One important thing to remember is that if you force yourself to do something on a regular basis that you hate, you’ll start to somatize. So don’t do it. Totally not worth it.
A healthier way to go about it is to find out why you hate it. You use very charged vocabulary with 4 strong, vivid descriptors in such a short text. A Stepford wife, a maid, a 50s housewife, on the one hand. Filth, on the other. You have an image of a person who cleans – subservient, robotic, pathetic. And you know that you are not that person. You have a strong personality and you value that in yourself. But you also feel some guilt for being strong and independent. You feel that it’s somehow dirty, filthy, not right. Somebody must have told you that being who you are makes you unclean. If you start cleaning, you’ll prove that person right, and that’s intolerable to you.
I suggest thinking in that direction. What makes you feel unclean? Who, in your mind, is the person that you associate with cleaning? Why do you feel that this person keeps encroaching on you? Instead of denying the emotion and trying to plough through it, untangle it. Only then will it lose its power over you.
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I did not post that question, but dang I have the same problem. Yay executive dysfunction.
Yes to figuring out why you hate it: in my case, my mother was the breadwinner of the family, and also my dad came from a household where all that stuff was wife’s job and if she wasn’t up to it… that was her failure. So end of day, she was exhausted from dealing with other people’s dysfunctional children at work, and the last thing she wanted to do was manage her own kids. This came out as anger, frustration, and basically a total inability to work with our limitations as kids. Every time we cleaned house everybody was angry at everybody else, it took all day because the house was a disaster, and was totally exhausting. Torture.
This has been a gigantic hurdle in adulthood. I don’t want to clean because in my head, it’s a horrible, thankless, exhausting, all-day pile of boring work that never ends, and I will have to do it all by myself or everyone will be angry at me.
Can’t say I’ve solved it, but I do have some work-arounds to get basic chores done.
What I haven’t solved for is how to get the rest of the household involved. Cleaning up after four other people with whom I share a dwelling is… hard. I could just, barely, manage it back when I lived alone. Throw in little kids, and… minefield. I am a really terrible people-manager. Great at working alone. Abysmal at getting other people onboard with my project. I have not yet figured out how to get the rest of the house onboard with cleaning, and mostly that means I avoid the subject because I have no template for addressing it other than my mother, who botched the job. So any time I enlist the kids, I frame it as: “This is a life skill that you will need in order to function as an adult, so let’s go over how to do (laundry, dishes, cleaning a bathroom, etc).” Which goes OK I guess, but I have not been able to convert that into “and now you’re responsible for part of this work on a regular basis” for anything more than the most basic chores, such as emptying the trash cans and putting away the dry towels.
So… if any of y’all parents out there have figured this one out, I’m listening.
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This is so identical to how I overcome writer block that it’s eerie.
In what concerns cleaning, it’s the picking up that gets to me. On the one hand, it’s great to have a kid who can draw or do crafts for hours on her own. But there’s a lot of picking up that needs to be done after that. And I hate bending many times in rapid succession.
I have a hilarious story about how I once tried to get my kid to clean after herself. This was when she was very little and still had one of those tiny potties in her room. She did her business on the potty – and it was a BIG business, if you know what I mean. Something glitched in my head on that day and I asked her to empty and wash the potty. I don’t know what came over me to think this was a good idea. I looked into her room a little later, and the potty was shining clean. She really washed it well, so I was happy.
But then her room started to stink in the most horrific way. I realized that I never told the child where to empty the potty. And of course she had already forgotten where she placed the excrement. N and I spent a lot of time hunting for it in her room. A lot of very stinky time. Whenever we thought we’d gotten it all, our sense of smell revealed how mistaken we were.
Give it to me to design the most original closeness-building family activity ever.
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Oh… gracious! (and also, laughing)
Otherwise (shrugs)… there are absolutely some childhood psych things going on there, but it’s ALSO something neurological. And they reinforce each other, because of course. People on the spectrum have almost universally a huge problem with multi-step instructions. Just cannot hold more than one verbal instruction in our heads at a time. Add in an overbooked mom with depression who could deal with all sorts of childhood pathology in the classroom… but couldn’t figure out one aspie kid at home and would *not* stop issuing 8-step strings of “Do this, then do this, and when you’re done with that, do this other thing…” and despite failure after failure after failure, took it personally when I couldn’t remember anything after step 1… eh. It’s a mess. The part where the task is too big and it’s hard to start– that’s neuro. But then there’s that whole horrible emotional thing stacked on top of it! The house gets messy and my first instinct is just… can I just pack a bag and run away from home?
No, we can deal with this. Just not all at once.
Picking up is a bear, though. I think that’s why everybody tells you to have kids when you’re young. Crawling around under the table after stray green beans is for young people. Once you get that first little bit of arthritis in the knee, that stuff is… difficulty level goes up a lot.
The only thing that works for me, with the picking up, is to ignore the bigger picture of 15,000 things on the floor, and employ the old pattern-recognition circuits and go for just one category of things at a time. Doesn’t matter what. Right now, we will pick up BOOKS. Nothing else. Find all the books. After that, look around, reset. Now, we will pick up PAPER things. Then writing utensils. Then laundry. Then toys, etc. There are other ways to do it: Biggest things first, down to smallest things. Ugliest color to nicest color. By material. Start at the door and go widdershins. Whatever works. I just need a starting point, and an order of business.
The biggest problem, though, is that once the floor becomes messy, I want to avoid the room because it’s so uncomfortable. I haven’t come up with a work-around for that one yet.
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What an interesting discussion! I guess for once I can give some credit to my mother and grandmother for making me think of cleaning and housekeeping as ways that women are powerful (in control of their environment! able to bring about positive change!) and for being more than willing to pass along tips about doing it well, etc (but not taking over tasks from a young person learning to do them). It can be so satisfying to do something with an immediate, visible result.
Also I worked cleaning houses when I was young, so to me it’s just a job. Labor for money.
At this point I am able and willing to pay for it to be done for me, which frees up time and energy I’d rather spend in other ways (I hang on to the tasks I like best, cooking and some laundry), but for the original questioner, perhaps it would help to find out how much you’d spend if you did hire someone and think of your work as saving your household $X per week or per month. Ideally, pay yourself—not necessarily the full amount, if you can’t afford it, but put something into savings for a meaningful longterm goal (down payment for house, vacation, retirement) and spend some on immediate gratification (new nail polish, fancy coffee, a book, whatever you like). And, of course, break it down, either in the “make the task smaller” ways suggested, or by saying you’ll do something for just 5 minutes.
If you have a partner who isn’t pulling his weight (and IME it usually is a “he”), that’s harder, and again it’s great if you can throw money at cleaning and make it someone else’s job, not either of yours, but breaking things down, checklists, very simple instructions, and gamifying can be helpful. Or so I gather from various internet sources.
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Definitely agree with breaking housework down into short tasks – I’ve learned to overcome procrastination by saying “I’ll work on this for 5 minutes.” Also, try to find a way to make it enjoyable by listening to your favorite music or comedian, or find an interesting podcast (I recommend “The Explorers,” and the BBC website has a good variety of podcasts: comedy, history, science, and sometimes a combination of the three).
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Yes, podcasts were enormously helpful for this, back before I had kids. After, I had to stop because I needed to keep an ear out for kids. Now that the youngest is out of the toddler phase… maybe I can get back to those (twinkling and plotting).
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“try to find a way to make it enjoyable by listening to”
What worked for me when I was learning how to keep a living space in relative order and relatively clean were two weekend programs on local NPR. One was Prairie Home Companion (late Saturday afternoon) and the other was Sunday night local program that featured Old Time Radio – Johnny Dollar, Suspense, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny and lots of others. The weekly big maintenance routine went much better with those than with music I chose and I preferred to be doing chores rather than sitting and listening.
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My problem is that I find housework very boring, but am also very terrible at multitasking, especially if it involves listening to something (doesn’t help that most housework makes noise.) I’ve been having a lot of imaginary conversations in the language I’m trying to learn in my head lately though, maybe I will do that.
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Do the conversations aloud instead. It all sounds very different once you try to say it out loud. And congratulations on learning a new language! I’ve recently started, as well, and it’s very enjoyable.
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Good point! The only reason I’ve been doing them in my head is because I’m at work, but there’s no reason to stay silent at home.
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There is a pretty good book on the subject of housekeeping for people with ADHD called “The House That Cleans Itself”. Not everything in there worked for me, but like other books on housekeeping (*Home Comforts* comes to mind– 85% not useful to me, but I still keep it around for reference, because once in a while it’s just the thing), you can usually glean at least a few useful things from any comprehensive book on the subject. It’s worth trawling your local library to see what they’ve got, and reading *all* of them.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/7af00d31-e24d-47b5-970e-1a2aed6ba794
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I liked the book Unf*ck Your Habitat: You’re Better Than Your Mess.
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I don’t believe that I have any trauma associated with cleaning but I just don’t enjoy it; however, I love having a beautiful house. I agree with a lot of the tricks above. But one other thing I like to do is give myself a little beautiful reward for each task I accomplish. And these are all very small things…..like once I vacuum the living room, I light a candle with a scent I love. If I do another task,I get to make a fresh flower arrangement for my dining room table. And sometimes my reward isn’t directly house related…maybe I get to sit in a beautiful clean room and savor a piece of chocolate with a cup of coffee. But these little rewards help to remember what I’m working towards: a lovely and comfortable living space that makes me smile.
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