What are Care Tasks?
In her wonderful book, How to Keep House While Drowning, licensed clinical therapist KC Davis refers to household chores as “care tasks” because they are tasks one does to care for people in the home. She shares that doing household tasks is sometimes easier when you know it’s for the benefit of someone you care about.
Importantly, Davis encourages readers to consider future you among the people deserving of care.
Closing Duties
One of my household duties is resetting the kitchen each night for the next day. I make sure the counters are clear and wiped down, the sink is empty, the dishwasher is loaded and turned on, and the coffee maker is prepped. Davis refers to such tasks as “closing duties.”
Who benefits from closing duties? Well, the person who does opening duties, of course. Sometimes it’s me (if I can get myself out of bed in a timely fashion), and sometimes it’s my partner.
Regardless of who’s opening that day, it’s a gift to wake up to a clean kitchen and simply flip the switch on the coffee maker. We can unload the dishwasher in the time it takes for coffee to brew. Then, it’s onto making breakfast and packing lunches, care tasks my husband does while I make beds and do laundry.
On a recent evening, it was getting late, and the kitchen was still a mess from dinnertime. I was too tired to deal with it, so I told my surprised spouse, “I’m going to let it wait until tomorrow.”
To my surprise, he said, “I’ll do it.”
I was vehement. “No, you’re just as tired as I am. You can’t do it.” But he insisted he couldn’t go to bed with the kitchen a mess. That day, I wasn’t willing to do it for future me, but I was still willing to do it for him, so I got it done.
This is when it hit me how far we’d come with respect to care task habit building. When we first started out as a couple many years ago, it would have been perfectly acceptable to let a chore like this go until morning or go half-finished. Today, it’s foundational to our routines.
CREATING ROUTINES TO Match Our Lives
Clarifying roles and responsibilities and creating strong routines emerged gradually as we became parents who worked full time outside the home. Prior to kids, it was easier to let things slide at home because we had more free time and fewer overall responsibilities. The added workload of caring for two small humans and earning a living forced us to develop new habits to maintain peace in our home.
Over time, our daily care tasks and routines must evolve to reflect the ever-changing circumstances of our lives. If something in our home life has become a source of chronic frustration, it’s often because our behaviors haven’t caught up with a new reality.
The many new tasks required by kids were a prime example. When our kids started needing school lunches packed each day, we didn’t have a clear sense of who would carry out this care task, and when. There were inefficiencies and arguments during this transitional period. Eventually, my husband claimed this task, worked it into his morning routine, and it’s never been a problem since.
When Care Tasks are Hard
There are many circumstances that can make it hard or even impossible to create and maintain optimal household habits and routines. Consider parents with newborns, people who are grieving, people recovering from illness or injury, a household in transition such as moving, downsizing, or adding multigenerational family members, and people with depression or cognitive challenges.
I recommend How to Keep House While Drowning for anyone who is struggling to keep up during a difficult time, for gentle, non-perfectionistic suggestions on how to cope. It’s also okay to ask for help from friends and family members, or hire household help such as a cleaning service, laundry service, grocery service, a handyperson, or professional home organizer during this period.