Thank god for housework (sorry, Mum)

Proof that grief rots your brain

As a kid, I struggled to understand irony.

If, for example, the newsagent had sold out of the Property Guide on a Friday afternoon, my mum might roll her eyes and say, “Oh, great”.

But that didn’t mean she was pleased.

If my dad was singing along to Van Morrison in the car, drumming on the steering wheel and speak-singing every line five seconds before the Irish songbird himself, my mum might mutter, “Very tuneful”.

But that didn’t mean she liked it.

Adults lived in a secret world where their speech was often accompanied by winks, nudges and laughter, suggesting they didn’t literally mean what they said.

As an observant child, I noticed these body language shifts but wasn’t always able to decode them.

Or at least, that’s my excuse for why I composed the following sentence when my infant school teacher asked the class to write about our parents: “My mum says she doesn’t like housework but I think she does really”.

It didn’t seem far-fetched at the time, considering the fact that adults liked all manner of things I found disgusting, like coffee and naps.

Now, of course, I understand how she felt about housework back then because it’s the way she felt about it her whole life: she hated it.

Cleaning, ironing, washing up, and perhaps most of all, vacuuming was all a waste of time to her, part of an endless, punitive cycle holding her back from drinking cappuccini with friends, reading the latest Denise Grover Swank or watching a good western.

She resented the fact that women are expected to do so much domestic labour, considered it drudgery and — rightly, in my opinion — raised me to believe that housework and cooking are necessary evils that you shouldn’t spend too much of your life on because:

1. no one ever looks back on their death bed and wishes their skirting boards had been a bit less dusty

and

2. food all ends up in the toilet anyway.

Then I lost her and suddenly, in contravention of every deeply held belief, housework became of paramount importance. Potentially life-saving. Ugh.

It’s terrible but it’s true: housework has become one of my bereavement management strategies.

Because I live with a fatiguing illness, I have to pace my activities, doing a little bit here and there before putting my feet up.

That means I can’t necessarily do a task when I think of it and have to break a lot of chores into stages — the gap between washing clothes and hanging them up might be closer to six hours than sixty minutes, for example, and the dishwasher is rarely emptied (or filled) in one go.

While previously frustrating, I now use this as a coping technique.

If I’ve been sitting at my desk wracked with grief, I know the movement and low-key sense of purpose of a little light housework, soundtracked by a favourite podcast, will make me calmer and less stressed.

And as kind as some of my loved ones have been in my grief, no one can be with me all the time. Whereas housework can! (Dystopian, yes. But helpful.)

I can invariably find towels to wash, clothes to put on hangers, cutlery to place into a drawer, or socks to fold as nature and Marie Kondo intended.

Because I struggle to make my bed in one go, I’ll change the fitted sheet one day and the pillowcases another; the duvet at a different time altogether.

Occasionally, I roll out the vacuum and employ it in half-roomly intervals.

When I look back now, I don’t know how I would have got through those first few days and weeks without having the task of cleaning up and clearing out my mum’s room.

I couldn’t face food — not without my mother! — and hadn’t yet worked out how much weepier irregular mealtimes and inadequate protein make me.

I didn’t have as extensive a variety of virtual grief support groups to attend or a handle on which antihistamine would help me nod off at the same time every night.

But you can bet your sweet bippy I had a large pack of Dettol antibacterial multi-surface cleaning wipes, a selection of dusters, sponges and cloths, and a Flash Speedmop starter kit with six wet refills and three dry.

Sure, sometimes I overdid it.

As I bent to daub doorways and rub under radiators, not entirely sure I’d make it up again, the thoughts I want my mum, I need my mum, my mum can’t be dead looping in my brain, I got a small endorphin boost and tiny sense of achievement that felt better than anything else at that terrible time.

So I kept going, pushing and pushing myself, until my back seized up, my legs spasmed and pain flared from wrist to elbow, forcing me to lie flat on my back on the sofa and (gross) face my feelings.

The worst thing about housework — that is, the endlessness of it, the fact that, until you die, you’re never done with it — now seems like a perverse blessing.

The tasks I didn’t want in those cursed early days, like sending emails, filling in forms and phoning strangers to announce that my mum was dead (sometimes receiving a cheery “OK!” in response) were unfortunately unavoidable.

But working the washing machine so hard I smelled burning rubber was one of the only things that helped me survive.

I wish I could have tidied up more before my mum died, made her room more hospitable while she was here to enjoy it. Instead, I was too exhausted from accompanying her to and from hospital.

Strangely, though, mopping her floor, throwing out junk, scrubbing the windowsill and making the bed felt like one last act of care.

It also felt, bizarrely, like a gift she’d given me.

I can’t claim, as Marie Kondo once did, that “I love mess!” but the simplicity of cleaning and tidying is a relief when bureaucratic processes are breaking your brain.

Unfortunately, I’m not skilled or energetic enough to cope with anything beyond the basics, or to organise outsourcing it.

One day someone will replace my kitchen blinds, scrape moss off the back steps and give my shower the scrubbing of its life but those are going to take more time. As much as I have a routine of sorts, I’m still in survival mode.

For now, I’ll stick with what I know. Wonderfully and horribly, as long as my health doesn’t deteriorate any further, housework offers an escape from the intensity of grief.

Even the sudden and shocking loss of my mum can’t make me iron, though. Life will never be long or miserable enough for that.