Clean your house. It’s good for you.
How our beliefs about our homemaking challenge and shape our experience as homemakers
Did you know that a clean home is not only good for your family, but also you, the homemaker?
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Yeah, sure, easier said than done” or perhaps “But homemaking is about serving my family, not me.”
Maybe the thought of getting your house cleaner brings up feelings of anxiety, pessimism, or even unworthiness so you think “Great, one more reason to feel bad about my homemaking.”
Sisters, believe me, self-reproach and stress are absolutely not what homemaking is about.
If you long to keep your home more clean or efficient but struggle with things like comparison or repeating certain beliefs about yourself (“She’s obviously better at this than I am” or “I’m just not naturally clean/organized/good at homemaking”), you may be stuck in a dysfunctional loop of low
Listen. You do not have some special defect that makes you inferior to other homemakers. Sure, there may be perfectly logical reasons as to why routines and cleanliness seem so challenging to you, but these reasons aren’t that important. We are all different, and that’s fine.
You can still improve your own life, mood, and mental state to be a present and dedicated homemaker and one wonderful way to do this is by mindfully putting your mind to your tasks and defeating the negative cycle of doubt and low self-confidence.
Anyone can sharpen their skills and use common sense tactics to improve their homemaking and general life management, but you see, it’s also not really about the homemaking, either.
It’s about you, and how you feel about your homemaking.
If you believe you’re not great at homemaking, you won’t feel terribly confident you can improve, no matter how many videos you watch or blogs you read (or perhaps especially, considering these women may make you subconsciously entertain the nebulous belief that you’re simply not as “good” as they are).
What you can do at literally any point in time pending a few basic logistical factors is to just do the next thing. Pick up a broom, grab a garbage bag and start decluttering, do the dishes, make the beds, do what you can to improve your living space today, even with a mere five minutes of extra dusting or rearranging, and take it moment by moment from there.
It is wonderful to keep a home to serve our families and loved ones, but when our thought patterns keep linking our sense of self-worth to our performance as a homemaker, this can mean we place a ton of pressure on ourselves that we are simply not intended to bear.
You are called to the very godly vocation of homemaking not because it is the end-all, be-all opportunity of your lifetime to positively influence your marriage, your future, or your children’s future, you are called to the vocation of homemaking simply because it is good.
And it’s good for you.
You don’t need to come up with your plan to fix every possible problem that might arise or cope with every deposit of disorganized clutter or dust immediately right now.
You just need to clean your house.
If you ever find yourself in one of those funks where the weight of the entire to-do list is crashing down upon you in a single, caffeine-fried moment and you’re almost paralyzed with overwhelm, I promise you I’ve got the perfect solution that will work like a charm in the vast majority of cases.
So try it out next time, and let me know if it works:
You just put down the smartphone (let’s be real), tie on an apron, and tackle the dishes.
When in doubt, always start with the dishes. Dishes are the heartbeat of a healthy working kitchen, and just as we need to exercise our hearts with activity, keeping the dishes going in a kitchen helps with its upkeep as well as the mental health of its mistress, believe me.
Do the dishes after each meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and you’ll find this heartbeat will come to you as easily as breathing (if that doesn’t muddle up my metaphor too much with different bodily functions).
Next, make the beds. Make your bed first thing in the morning or when the pressure first arrives to catch up with the housework. It’s OK if one day is different from the next. Like dishes, bedmaking is best kept up with regular, muscle-memory fluidity at a certain time of day or simply when your body needs the message that its homemaking mode.
It is my firm belief that making the bed makes the messiest of rooms look 25% cleaner.
Then, start a load of laundry. A laundry a day keeps the dirty clothes away, although it does keep your hampers full of clean laundry which I’m always reminding myself contributes to a lot of mess.
That said, clean laundry mess is a better problem to have than no clean laundry, so starting the laundry and aiming to do at least one load a day are excellent ways to complete this trio of “when in doubt” homemaking tasks.
Whether you try this in a pinch or adopt it into your daily “when in doubt” routine (since you may have many seasons where it feels like every day is just barely keeping one’s head above water), I promise you that simply tackling one task at a time and getting to enjoy the satisfaction of their completion will feel much better than self-reproach or guilt.
Yes, there are seasons of life and young motherhood when the basic household chores will take all day. That’s OK. That’s what it is to be a homemaker, and the best way forward is by putting one foot in front of another and learning to love the constant process.
So go on, just get started with something. The littlest bit of productivity can cause a chemical reaction in our brain that will motivate us far more than any cleaning video, checklist routine, or motivating podcast ever will.
By having faith in small things in small moments, we create new beliefs about our homemaking such as that it is rewarding, feels good to accomplish small tasks, and can bring us peace and confidence when we find that organic, natural, perpetual rhythm and start to dance along with it.
Clean your house, my sisters. It’s good for you.