Quick Hits
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Overall rating: 5 stars’Overall rating: 5 stars
Format reviewed: Kindle
Would read again: Yes!
Intended Audience: Those with anxiety, depression, ADHD, and I would say anyone going through a hard time in general. This book is very neurodiverse friendly. Davis offers literal explanations of metaphors used, summaries, and bolding to highlight important points.
Is this book a lead magnet? No. Davis does offer a depression/ADHD house cleaning course for $14.99 on their website. However, this is never mentioned in the book that I can remember and it’s the least offensive online course offering I’ve personally ran into. I had to seek it out and the “sales copy” is two sentences explaining what it is and who it’s for.
In-Depth Perspectives
Before my daughter was born, I was one of those people who read 60+ books on average per year. Then the last trimester set in and I barely had any energy for reading 5 minute articles on the web let alone pick up a book. Several friends told me I’d get back into reading during maternity leave because you can just read to your kid and that’s all you’d be doing.
I didn’t have energy for that. Postpartum depression hit hard and about all I could muster was non-stop Great British Bake Off episodes. But one book caught my eye: How to Keep House While Drowning.
I felt like I was drowning, but I wasn’t sure if the book would be for me or not. But when I opened it up and the author, KC Davis, spoke of going through the same postpartum experience, I knew I wasn’t alone.
This is one of those books that I feel like should be required reading for humans.
Here are my main takeaways:
- Separate cleaning from morality. You are not bad if your kitchen, bedroom, or house are a mess. My daughter has gotten into Cocomelon recently and I heard a song I hadn’t heard since I was a little kid about the three little kittens who lost their mittens. When it gets to the bit where they have to fess up to having gotten them dirty, they’re naughty kittens. This idea of being bad for something getting dirty is so ingrained it’s sung to tiny children. But it’s not true.
- Cleaning is about getting things back to functional. We have this weird idea that once we clean it’s done. But cleaning is cyclical in nature because our homes need to serve us. So things are either in a state of functioning or dysfunction. Again, it’s not tied to morality, which is such a breath of fresh air. It’s just a matter of whether our spaces are able to serve the functions we require of them.
- Different levels of cleaning are more than acceptable for when you feel off or are sick. This one has been a game changer for us as we’ve gotten every cold under the sun since our daughter started daycare.
I’m always saying, “We’re going by sick rules right now.” Which for us means, clothes get sorted into the right drawer, but they’re not folded. You need clean clothes. Wrinkle-free is optional. - Go easy on yourself when you’re sick. This may sound very similar to the last point, but for me, it’s more about self-compassion.
For some reason putting lotion on when I was first postpartum was too much, so I bought the kind you throw on in the shower. It probably took the same amount of time as putting regular lotion on after the shower, but it mentally felt like I was giving myself a break, so I did it. Same went for buying flossers instead of using regular floss string. Anything that takes a little mental load off is perfectly acceptable when you’re sick. - It actually addresses trauma around cleaning from childhood! I’ve never heard anyone talk about this concept other than myself (and my siblings because I’ve asked them about it too). But trauma from how adults criticized cleaning and the tactics they used to get kids to live up to their cleaning standards is real. I really appreciated that it was brought up in the same compassionate way the Davis tackles all the other topics in the book.
Final Thoughts
There were so many tools that I picked up in this book that a year later I still think about them and use them every day. I can genuinely say that we have a cleaner home than we did before we had a kid. Not that you’ll ever see it spotless. It’s certainly not! As someone who likely has ADHD a lot of my cleaning and organization projects get left half done. However, it’s become more and more functional because of the mindset shifts I picked up from reading this book.
How to Keep House While Drowning lands in my rare category of books that deserves a place on the kindle AND a place on my bookshelf.
Resources:
Davis, K. (2022). How to keep house while drowning: A gentle approach to cleaning and organizing. Simon Element.
Recent Comments