How to do that? 

Just like managing a relationship or managing a career, you have to make sure that everyone is on the same page and understands that part of the benefit of having you in their lives is to help you succeed at what you are doing career-wise and on the household level. Assuming that spouse/kids treasure mom the way you treasure them, this is a mindset that is quickly adopted and embraced if presented in those terms. 

The following sections will show how to approach that situation and how to get everyone on the same page and working together to maintain a happy, healthy, clean and safe home. That way, you will only have two jobs to focus on. Well, ok, two and a half, the husband will probably always be a slob!

Week 1 – Getting Into Gear

Erma Bombeck, the American humorist once stated that “the female species is naturally a perfectionist to help keep the male species, which is naturally watching football, from injuring themselves around the house.” 

When you think about that, it is true in both the abstract and in reality. Men are, by nature, messier and less prone to pick up or clean up after themselves. Some of this is instinctual, but much of it is also learned. 

Despite getting lost all the time and refusing to ask for directions and being fascinated with all things shiny and bright, men actually are pretty smart. They realize real quickly if they can get away with leaving stuff around the house, not picking up after themselves or leaving the picking up for someone else.

To fill that void, as women, we often pick up the slack and either do chores that would never get done or redo chores that children and the spouse/boyfriend do not do thoroughly. Men are not programmed to clean houses, according to another humorist, Dave Barry, they are programmed to go under the hood of their car and stare at the engine block for hours. The point is that what is important to a man or to children, is not the same as what is important to you, as a woman, when it comes to cleaning or keeping an orderly house.

The recent study that showed that as women, we multitask better than men also showed that men function better in chaos and mess, while women tended to be better organized because of having to have a neat, structured place to work. Perhaps this is some ancient instinct from their days of being a hunter-gatherer or perhaps it is the result of one hundred years or so of having females run the household; men just are not good at managing those types of affairs if left to their own devices. This is part of the reason you almost never see television advertising showing men sitting around a pristinely decorated living room, sipping coffee and “communicating,” but often see “guys” lounging around a television, watching football and barely talking. Advertisers play to actual market segments and men are not the target audience of, say, hand sanitizers. 

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