If you’re honest you can probably fill in the following blank:

I feel shame that ________ isn’t __________ (meeting some spoken or unspoken expectation).

If you’re anything like me, you can fill in this blank a myriad of ways:

• I feel shame that my toilets don’t get cleaned more often.
• I feel shame that I’m not more disciplined in my writing.
• I feel shame that I don’t work out more.
• I feel shame that my children don’t eat the healthy dinners I make and put on the table without whining.

Shame can often be recognized through using the word “should.” So if you have a hard time admitting you struggle with shame, consider how many times you tend to use the word “should” in your internal dialogue. I’ll translate my list:

• I should clean my toilets more often.
• I should be more disciplined to write every day.
• I should work out.
• I should be able to train my children to eat healthy food without whining incessantly. (There must be something wrong with me as a parent if this is the result.)

My therapist likes to use the phrase: “Don’t should on yourself.”

We all need practice in mentally reframing and rephrasing these inner (and outer) strains of dialogue in our lives. Consider this version instead:

• It would be good if I cleaned my toilets more often, but I’m a busy mom with a lot on her plate and it’s okay if I go longer between cleanings than I intend.
• It would be good if I could develop a disciplined writing routine that was consistent, but it’s a process to discover how to do that and I’m making good attempts along the way.
• It would be good for me to work out, but there are a lot of days I make choices to engage in other kinds of self-care. There isn’t time to do it all.
• It would be good for my children to learn to sit at the dinner table and be grateful for healthy food and eat it without whining, but I can’t control how my children react. I can only do my best to keep asking questions about my parenting style and create boundaries for their unwanted behaviors.

In my last post I shared about Eve Rodsky’s book, Fair Play. While I was reading that book, a friend sent me a video by therapist KC Davis entitled, “How to Do Laundry When You’re Depressed.” If you’d like to watch the video in its entirety you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1O_MjMRkPg

Don’t be misled by the title. She had a lot of profound things to say about more than laundry and depression. In some ways, the video was all about setting aside shame. The premise of her video is that care tasks (laundry, dishes, cleaning, etc) are morally neutral. Completing or not completing these tasks does not make you a good or bad person. Let’s pause and read that again.

Care tasks are morally neutral.

Translation: If you can’t keep your house picked up, or your floors vacuumed, or your dishes out of the sink, that doesn’t reflect a character flaw. It doesn’t mean you are lazy. Often that is not how it feels. Most of the time we compare ourselves to our family or friends, our Pinterest feed, or pristine pictures in home décor magazines. So-and-so seems to be able to keep their house picked up and ready for hosting. Why can’t I? I’m failing. The should-show in our heads continues with fervor.

My mother is a rock-star at keeping her home clean and organized. Her mother was one too and let everyone know there was only one proper way to do things. She sorted her laundry into seven different color piles for two people. She ironed my grandfather’s pajamas. Who has time for that?! I have the skills to keep my home as well as my mother. But I often don’t have the energy or the time. I daily have to decide what is good enough. Some days I decide it’s more important for me to read books on the couch with my children, or journal, or plant my garden, or attend to work emails rather than do my dishes or scrub my toilet.

Other days, I need my home clean and orderly to minimize the psychological clutter that piles of unattended things create in my brain. I need space to feel free to write. So where is the balance? Some nights I’m too tired to fight with my kids and make them clean up all their toys, and I leave the dinner dishes for the morning. Other nights I work to tidy everything away because I want to protect my sacred morning space and have a prepared place ready for me to do my work. Both are valid. Different days I need different things.

Davis presents the idea of making choices about care tasks based on functionality rather than shame. She describes being post-partum with her second child and folding laundry and having a moment where she looked at the infant onesie she was folding in her hand and thought, “Why am I folding this?” It eventually led her to completely rethink how she was doing her laundry. It caused me to rethink mine too.

For years I’ve been meticulously folding all of the laundry in our home and tucking it neatly away in everyone’s drawers in a way that Marie Kondo might loosely approve of. But I’ve realized I’m the only one who actually cares. Why am I doing this? The past two weeks we’ve tried something new in our house. I still wash the laundry and then we have a family claiming party. Even my two and four year olds are capable of recognizing which clothes are theirs in the pile. So everyone claims their clothes and then everyone puts theirs away. I close my eyes and don’t watch how the kids’ clothes go into their drawers. It takes a slightly painful letting go of control on my part. But everything goes into drawers. The most important thing to me is that the laundry isn’t left in visible piles of clutter around the house. I don’t want to see it. I also bought a hamper with a lid for my husband’s clean clothes. If he wants to put them away, he can. If he wants to dig through the hamper to find clean socks in the morning, then that’s his yard. It’s morally neutral for both of us. And we came up with a solution that means I won’t get angry at tripping over the laundry basket that has sat in our room for two weeks because he doesn’t want to fold clothes. It works for both of us. It’s wonderfully freeing, and I feel less like a maid. I still fold my own clothes and put them away because it makes my brain happy.

So far most of the examples in this post have been about stereotypically female gender role tasks. But they don’t have to be. There are plenty of men who already do and/or could participate in these tasks more. There are also lots of other aspects of self-care tasks that can apply to anyone—personal grooming, wardrobe style, vehicle cleanliness, preparing meals, etc. For instance, I need to catch myself from thinking that my husband has a moral flaw if he doesn’t keep his clothes put away in his closet in neat piles, or if he wears socks with holes in them because he doesn’t take time to buy more when I think he should, or if he doesn’t keep his truck dusted or his paperwork in organized files. There’s nothing moral about any of this at all. The question is functionality. Can he find the clothes he needs to wear? Can he locate the needed paperwork to do his job? If the answer is yes, then that’s all that needs to really matter, at the very least what needs to matter most.

The point is to let go of any lingering shame or comparison to how others complete their care tasks. Work towards functionality. What works for you? What are your values? You might not care about piles of laundry on your floor. You might be really bothered by something else. And that’s okay. Be yourself. Embrace what works for you and your family. Stop trying to measure up to impossible standards or working overly hard at things that don’t matter as much as they feel they do.

Stop “shoulding” on yourself.