Last week kind of sucked. There was a lot of getting too much done in too little time. There was a lot of feeling in the weeds and overwhelmed. There was a lot of remembering things last minute and scrambling to get them done. There was a lot of plans changing and feeling disappointment about those changes.
But in the end, the house got cleaned (which ended up being totally unnecessary) and my daughter was very happy with her family birthday party. She felt celebrated, was happy to have her cousins there, and loved all her presents. In her eyes it was a big hit, and that is all that matters.
I had a slightly different experience, and I’m processing that.
During the week I realized that we’ve fallen back into a pattern where I am responsible for more than I can manage, and (in my mind) more than my husband is doing. I think this is partly because, when my husband is doing a lot of cooking, duties at home feel much more evenly dispersed. But when he stops cooking regularly (because, say, he got Covid and felt really shitty), none of my responsibilities get picked up by him. We can order out and he doesn’t have to cook, but there is no outsourcing the laundry. And even when he’s not cooking, we split the dishes pretty evenly, so I don’t even get to do less in the kitchen.
I also ended up taking on a lot of cat care duties after the (crazy expensive) vet visit, which is a new set of responsibilities for me. Finally, all of this was compounded by the fact that I’m the only one who actually cleans anything. My husband does pick up, and is better at it than I am, but he NEVER cleans anything. He doesn’t even wipe the kitchen counters after he clears them off. It’s like he doesn’t even see how gross things get (if the state of his toothbrush charging base doesn’t prove this to you, nothing could).
I kind of unloaded on him Friday afternoon, and it didn’t go great (shocking!). But later, when the dust from the family party settled, I recognized my error and took responsibility for my delivery. Saying things don’t feel manageable is not helpful, what I need to do is ask for help and be very specific about what kind of help I want/need. I need to present my “ask”.
A couple months ago, when my husband was packing our weekends with plans, I lamented the fact that I felt I could never stay for the sparring class on Saturday at the dojo. He immediately requested I clarify “my ask.” What do you want to change? How can we make this better?
It was actually really hard for me articulate what I wanted. I mean, what I wanted was for it to be possible for me to go to sparring sometimes because we just didn’t have anything else going on. But that wasn’t really an ask. It was just a desire. In the end I asked for two Saturdays a month at sparring. And until we got Covid, I was getting that.
So now I need to figure out what my ask is for tasks around the house. I don’t think my husband will be able to help me with the cleaning, he just won’t see what needs to be cleaned and I’m not super interested in teaching him how to clean stuff (I will absolutely have to teach him this stuff). I will probably ask him to do more dishes when he’s not cooking, and then I will ask that we look into a monthly house cleaner. If someone could just clean the kitchen and the bathrooms once a month that would be such a huge improvement.
Of course we have to see if we can afford it. Our son’s aftercare costs so, so much that this did not feel like a cost we could absorb last year. But we did get a much bigger tax return that we were expecting (it was something about our no longer being landlords and getting a big deduction for that this year), and I got a COL increase as well. So maybe we can make it work. I do think it would be a massive improvement for our family and if it were just the kitchen and two bathrooms we wouldn’t have to pick up the whole house when they come.
I am happy to report that this weekend was MUCH better than the week preceding it. I only have four more days with students, a bunch of 8th grade promotion activities, and then on Friday, after I turn in my end-of-year checklist, the school year is officially over!
I’m a huge advocate of the monthly cleaner. We get a 4 hour clean once a month (2 bathrooms + 1 kitchen and then she dusts/sweeps/mops – whatever she can get done in the 4 hours), and it’s SOOOO nice. I’m forced to make sure clutter is picked up ahead of her visit, but I don’t have to do the scrubbing of toilets and ovens and the like (which I HATE), so it’s totally a win/win and honestly not that much money. I hope you can make it work!
Here it would be about $300 (after tip) which is a lot for our household (at least as a monthly expense). I really hope we can make it work.
Ouch, it’s half that here! Fingers crossed you can make it work.
Surprised!. You need to do a tip on top of the house cleaning bill? I have every other week cleaning and DO pay, my choice, for one cleaning a year when/if she needs to cancel and I pay once a year if I cancel due to my vacation plans. (It is MY insistence that I pay.) I also paid every time covid shut things down. (My insistence, she said most did not.) I also do a holiday double pay at the beginning of December or late November. Looking at this maybe it is equivalent to what you are saying is normal re tipping. Never thought of it that way.
Also AM SO IMPRESSED by you defining ‘presenting your asks’, understanding he doesn’t see the cleaning needs and his not know how to do some cleaning functions. Reminded me that children need to be taught to clean a bathroom or bedroom and what that entails and how it is done. Today many more people have/were never been taught that and literally do not know… like people who have no idea how a potato is baked in a micro-wave or normal oven, or have never made hard boiled eggs. Also you rapidly saw what had occurred during the family bout of covid and the deltas in how it impacted family members and activities.
Am going to be so happy for you when the semester is out! The stresses of class post the Texas shooting went out of sight higher and they were bad before that.
Sending you so much support and praise for all you have learned and taught by sharing. Thank you for who you are and all you do!
Knowing what you need is so, so helpful. My husband is on the spectrum and I realised quite early on that I had to be really specific – he wasn’t going to intuit from my dramatic sighs that I needed something. And the man loves a list… I feel bad making him one but if I put a big list on the fridge, he’ll happily work through it. Yes, it’s my mental work to notice/make the list but I do a lot less of the actual work.
We have a weekly cleaner, an hour every week, which keeps things from getting too messy. It also means we aren’t cleaning toilets, etc. At most, we run the vaccuum during the week.
My husband always tells me to ask for what I need help with. Problem is, when I do, and ask for more than 2 things, he gets super irritated after saying he is exhausted from what he was asked to do OR worse, he complains afterwards how difficult he found the errands or chores to be. For example, if I ask him to go to the store and get the groceries he comes back saying it was crowded or the list was too complicated, or how he hated school pick up one day because because right after school our son wanted to go to the park and he couldn’t tell him “no” but he didn’t want to sit there while our son played with friends in the park, he just wanted to come home. Or if I ask for him to do the laundry, he wasn’t sure what pillowcases went on which pillows so it was a very frustrating chore. So then I just get so beat down by all his comments or rants and I figure just easier to do it all myself and not have to hear the rants
Yeah, If my ask were “do this specific thing” I’d probably get a lot more push back too. Like if I asked him to do a load or two of laundry every week that would be a huge deal. Asking to get a house cleaner is much easier, which is why that will ultimately be my ask.