I picked this up in the new-to-us section of the public library. This is a really well-chosen title, really lets you know what you are getting.

From the back:

If you’re struggling to stay on top of your to-do list, you probably have a good reason: anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support. For therapist KC Davis, the birth of her second child triggered a stress-mess cycle: the more behind she felt, the less motivated she was to start. …

Inside, you’ll learn to: See chores as a kindness to your future self, not a as rejection of your self-worth; Start by setting priorities; Stagger tasks so you won’t procrastinate; Clean in quick bursts within your existing daily routines; Use creative shortcuts to transform a room from messy to functional.

With KC’s help, your home will feel like a sanctuary again. It will become a place to rest, even when things aren’t finished.

I really wish that I had written this book, or that it had been written by Allie Beth Stuckey. This book, or a version of it, needs to be written by someone who understands human sin nature, grace, and the freedom that is found in Christ Jesus. It’s so, so close, but because of the author’s wokeness, there are jarring notes.

The Practical

To some, this book might sound as if it was written by a sloppy, disorganized person, to sloppy, disorganized people, to help them justify their sloppiness. On the contrary, it was written by a naturally distractible person, to distractible people, to help them achieve the level of organization that they actually want to, without letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

KC went through rehab as a teenager. She has ADHD, is married with two small children, and is a therapist, which means that people talk to her about their frustrations with themselves and their inability to get their houses in order.

Consequently, the intended audience for this book is people who are responsible for keeping house, but have some major obstacle such as chronic pain, being in the midst of grieving, ADHD, depression, or having “issues” around cleaning due to the way they were raised … or all of the above. The goal is to help these people develop strategies to get over the mental (and sometimes physical) blocks so they can maintain their houses in basic livability. And I am there for it!

People in these situations might not have the time, energy, or attention span for a long book, so this little gem is written in short chapters, each of which gets right to the point. To accommodate people who might be very literal-minded (such as those on the autism spectrum), KC re-states all figurative language very literally. For example: “We are going to flex our motivation muscle” becomes “We are going to practice this skill until we get good at it.”

While I don’t believe that ADHD is a literal, physical brain disease, nor that it should be treated with drugs, I do believe that what we call ADHD is a good description of how some people’s minds, bodies, and sensory-processing work. And while I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD (and have no desire to), their descriptions of how their minds work, and the strategies they use to get things done, usually sound so familiar and relatable that I find myself asking, “Doesn’t everyone experience that?” So, I could probably get a diagnosis if I wanted to. I just don’t think it would help me. I’m an older person and I’ve learned how to set up systems that work for me.

With that in mind, many of the aphorisms and strategies that KC presents here, are ones that I’ve come to myself, over years of keeping house, in season and out of season, through small children, international moves, unemployment, depression, the lot. Things like this:

• “I have a responsibility to make sure my family always have clean clothes. I don’t have a responsibility to make sure that they never have dirty clothes.”
• Any cleaning is better than no cleaning.
• Better a less efficient method or system that you can actually do, than a perfect system that never gets done.
• Doing “closing chores” the night before is a favor to your future self.
• Most people don’t have a motivation problem (since they do actually want to be able to do the task and enjoy the clean result). Instead, they have a task-initiation problem.
• And the like.

The Spiritual

Of course, there is not a firm frontier between the practical and the spiritual in our everyday lives. As Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil runs “through every human heart.” Which means that, even as we face mundane choices like do I do the dishes, the laundry, or take a nap, we are interacting with issues of bondage to sin versus freedom, and grace versus shame. So it’s not really possible to talk about practical things like task initiation without also addressing the spiritual.

KC does a pretty good job of this in her book. She starts out by saying (page 11), and this is in bold, “Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.”

Now, since I can hear howls of objection, let me address this. What she is trying to express here, is that shame does not energize people. It paralyzes them.

Yes, moms do have a duty to keep on top of the laundry cycle and yes, (contra KC Davis), there IS such a thing as laziness, and laziness IS sinful.

But when it comes to “care tasks,” many people (most people?) grew up being shamed not for character flaws such as laziness, but for lack of technical skills in the tasks, for not doing them up to an adult’s standard, for not doing them perfectly, or for not knowing where to start. Consequently, many (most?) people have a huge burden of shame and failure around household tasks. And this burden of shame, and this perfectionism, makes it much, much more difficult to get these tasks accomplished (or in some cases even started). See? KC is not saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame because it is 100% OK to never clean your kitchen.” She is saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame associated with these tasks because only then will you be able to do them.”

In other words, KC in her self-examination and her work as a therapist has stumbled upon that biblical truth: “the law kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The only people who are free to act and move in this world are those who are not paralyzed by shame.

It’s at this point that I wish this book had been written by a Christian, because this point really deserves to be developed further. How does one set others free from shame? Certainly, if people have indeed been shamed over things that are morally neutral (such as being slow at doing chores, or doing the dishes a different way than your parent), then this needs to be clarified. But this is not enough, because not all our shame is spurious. We actually are sinners, and we actually do know it. It is not enough to say, as KC says, “I don’t think there is any such thing as laziness.” Even when we have gotten rid of the spurious shame over morally neutral things like being naturally untidy, even if your particular client is not actually lazy … what about the other shame? What are we going to do about that?

In other words, the only way that people can truly be set free from shame is when they turn to Jesus, the living Christ, who alone has the power to free us from shame, so that we can “do the good works that He prepared in advance for us to do.” I think Allie Beth Stuckey could do a lot with this. In fact, I’d love it if she were to have KC Davis on her podcast.

But then, she proceeds to shoot herself in the foot

The other problem I have with this book is as follows. For the most part, KC does a great job of being gentle with her readers and treating them like responsible human beings. But every so often, she turns around and sucker-punches them with identity politics.

Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold. You can see this when a thin, white, rich self-help influencer posts “Choose Joy” on her Instagram with a caption that tells us all joy is a choice. Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control.

pp. 14 – 16

It’s hard to know where to start with this paragraph. Does KC really think that a “thin, rich, white influencer” posts “Choose Joy” because she is already joyful? That such people have no insecurities or struggles? That all that is necessary for joy is having circumstances line up in your life such that you avoid three major conditions which the Identity Crowd considers to be disadvantages? This is so dehumanizing as to beggar belief. 

I’m not saying “Choose Joy” is advice that would be helpful to anyone, really, but I at least recognize that most people who say things like “Choose Joy” obviously mean “Choose joy in spite of all the awful things that are happening in your life.” If people are happy, at peace, and free from shame or struggle, they don’t go around saying stuff like “choose joy.” And based on the practical wisdom in the rest of her book, I think KC actually knows this. But, blinded by identity politics, she considers it OK to lay aside what she knows and take a swipe at some of her readers in a misguided attempt to build up others of her readers. Unfortunately, this undercuts her message that she doesn’t want to shame anyone. You see, this book is not for you if you are rich, thin, or especially, white. And as we know, those always go together.

In the very next paragraph, KC says what she was actually trying to say, but in a much more sane and humane way, namely that different things work for different people:

Different people struggle differently — and privilege isn’t the only difference. Someone might find a way to meal plan, or exercise, or organize their pantry that revolutionizes their life. But the solutions that work for them are highly dependent on only their unique barriers but also their strengths, personality, and interests.

p. 16

Really, that paragraph would have been sufficient, excepting the word privilege. I do wish people would stop using the word privilege — which is a legal term — when what they actually mean is “advantage.” But that’s a rant for another day.