18: Q&A: Housekeepers and Messy Boyfriends

Today’s episode is a Q & A. While you listen, I invite you to relax and unwind or use the time to care for yourself gently in whichever way you prefer. 

I received questions from a working neurodivergent mom struggling to maintain a functional space, grappling with whether or not she should hire a housekeeper, and from someone living with a messy boyfriend with ADHD, looking for a way to establish a cleaning routine without creating resentment.

I share some strategies to help people with ADHD become more functional and explain that struggling to keep your home clean and tidy has nothing to do with your character, work ethic, or who you are as an individual. Let’s get into it! 

Show highlights:

• Is it beneficial or detrimental to hire a housekeeper if you’re working full-time and struggling with ADHD, RSD, anxiety, and major depression?

• Why paying someone to keep your home clean does not make you a failure.

• How taking a different perspective can make asking for help much less distressing.

• How can you establish a cleaning routine without resentment when your partner has ADHD and often forgets his promises to clean up?

• What happens in the brain when someone has ADHD?

• What is working memory?

• Why is it sometimes hard for people with ADHD to complete one-off under-stimulating tasks?

• How task-bundling and ritualization helped me (someone with ADHD) become more functional.

• How isolating the bottleneck, or the step in a task they dread most, can help people with ADHD become more functional.

Links and resources:

Connect with KC: TikTok, and Instagram

Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning

Get KC’s decluttering workbook when you sign up for her newsletter 

• Transcript

  KC Davis 0:00

  Oh hello you sentient balls of stardust, this is Struggle Care, the podcast about self care by the host that hates the term self care. I'm going to answer a couple of Q and A's for you today. And I just invite you to use this time to care for yourself. So whether that is sitting down, relaxing, maybe closing your eyes, or maybe that is running a load of laundry, or putting away some dishes, well, whatever this time could be used for, that would be a gentle way to care for yourself, I invite you to use it. So here is a question that I want to read to you guys. It's from Christy. And it says hello from the land of ADHD, RSD anxiety and major depression. My hubby and I both work full time. At home, we have a 12 year old son, two dogs and two cats. Our home is a constant mess. It totally overwhelms me and makes my executive function struggle even worse. My question is, Is it beneficial or detrimental to hire a housekeeper to help? On the one hand, I feel like I could really use the help. But on the other hand, I fear it will just make me feel more like a failure that I can't handle our household. Any thoughts on this? So I absolutely have thoughts on this. And the short answer is yes, do it. The long answer is this. I can't promise that you won't feel like a failure. But let's walk through the upsides and the downsides, because this is a very common question. Not everybody is privileged enough to be able to afford to outsource care tasks. But many, many people that do have that privilege, find themselves still being held back by sort of cultural messaging that says kind of what Christy is talking about, I'm a failure, I should be able to do this all on my own. And I want to kind of address that. So let's talk about the upsides and downsides. Okay, so the downside of hiring a housekeeper is that you will feel like a failure, but you will have a functional space, the upside of it is the functional space, right? So the downside is, I feel like a failure. The upside is my space is functional. So that's if you hire them, if you don't hire them, the downside is you will not have a functional space. And what is the upside, you're saying the upside will be you don't feel like a failure. However, it sounds like you already do. So you're really sort of choosing between two emotionally distressing options. And it sounds like you're struggling to maintain a functional home because you have some barriers. And those barriers are legitimate, they are morally neutral. Your struggle with keeping your home clean has nothing to do with your character, your work ethic, who you are as a mother or a spouse or a person. It just is what it is. And if you're having trouble creating or maintaining a functional space that is going to be distressing. 100%. But I hear some truths here. And I want to tell you the truth that I hear Well, number one, it's true that you deserve a functional space, it's true that you don't have the current capacity to pull that off. It's true that you have the resources to pay someone else to help you. Those are sort of the true things. Now this question of what if I hire one and I feel even more like a failure? Well, feeling like a failure for needing help is sort of based in the idea that care tasks have a moral charge. Like if you're struggling with them, it must be because you're not good enough, you are failing. You don't have what it takes. And I think that there's often this like underlying message subconsciously that then goes and who would love and respect someone like that. But that line of thinking sounds like it's based in things that are not true. Like it's not true, that needing help with care tasks means that you are failing, right? You yourself said we both worked full time jobs, we have a child we have animals, you have a lot going on, you know, we usually don't feel like failures for paying someone to change the oil in our car for us, or fix a mechanical issue in our car, we usually don't feel like failures for hiring the AC guy to come and fix AC for us. Although you could do those things. You could go out and learn how to change oil work on cars, you could pull up YouTube videos and figure out how to fix the AC. But when it comes to certain types of care tasks in the home, particularly for people who grew up or socialized as women, there's this identity connection where we have to be good at these things. We have to handle these things on our own, or we're not doing what we were designed to do as a person. And that's not true. In my experience. There are men who mow lawns and there are men who pay other people to mow lawns and typically what comes down to is whether they enjoy that activity and whether they have the money to pay someone else. But I've just never met a man that's like Man, I hate mowing the lawn and I have the money to pay someone else to mow the lawn. wanna ban I'll just feel like such a failure. If I don't mow my own lawn, maybe that person exists, I've never met that person. Okay, so it's not true that wanting or needing help with care tasks in your home makes you a failure. Okay, you're not failing as a person, a spouse, a parent, any of that, okay. And I know that it feels like you're choosing between two distressing emotional experiences. But one of those experiences can be made a lot less distressing. by just taking a different perspective, you deserve support, I deserve support, and I have this support, I am privileged enough to be able to afford a housekeeper to come in occasionally and help me deep clean things. There's nothing wrong with it. It is something I am deeply grateful for. And like I mentioned, sometimes even when you have the resources to do this, you have this messaging or this feeling of failure holding you back. And I think what helps me to remember is that when it comes to people's jobs, they often have a whole support staff to help them and it's just the same thing. It's just a task that needs to be done. It's just an environment that needs to be up kept. Okay, at the end of the day, if we avoid asking for help, because we fear the distress of feeling like a failure, what are you left with? Because as I mentioned, chances are you already feel like a failure, you're already distressed. So what do you really have to lose? Right now you're distressed with a nonfunctioning space, the worst that could happen, if you hire a housekeeper is that you're now distressed with a functioning space. Like even if you're not able to sort of move through feeling like a failure, it still sort of seems like your choices are to feel like a failure with a space that doesn't really work for you or to feel like a failure with a space that pretty much works for you. I mean, even if, like your worst nightmare kind of came through, and you were to hire someone, and they were to walk in your house and take a look around and then go, Oh, God, it's so bad. I can't do it. Great. You will never see that person again. You can call the next one, you will eventually find someone who was willing to help with your space. So in conclusion, Christie hired the housekeeper. Okay. It just makes sense to me that the choice that will improve your quality of life the most is to get a housekeeper to call the housekeeper Christy. treat them with respect, pay them well, and it will be morally neutral. All right. Next question we have here says My boyfriend and I now live together, my boyfriend has ADHD. And while I've always been untidy, he will completely forget messes that caused bacteria growth, such as pans with food in them on the stove for days, some weird film that I scraped off the sink when I moved in. I don't want to clean up all of his messes, but his poor working memory means even something he promised to do before bed is forgotten. How do you suggest we go about establishing a routine without resentment? So for listeners that are not familiar with ADHD, there are sort of several things happening in the brain when someone has ADHD. And one of them is she mentioned working memory, which is one of your executive functions, which are the things that the front of your brain does. Working memory means that when you sort of take in new information into your brain, before your brain decides what to do with that information, it holds it in this little holding tank, called working memory. And from there, your brain decides what am I supposed to do with this information? Can I forget this information forever? Right? Have I used it? And I just needed it for this minute? And then I can forget it? Do I need to file it away in short term memory, or should I log it in long term memory. So because the truth is you don't really need to retain all of the information. If I go to the place to get my oil changed, and they say, I want you to pull up, turn the car off, and then hit the button to turn it back on for the electronics and then stay in the car. Right? They give me this little like list of things to do. In my head. I'm thinking okay, now I have this information. And now is my time to pull forward, I

  pull forward, I recall that information out of the working memory holding tank and I use it and then I get the oil changed. And then my brain will go okay, look, scanning scanning looks like that. We don't need to remember this information anymore. And then, like dumps it out. I can forget that information forever. They're going to tell me again when I go back. Okay. So the issue is that for people with ADHD, we have what's called poor working memory. So we have a hard time holding information in that holding tank for very long. And the way that I describe it is it's like if I think about a computer with a browser, like I can have one page at a time in my working memory web browser. So if I have a tab up that says I need to feed the cats. If I have good working memory, I'm walking towards where the cat food is, and I noticed that the laundry is on the floor and another browser window pops up and goes we also need to do the laundry. And it looks like what your browser probably looks like right now like the little you know feed the cats browser just go like right behind the laundry one and I can decide am I going to focus on laundry or am I going to focus on the cat stuff and whichever I decide to kind of pull forward, the other one just fold behind it. But the little tab is sticking out so that I remember it when I'm done with that task. Well for me, when I walked by, and I see that laundry, if I decide to stop and do the laundry, instead, the browser tab that had you need to feed the cats on it just disappears, just goes away forever. And if I choose to stick with feeding the cats and go, oh, we'll have to remember to come back for that laundry. It goes away, too. I literally have one slot for holding information. In my mind, this is why I lose my keys all the time I walk in from the house, I set my keys down. And my brain does not think that that's important information to remember, right. This is also why my house is messy, because I will be you know, pouring something for me to drink. I'll set the milk jug down, I'll turn around, a child will ask me for something, I'll go to do that thing and my brain won't have registered, the milk is still on the counter needed to go back to put it up. Because I can only hold one piece of information in my working memory at a time. So with that little breakdown, this commenter was basically saying that he tends to forget things, he tends to forget dishes, he tends to forget things long enough that it's sort of causing this functional issue. And this is a really great question. What is good here is that it sounds like this commenter already has a functional view of tasks, right? The issue is functional, not moral. She's not saying, oh, you know, he just isn't clean enough. And that's awful. And he's lazy. And he needs to come up to my standards, she's just pointing out like, there's some functional issues, right. And the purpose of doing dishes is to prevent bacteria and pests and to have clean dishes to eat off of because you are people who deserve to eat off of clean plates, and a sanitary environment. And the boyfriend has a functional barrier, which is ADHD. And so whether it's a working memory issue, or whether it is what's called a task initiation issue, one thing I know about ADHD, because I have it, it's very hard for us sometimes to complete, like one off under stimulating tasks, like cleaning the sink, putting a dish away. So we have this working memory issue, this task initiation issue. And one thing that has worked for me, because I recognize that I had these dishes everywhere I was even having these functional issues. And I had to sort of realize, okay, I'm not failing for struggling with this. But I have this barrier. And I also deserve a functioning environment. So to my family. And so I recognized that things that I was good at, like I can jump into a project and just do a project and sort of enjoy doing that project, right. But when it came to sort of like one off little boring tasks like this, it like trying to get myself to wash a dish was like trying to get myself to put my hand on a hot stove. Like I just my brain would rather eat my body off of a moving truck some days. And what has helped me is something called Task bundling and ritualization. This has been key for me, I've really noticed that there are three things that motivate me, right? And it's pleasure projects and patterns. So pleasure is self explanatory. Eating good food, going on an amazing vacation, getting on a roller coaster, having good sex, experiencing romance, the pleasure of a good conversation with a friend like things that are just like actual high key pleasure, like yes, I will do what it takes to experience those things, no problem projects. I love a good project, right? Whether it's putting together a piece of furniture, or deciding that I have a new hobby, or any of those things, right. And you may not like furniture, but ADHD, we love a project and we get hyper fixated on a project. And sometimes that project is a real life project that we're tangibly doing with our hands like a new hobby. Sometimes that project is like a research like I'm just fascinated with the subject, and I won't stop researching it and learning about it. And then the third thing is patterns. So what I mean by patterns is that if something is structured and ritualized each day, so you'll hear people say, Oh, ADHD, people do well with structure, and routine, but they're really bad at creating structure and routine. And I don't say routine, I say ritual, because it's not a routine that tickles my brain. It's the ritual of it. It's doing sort of knowing the same pattern, doing that pattern getting that result. So I turned these sort of one off care tasks into ritualized patterns that have sort of a rhythm to it, whether it's a daily rhythm or a weekly rhythm. My daily rhythm is something that I talk about in my book, which is closing duties. And the way this came about was I was making a tick tock one day and I was sort of joking about how I was waking up every morning, walking into my kitchen and then going, who closed last night, which is a joke about waiting tables. I used to be a restaurant server, and you had an opening shift and a closing shift. And in addition to the task of actually waiting tables, we had what's called closing duties, and they were the extra things you do Get on the side, like cutting lemons or rolling silverware to set up the next shift for success. So it was quite common to walk in as an opener. And if stuff wasn't done, you got irritated at the closers. And you're like screaming, who closed last night. And so the joke and the Tick Tock was me walking into my kitchen and being like, Who closed last night, damn them, and then being like I was the one that closed last night. So I started turning these care tasks into what I called closing duties, I had this little ritual called closing duties. And I started really small, my first closing duties was unloading and reloading my dishwasher every night at 730. And the reason I picked 730 was because my kids go to bed at seven. So you just pick your time, I suggest not picking the last time in the evening, right, because once I sit down on a couch, I'm not going to get up and do more things. By the time that rolls around, I'm tired. So for me, because my kids had just eaten and gone to bed, I was already on my feet, I could walk downstairs, I could roll right into doing a couple of tasks. And then I can sit down and clock out. That was another part of it, like knowing that there's an end to the day where I don't have to do any more tasks. So if you have kids, that's a great time to do it. If you don't have kids, just think of a time that matters for you. Some people, it's about when I walk in the door after work, I don't even take my shoes off, I don't change my clothes, I go right into the door and I do my closing duties, then I go kick my shoes off, put on my comfy clothes, and I'm done for the evening, or the afternoon or the morning whenever you get off work. And what this did for me was eventually I had this list of things and instead of the list being I need to clean my kitchen, the list was what do I need to be functional for the first few hours of the morning. So I could decide I need a clean saying I need enough dishes to eat breakfast, I need a clear trash can to throw away trash all day long, I need my lunch packed, or I need the coffee set up to be brewed. It can be I need to pick up my outfit, it can be anything. Now like I said, I started very, very small with just unloading and reloading my dishwasher. And I did this enough times that eventually this ritual moves out of the working memory bucket, which is that temporary brain space and sort of filed it away in a different part of my brain so that I actually am like naturally prompted every night now at 730 After my kids go to bed to go Okay, time to do closing duties. I've been doing this for over a year now. And my list is always sort of fluctuating and changing. And you can sit down together and decide what is most functional for you. So now my list is to load the dishwasher, take the trash out, wipe down enough of my countertop so that it's clear for like making breakfast in the morning. Oh, and sweep the kitchen. And that those are like my four things and like it and sometimes things come on, sometimes things come off. And I find that if I least do those things in the evening that I'm set up for success the next morning. And then the other part is that ask your boyfriend, where is the bottleneck? What is the step in that task of cleaning that dish that he's dreading? Because usually we don't dread all of those steps. And when I really broke that down for me, I realized that I hate to unload the dishwasher

  hate hate, hate, hate hate. And I was finding that I would put off loading the dishwasher because there were clean dishes in it. And so when I realized that it was easy to pass that off to my husband. So his job now in the mornings is to unload the dishwasher. And then the other bottleneck was that when there's lots of dishes in the sink, I was overwhelmed with loading the dishwasher. And so I started a dirty dish station. So we have a dish rack, and it's for dirty dishes. And the reason that this worked for my brain is that when we finish a dish during the day, we put it on the dirty dish rack, and it holds those plates up, but it holds it up organized. Even when I was doing dishes of big mound of dirty dishes, I always went through the step of like organizing my dishes on the side of the sink before loading them up into the dishwasher because my brain just worked better that way. And so now I'm walking to my sink in the evening, the sink is already clear so that it can be used all day long. And I'm looking at an organized set of dirty dishes that are already laid out in a pattern. I'm opening an empty dishwasher, and I'm engaging again in a ritualized pattern. I'm loading it up dishes, dishes, dishes, districts, dishes, plates, plates, plates, plates, plates, cups, cups, cups, cups, cups, right, and so that makes that a smoother, I don't feel like I'm trying to like throw myself out of a truck. So those are some things that I've done. And I write this list on my fridge because I still have to reference it or I'll forget it and you guys can do this together. You can do it separately. You can do it as closing duties, you can do it as morning duties. And I just encourage you to check that out. I've got some other kind of tips and tricks in my book for motivational hacks and systems that you can do but start there. It's a really powerful ritual that can really get your space functional. That's all I have for you today. I hope that you did something to be kind to yourself, and I will catch you next week.