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Maternity leave round 2 is coming to an end. For 12 weeks, Gardner and I have been together at home taking care of baby while our toddler attended daycare. If you’d like a stress test of your marriage, being trapped together in a house caring for a newborn can certainly provide that outlet.

However, that was the beauty of this maternity leave. I wasn’t trapped. I didn’t have to plan every waking minute of my schedule around the whims of a baby. I could be around for feedings, then leave the house to run errands. I could grocery shop! I could take a shower! I could go out and burn up the interstate listening to Taylor Swift and enjoying a brief taste of freedom to restore my sanity!

We’ve been incredibly lucky to have employers that allow time off to care for our families. We well know how poorly America treats pregnant women. Outside of government workers, there is no federal policy to guarantee paid time off to recover from birth, and as an recent Washington Post article on the US Women’s soccer team highlighted, 1 in 4 working mothers returns to the office within 10 days. 10 days!

Many people we’ve talked to have scoffed at the idea of the father having as much time off as the mother, but studies increasingly find that paternal involvement improves outcomes for both infant and mother. Shocking that having assistance for an incredibly time consuming and stressful undertaking would show benefits, I know.

I hope the new generations continue to push for more protections and benefits for working parents so everyone can enjoy their time off in welcoming the new baby, just as we did.

How to Keep House While Drowning

But I digress. My intent for this article wasn’t to (again) highlight the dire state of American parenthood, but instead offer support for the returning to work phase. While browsing my Goodreads feed to find new books, I saw one of my friends with toddlers had recently read a book called “How to Keep House While Drowning”. As a soon-to-be working mother of two with a stressful and time consuming job, that sure seemed to describe my life. It didn’t disappoint.

The book starts with the premise that most of us need deprogramming from what is expected for a well put together house. Do rooms really need to be “clean and tidy” to be livable? Why shame yourself for things that don’t actually represent any threat to health or safety?

Davis’ 6 Pillars of strugglecare are:

1. Care tasks are morally neutral.
2. Rest is a right, not a reward.
3. You deserve kindness regardless of your level of functioning.
4. You can’t save the rainforest if you’re depressed.
5. Shame is the enemy of functioning.
6. Good enough is perfect.

KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning

It’s a short read, even shorter if you take the “Absolute need to know chapters only” approach Davis offers. Some of the systems I’d already implemented, some of them were new. Here are my best practices for caring for yourself and household when there is little to no time to do so.

Closing Duties

In both retail and chemistry jobs, I’ve had closing duties. And in both, there have been shift wars. The night shift didn’t do what they were supposed to so the dayshift is pissed or vice versa. However in your house, shift wars don’t exist. You’re always the one to blame!

The concept of closing duties is to have a defined list of tasks to accomplish at night to set future you up for success. These don’t have to be exhaustive like “Clean the whole kitchen!”. You are free to define what they are, but it’s recommended they take less than half an hour. In our house closing duties are:
1. Make coffee
2. Start the dishwasher
3. Prep bottles for daycare

Without doing these things, mornings would be devastatingly shaken. As long as we do these things, we will have as good a day as we could expect to have based off the mood swings of a 2 year old. Closing duties are a simple way to reset your space at the end of the day making sure you’ve hit your most important tasks.

Listify Your Life

So much of the anxiety about keeping house comes from deciding what to do. As with closing duties, what is vitally important to make your space usable versus what is nice to have? When I was pregnant, we had a housekeeper because I didn’t feel like doing anything ever. Now that we’ll have a daycare budget for two and I’m no longer physically hampered, I’d prefer the money over the help (although Davis highly recommends getting this sort of help if you can afford it!). And I have Fridays off, so there’s dedicated kid-free time to do it.

Rather than be faced with the amorphous task of “Clean the house” every Friday, I took a lesson from Davis -and the housekeepers themselves. Instead of picking one day to attempt to clean everything, I do a deep clean of one space set every week. Each week has a designated list with designated activities to happen in each. Master Bed & Bath, Baby Bed & Bath, Kitchen, and Living Spaces.

As Davis cites, most spaces really don’t need deep cleans that often. Superficial cleans often happen as you go (clearing plate, doing dishes, cleaning macaroni and cheese off the floors after dinnertime tantrums), and deep cleans are really only needed once a month. The housekeepers swear by rotating deep cleans, so who am I to contest? Breaking the space up makes it easy and relatively quick. And taking the time to pre-establish a routine schedule to follow takes away the stress of deciding what to do. Follow the program; save your mental stress.

Dinner Roulette

Another list I love? The dinner roulette list. This one I implemented months ago, but its approach ties in perfectly with the Davis methods. Planning dinner is the worst task of adult life IMO. You have to decide what to eat every day, and this is a task that if you don’t accomplish, you will actually die (eventually). Sure, you have the option of making a cheese quesadilla in the microwave every night to survive, but is that really living?

Sadly, I am cursed to desire a different dinner that includes vegetables every night. I cannot follow my husband’s bachelor approach of “Make a giant pot of spaghetti and eat it until it’s gone”. But who wants to plan and make choices for a different dinner every night? Enter the dinner roulette list.

Before I started my new job, I made a list of every dinner we enjoyed I could make in less than half an hour. I mean it. I walk through the door, start cooking, and it has to be ready by 5:30pm -the prep, the cooking, the everything. I created an accompanying recipe Google Doc for the list. Each week I sit down and I use a random number generator to pick dinners for the week. If I decide I don’t like one of the options, I generate another until I have four meals I like. Using the accompanying recipes, I can easily create a grocery list for the week. Fresh, easy, healthful dinners every night with the minimum amount of effort, and a pizza splurge on the weekends.

Caring for People Is Hard

Caring for people is hard. Emotionally certainly, but even the seemingly basic minutiae of things like “eating” every day. Make things as easy on yourself as you can because you too deserve care.