Book Review: How to Keep House While Drowning, by K. C. Davis

Do you judge yourself because of the state of your home?

Did you grow up with the idea that you were a certain kind of person depending on how presentable your home is (or isn’t?)

I certainly was.

And it can be difficult, at times, to remember that the state of our homes has nothing—nothing—to do with our worth as human beings.

Mess is meaningless.

That’s right. In spite of everything we’ve been taught and the way we feel—the mess means nothing about us.

What is this book about?

Katherine Davis had a plan. But the pandemic blew it apart. A few weeks into lockdown, she found herself with a newborn, a toddler, severe post-partuum depression, and a husband with a demanding new job.  Without outside help during the isolation and confinement of the pandemic, Davis flipped her view of housework and her home upside down. Her home, she decided, existed to serve her— not she, it.  In other words, looking after her home made sense only in so far as it enabled her to function and nothing more.                 

This book is about decoupling the journey of worth from the journey of care. This book emphasises kindness towards the self and champions doing as little as you can to keep things running.

KC Davis reframes household tasks as care tasks: things we do to help take care of ourselves. Thus the only criterion for evaluation is function: How’s that working for me?

What’s good about this book?

It puts self-care into the centre of the conversation about looking after our homes. It removes shame from the act of caring for our homes. She underlines how important this is when she talks about finally having the time to deal with the laundry when the baby was seven months old. Until that day, she says, the family got dressed from a huge pile of clean clothes on the floor of the laundry room.

As she writes,

“If I had spent those seven months telling myself I was a piece of of shit every time I looked at that laundry pile, I probably would not have had the motivation to do it despite having the time.” 

p. 5

This moment in the laundry room is pivotal to understanding the necessity and the power of self-compassion. She continues,

“if a laundry pile represents failure and I’m already struggling with a newborn and a pandemic and an energetic toddler, my brain, which is desperately to avoid pain and seek pleasure (or at least relief from pain), is never going to give me the green light to lean in to yet another painful experience like spending thirty minutes in my failure pile of laundry. But it’s not failure. It’s laundry.” (my emphasis)

(p. 58-59) 

Key takeaways:

• There are only five things you need to do to tidy a room.
• Good enough is perfect. (Actually, good enough is better than perfect!)
• Rest is a right, not a reward.
• Set priorities to do the most good with the least amount of energy.
• Be kind to yourself. Self-compassion is powerful.
• Mess has no inherent meaning.

What are its shortcomings?

She doesn’t have all the answers (if that can even be considered a shortcoming in this context!). The chapter on car cleaning, for example, starts with: “I dunno, friends.”

And why not? Like every home needs a rough storage area: there are places that will never be polished, nor even picked up, perhaps. No judgement. That’s self-care, too.

“This journey isn’t about some mythical destination where everything has the perfect system; it’s about permission to make things functional and permission to enjoy your life even if your car never gets clean.”

You are not the state of your car.

Did she go too far?

Rating:

4.5/5

(Just ‘cause nothing’s perfect. 😉)

Highly recommended. 

Have you read it? What did you think?

You can find it here at Amazon.ca. (Not an affiliate link!)