Retirement feels busier than when I worked full time. I have been putting in a lot of long hours at my part-time lifeguarding/swim instructor job and I have also been focusing on getting my fitness activities in. Plus there is elder care across town. Despite the huge portion of the burden my sister takes on, it somehow feels more demanding than single parenting ever did.
These are all responsibilities I mostly took on joyfully, just as I did full time work after university. I had been raised in the 1960s and 70s with the idea that women can do everything. But in the 1980s, that morphed into superwoman syndrome, where women worked outside the home and still took on the burden of all the unpaid work inside the home.
I think back to those early days in the 1980s and I am struck by how much I still feel bound to externally-imposed housekeeping norms, and therefore a failure.
My mother and my ex mother in-law were mostly stay-at-home parents. In Mom’s case, at least, it was largely because we moved often. By the time she found a job as a nurse, my dad got posted to a new location.
Both of them maintained perfectly tidy houses. Mom used to say she came to visit me, not my house, when things weren’t perfect. My mother-in-law was less kind. She obsessed about sweeping floors three times a day, and washed her kitchen floor daily. She was not shy about doing the same at my house when she came to visit, even though my house was clean.
In retirement, I am finally trying to let go of those expectations.
I live alone, shower at work and after swim practice, so my shower and tub rarely get used. Do I need to scrub them weekly when they may not have been used for weeks? No, I do not.
Could I hire a cleaning service? Probably, once I get over my obsession with cleaning before they get here.
Realistically, I don’t need to dust everywhere in my house at least weekly. I’m pretty observant and have a good sense of when there is actual dust to remove (and then I usually get it done fairly quickly).
Some rules are good: I do change the sheets and do my laundry weekly. I make a serious effort to clear kitchen counters before bedtime because I like to wake up to a clean kitchen. But I am letting go of Mom’s maxim that a clean sink is a sign of a clean house (desiring a gleaming sink does not make me any more inclined to reorganize the bicycle storage room).
I use an app to help me track the jobs I truly loathe, like cleaning bathrooms and washing floors regularly, and remind me to do certain seasonal things.
The biggest thing I need to let go of is the belief that I can be superwoman, decades after the concept was debunked.
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