Help! I Stay At Home and I Can’t Do the Dishes!

Here’s the situation: You stay at home with your little baby and even though you’re home all day, your husband still comes home at 7pm and wonders why HE has to wash the dishes.  And go through the mail.  And start the laundry.  At first you’re mad and yell at him—”I didn’t have time!  I couldn’t put the baby down!”  But then after you’ve done that, the thought does cross your mind: why IS the kitchen a mess?  What HAVE I been doing all day? Then you start feeling guilty.

To be sure, stay at home mothers all over the world are covered in spit up, still in their pjs, and generally hanging on by a thread when their husbands walk in the door at night.  This is totally normal, especially if your baby is not napping yet, or the baby is napping but you have other small children at home too.   Husbands typically don’t understand how staying at home with little children generally means moving from one crisis to another, and even though one of those crises might take place in your own room, you still don’t have time to pick up and use the hairbrush just inches away.

But sometimes there is something wrong.  Sometimes his rebuke uncovers a paralysis problem that is not just normal stay-at-home mom stuff.  It hits a nerve because you’re depressed and want a way out, but you don’t know how to get it.

The boundary between “normal” stay at home mom, and “paralyzed” stay at home mom, is gray for the kinds of reasons I’ve stated above.  Sometimes it’s not a matter of outward behavior, but of inward feelings.  A normal stay at home mom might still be in her pjs with nothing accomplished at the end of the day, but there is a qualitative difference between her and the paralyzed stay at home mom.  Mainly because the normal stay at home mom is at peace.  She knows the messiness is not the ideal but she just couldn’t get to it today and tomorrow she has a better plan to get the baby to sleep while she mops.  She might not accomplish it even tomorrow, but if she doesn’t, she’s at least going to get to the mail while she’s spooning Baby her strained peaches.  There is an inward mobilization that fuels the normal stay-at-home mom.  She’s not defeated and resigned.

The paralyzed stay at home mom is truly depressed.  She knows the dishes aren’t done but doesn’t see any way that they’ll get done for the next 18 yrs.  She is overwhelmed with being a mom, and it isn’t so much the “time” she doesn’t have to clean the house or take a shower—it’s the mental space.  She doesn’t think like herself, she doesn’t feel like herself.  She’s paralyzed because she’s resigned.  She may in fact have time on her hands that another mom doesn’t—this might be the first baby and one day the baby takes a long nap.  But she doesn’t feel any better.  She doesn’t use that time to grab that cup of instant coffee she’s been dreaming of and, relieved, step into a ten minute shower.  She sits right through the nap, thinking of nothing or just her lot in life, and sinks into the confirmed role of doom once Baby wakes up again.

If this is you, you are not alone.  But you are depressed.  It might not be post-partum depression… your baby could be two years old!  But you are depressed all the same and it is important for you to take action.  The unwashed dishes are just a sign, and the answer is not to despise your husband for bringing it up.  The answer is to get some paper plates for awhile and talk to your husband about the deeper problem.  Once he understands that your problem is depression, and not your lazy butt, he’s liable to cut you some slack.  that doesn’t mean he’s going to back off!  He will definitely want to fix your problem and this will probably make you mad.  But it is his nature to fix, and he’ll suggest ridiculous things that you’d better have some alternatives to, until you start taking some initiative.  It pays to allow this.

Once you get your motivation back in life, then eventually the dishes will get done again.  Let him help you rediscover your motor, what makes you tick.  Let him help you take care of yourself, and work with it.  Or if he’s not helpful, confide in a friend who can kick your butt for awhile—make you go to the gym with her, take a cooking class, whatever.   Get a counselor if necessary or join a small group.  Or consider doing a stay-at-home degree that will give you some work and vision.  Whatever it takes, do it.  Add to your life, don’t subtract.   Because no-one can promise that you’ll get the dishes done every day, but at least you’ll feel like you’re controlling your life again instead of your life controlling you.

That’s the goal.

 

 

Self Esteem

Ok, I have a confession to make.  For my first two sons, I fell into the self-esteem trap of parenting.  You know, the “you can’t praise too much” trap?  Or sometimes it is said, “Make sure you give 10 good remarks for every 1 negative one.”  I really thought the more I heaped on praise, the better my children would feel about themselves.  Or at least I thought, if I avoided a lot of corrections, they would.

Turns out, I was wrong.  Like most moms, I sheltered my firstborn and he is now the most bitter and grumpy of my children.  Actually, he’s not too bad but in comparison to my third and fourth children, there’s no comparison to be made.  They are always happy, and my first is always needing a pick me up.  My second born is not too much better although he has a melancholy temperament (and always has) so I try not to take his sadness too seriously.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in my typical homeschooling routine.  I have just started homeschooling in the last two years, and my kids follow a predictable line up: my firstborn starts off well but usually gets grumpy and frustrated with work, my second born is not totally happy but is very excited when he gets to do something “bigger” that his older brother gets to do (i.e. write a sentence!).  My third, who is only four and not kindergarten age yet, happily begs to work throughout the day.  And my fourth is too happy to care whether she gets a turn to work or not.   HA!

Some of this is surely typical of birth order and homeschool in general.  It’s hard to pioneer, it’s easier to follow.  And things become more fun with time.  But I am also sure that it is more than a homeschooling phenomenon… it’s kind of the same in every area of life.  Part of this is, I believe, due to the self esteem problem and the motivation style differences in my children.

For my firstborn, my husband and I were the typical parents cooing over the baby and over-obsessing about his developmental milestones.  He had some speech problems, so that made us all the more myopic.  We taught him and tutored him, we played games, we took him to specialists, he went to preschool etc.  And he had lots and lots of attention and praise.  Now at age 6.5, however, he is mainly externally motivated.  He’s motivated by praise and attention, but he has a hard time being happy when he doesn’t have it.  ANd like any child, the more they have, the more they want.  So school is difficult not because he doesn’t have enough character to stick with it–he does.  But it isn’t a joy to him, and that’s the hard thing.  Every parent wants their child to ENJOY learning, to be a reader, to get enthralled with some subject and just take off.  But he isn’t intrinsically motivated… yet.  He doesn’t see the thrill in making up a story, coloring a picture, or working on a project.  He just wants to get it done and then it’s over.  He likes learning of course, because he likes to be smarter than everyone else.  I think it makes him feel good to know things (as real self esteem should!).  But he doesn’t like or embrace the path to getting there.  It’s a battle.

In fact everything in his life is like that… if it’s not being monitored, it falls apart.  Very conditional, externally motivated ethics.  My second born, whom we did not lavish attention on, is slightly better adjusted.  But because he too had some special needs as a preschooler (sensory issues), he is also very hard to praise.  He has pretty good intrinsic motivation actually, and loves to get into science, art, or English.  But when I try to make him feel better about himself, it never works. I  can praise and praise.  I can encourage and encourage, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference. At 5.5yrs, he has a particularly salient perfectionism problem, and it is hard to get him to be happy with what he does.  It was like that when he was two and struggling with physical milestones, and all the praise in the world from me did not seem to convince him in his inner thoughts.  He’s mildly unconfident that what he does is good enough.

Now we come to my third and fourth children who, while they are far from perfect, are much more functional.  At least in the self-esteem department. I’ve never made an effort to praise them over and above—in fact, I’ve never worried about it—and they’re healthier!  They don’t seem hung up like their counterparts.  And I am sure letting the self-esteem education is part of it.  I’ve learned that the self-esteem really has to come from within.  It can’t be GIVEN or forced by an external party.  And in order for teh self-esteem to come from within, it has to be related to things the child can do for themselves.  So the more my children can do for themselves independently, the happier they are about it and the more intrinsically motivated they are to do it.  If I am happy about it too much, then I usurp their own happiness about it.  If I motivate it too much, then I usurp their motivation to do it.  There is a certain distance or disattachment that is important to healthy self esteem development.

That doesn’t mean I can be neglectful.  Being a passive and aloof parent will not yield a child who feels loved and praised.   But there is a certain KIND of distance which is very important to give a child, which I apparently did not give to my firstborn.  I tried to give it to my second born more, but he was hung up in a stage where he felt inept, and that went counteracted fora  long time.  So the kids have to experience victory for themselves, and they have to even initiate these victorious things.  The problem with my firsborn is that he doesn’t initiate things for himself—I have to be the initiator—so he can’t feel as happy about it.  That is one cycle of external motivation that is hard to break.  The areas where I don’t have any input (i.e. his lego building) tends to be the areas where he really excells and has his own fun.   ANd the more I push him to learn, even though he resents it at first, eventually becomes points of victory for him too because he gets more competence as he learns.

So it’s a tricky thing, but I just wanted to pass on the small bits of wisdom I’ve so far learned the hard way =)