This is so tough. Housework is going a lot better for me lately, but it’s still hard to maintain a loving, spiritual attitude towards it! Last night I caught my husband trying to fix himself a snack, after I had already shined the sink !! What was he thinking? I strode into the kitchen and announced that, just like my mother used to do, I was going to impose hours of operation on our kitchen. Once the kitchen closes for the night, that’s it! No more kitchen! You can wait until morning! If you’re hungry, get up early! God knows I’ll be up early, cleaning up after your messy butt!!!!!

I was feeling extremely righteous until my husband looked at me like I was some kind of maniac . . . exactly the way my brother and sister and I used to look at our mother when she closed the kitchen, as she periodically did. It occurred to me to wonder what in the hell I was doing. Do I want to have a clean kitchen so I can look at it all the time? Or so I, and my family, can have a clean, comforting, relatively unstressful place to prepare and eat our food? Do I want meals in my home to be exercises in control and anxiety, the way they were in my mother’s house when I was growing up? Or do I want them to be sources of physical and emotional nourishment, a time for us to care for ourselves and each other?

This is starting to sound melodramatic, but that’s how intense it felt to me last night. I was briefly overwhelmed by the implications of my reaction to my poor hubby’s snack. Then I recovered, and I told him to go ahead and have a snack, and I would get the dishes and sink in the morning. And I did. You know what? The sink was lovely and shiny last night when he went to use it—so he got to enjoy it. That’s the whole purpose of keeping it so shiny, right? For my family and me to enjoy it.

I wonder how many women I know who go to therapy because of food/housework/marriage/parenthood/other issues could benefit from just trying Flylady.