its incompatibility with true feminism and a sustainable planet. I’m still ambitious to work outside the home, but now, I find, I’m not ashamed of the work I do within it. Either being ashamed I’m not doing more outside the home, or ashamed I’m not doing more work inside the home, or being ashamed I can’t balance. If the deck is stacked for the house to win, maybe there are ways I can explore not gambling.
For now, that means cutting our takeout excursions in half and me cooking at home, which involves a lot of time meal-planning and batch cooking, but not quite as much time as I think it would on those occasions I am opting to Door Dash.
Also, there’s an overarching routine of the way I spend my days and weeks, and a giving-in to the monotonous tasks by compartmentalizing them and plotting them out so they don’t mash together into an overwhelming sense of never-doneness. Instead of vacillating between completely ignoring chores and then over-doing them, I have a weekly routine—and when I miss a day, I miss a day of a routine, one I can pick back up and feel oriented within.
When objects misbehave and arrange themselves into little piles of booby-traps and chaos sprinklers, I can tame them, by putting them back into their homes.
I even have homes for objects without homes.
The hardest part of this for trauma survivors of all genders is that what works for Cheryl, or Shannon, or K.C., might not work for them. It’s hard as a childhood trauma survivor to realize that you are an individual, when your prior survival may have depended on chameleonry and conforming. It can be such a joy to stick with the discomfort and lean through it to get to the empowerment of realizing that not only are you safe, your inner adult will now care for your inner child, but also, your inner adult gets to choose the way she wants to do adulting.