“Wednesday is Anti-Procrastination Day,” and it still is, all these years later.
It began when I was a new mother, overwhelmed by keeping house, until exhausted by my own whining, I said:
“Kelly, you ran a classroom, a restaurant, a nonprofit, YOU can do this.”
And so even though housework did not deserve my best, especially as I had witnessed the unfair weight of it on my mothers & grandmothers, I set out to study the art and science of household management, as a matter of survival.
I created systems of sanity, engaging everyone in the household in routines that continue to this day. “I stayed home for the children not the house,” was my motto.
My sense was that this role was both sacrifice and blessing, but never an assignment to do everything alone. Along the way, a woman (and email subscription list) called FlyLady was an ally in staying the course, but this was long before I realized that housework was political.
Moral.
I hadn’t understood then that homemaking meant that a women’s brilliance was unavailable in other spaces where it is was so desperately needed. I hadn’t understood then that refusing to do everything myself was not only an act of self-preservation but a revolutionary act of consciousness.
Sharing housework with my family from the very beginning created increasing space for me to begin exploring other aspects of myself, which are still unfolding as my youngest prepares to fly from the nest.
During my first year at United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 2012, I heard women from developing countries emphasize how much their voices were held back by an unfair share of caring for home and family.
This year women from these same regions expressed their surprise to find that #metoo was epidemic in our developed nation.
Equality, it appears, is far from being achieved, anywhere.
It begins in the home. In the bedroom. At the kitchen table.
It seeds a more just world,
For everyone.
The Empty Nest Diary 