The Octopus doesn't do dishes (anymore)
Pooja Lakshmin's real self-care, boundaries, and household chores
Preliminaries:
Save the Date: I’ll be hosting a Wellness Brunch on Sunday 7/16/23 at 11:30am at Unwindings for only $35. We’ll be talking about a variety of wellness topics, tailored to your questions and concerns, plus a delicious brunch. There’s a limit of 12 participants, and based on the feedback from the previous workshop, I anticipate it to fill so I strongly recommend registering early—just send me an email (adrienne@soilandsunshine.com) and let me know you want to attend.
Qoya: I’ll be teaching a full Qoya class on 6/24/23, at 9:30am, at Unwindings. If you’d like to join us, email me at adrienne@soilandsunshine.com. I’d love to have you join us. It’s a great way to get out of your head and back in your body.
I can't remember how I came across her, but I recently discovered Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist who focuses on women dealing with overwhelm. She has a new book out, Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), and I'm waiting impatiently for my interlibrary loan copy to arrive. In the meantime, I've started reading the Kindle sample, and if my library book doesn't come soon, I'll break down and just buy it. I'm really impressed and strongly suggest that you take a look it.
Lakshmin's work, in a vastly oversimplified form, says that the problem isn't that women don't take enough yoga classes and bubble baths, but that we don't set good boundaries. Boundaries about what we do, and for whom, and when. Looking closely at how we often automatically take on everything, regardless of whether we can handle it or not. Because if we don’t do it, who will?
That concept—even in just the first few pages of her book—really hit home, and the idea of boundaries as the real self-care is mind-blowing. For me, that means looking at how work and responsibility is distributed in our household.
For a long time, I was the stay-at-home mom, taking responsibility for the household and homeschooling the kids. Some things might get done by my husband or kids, but ultimately the buck stopped with me--if I didn't either do it or delegate it, it didn't get done.
(An aside: Chandler Baker captures this very common situation with disturbing accuracy in her spine-chilling novel, The Husbands--it's worth reading. Especially because it illustrates how a neighborhood of women overcomes that problem, with just a few side-effects...)
I've been gradually working on distributing the household responsibilities more evenly over the last few years. But being in school full time means that I'm not that SAHM any more. Plus, all three of the other people in my house are fully capable of taking on a whole lot more responsibility. I'm starting with the dishes.
I can empty the dishwasher in 2.5 minutes (back when I had hot chocolate every morning, if I tried I could get the whole thing done before the microwave was done). It's faster if I just do it myself because no one can do it as fast as I can. Plus, I'm the first one up, so I should just do it and then it'll be done.
But! I'm not the only one capable of taking care of the dishes. It doesn't require specialized knowledge or making any sort of judgement. It's a concrete task that is essential to the efficient running of the kitchen and I DON'T HAVE TO BE THE ONE TO DO IT.
So I've delegated it. My son is in charge of the actual dishwasher, and my daughter is in charge of the handwashing and wiping down the counters. It's off my shoulders now.
Granted, we're figuring out the details and it's a work in progress. They're learning, and I'm learning. But being able to ask other people to do this work is a much better way to deal with my overwhelm than just taking a bath.
Moving the load from just my shoulders--setting boundaries on the housework that I'm able and not able to do, what I can do and what I don't need to do personally--fixes the underlying problem.
We're all working together to rethink the system of how we run the household--it's better for everyone, ultimately, not just me. Because everyone needs to be able to keep a household going, and everyone needs to know how to have good boundaries.