“Well done, Mum. That was a lovely, calm response to a difficult situation. I can see why she’s doing so well.”
My child is distressed and angry. She’s lashing out, and I’m staying composed — calm, responsive, helping her find her way back. The doctor compliments me on the work it has taken to get her here: through the door, into the appointment, engaged enough to take part and regulated enough to stay.
It’s a moment in time, but it’s a fair reflection of most of our moments. Not all of them. I’m far from perfect. But most of the time — enough of the time, I hope — I choose calm over anger. And when I don’t, I model an apology. I name what happened and what I need to help me regulate.
But I won’t lie. It isn’t easy, and there is always a cost.
So I smile and say thank you. I let myself take the compliment. But inside, I can’t help wondering: would you feel the same if you could see our living room? If you saw the clutter, the chaos, the dishes still in the sink because I didn’t have time to do them and get her here?
Because I had to choose.
I could spend those hours offering the calm attention it takes to help her get ready, or I could rush around tidying the house before we went out of the door. I could make a packed lunch, or I could use that energy to regulate myself and my child.
I couldn’t do it all.
The ledger
For me, cleaning uses a lot of brain. Far more than it seems it should. There have been times when I could not keep the house clean and still have enough left to be the calm, regulated parent my children needed.
I couldn’t deprioritise work, because we need money to live. And my work is not something I can take half of myself to. It is all of me or nothing. Feeding, cleaning and simply living took what was left. Every bit spent somewhere was a bit I could not spend on regulation.
I have more choice now because I can pay for a cleaner once a week. It helps. But when I couldn’t, there was less in the pot, and you would have met a far less regulated version of me.
Oddly, I think that version of me would have been judged more kindly than the regulated mother with the messy house.
That is the ledger nobody sees. When I prioritise one thing, something else drops away — and everything I have to choose between is expensive. The bottom line is that I cannot do it all. None of us can.
Measuring a category
Ironically, DIY costs me less than cleaning. But because I am a woman, it is the cleaning I am judged on.
Well, perhaps the parenting too. But even then, the measure can feel less like Are these children loved, understood and helped to feel safe? and more like Are they clean, presentable and alive? And somehow the state of the house still gets folded into the answer.
You don’t walk around my home and judge my parenting by whether I can fix the mirror or hang a shelf. If I can’t plumb in the washing machine, you assume I need a plumber. You don’t take it as evidence that I am a bad human being, or a bad mother.
So when you look at my house, you are not measuring how hard I work. You are measuring one category. Just one of many.
And so does the help
We can have Home-Start come and take the children out, hold the baby, or provide a support worker to see to the children while we clean. But we cannot usually have a cleaner. Or an administrator.
For me, and for many people whose brains work like mine, that is the wrong way round.
Cleaning may be where my brain is weakest and has to work hardest. It may also be where I am least valuable to my family. I am a good parent and a lousy cleaner. My children need more of me, not less of me.
But that is not the help we are offered. If I want a cleaner, I work extra to pay for one. If I want more time with the children, I sleep less. Nobody takes anything away, so I keep holding all of it.
And if I accepted the childcare offer, I might still not have a clean house. Taking the children so I can clean assumes cleaning is something I can easily do once time is made available. It is a little like saying, “If I take the children, you can paint the next Picasso and earn some money.” Unless painting is my thing, the free hours do not make me able to do it.
We presume everyone can work out how to clean and tidy efficiently. But some brains cannot, or can only do it at enormous cost. I might get a fraction done in the time available and finish dysregulated, stressed and exhausted.
The children may also have spent that time with somebody who does not know their rhythms as I do, or whose nervous system does not feel as safe to theirs. They return dysregulated, and now I am trying to settle all of us. We sleep less, because dysregulated children and dysregulated adults sleep less well. And when the children sleep less, Mum certainly sleeps less too.
That help has a cost as well.
Two different jobs. Actually, three.
I don’t judge a bus driver by how well he can fix the engine. We understand that driving the bus and maintaining it are two different jobs, even though both help the bus to run.
Cleaning and mothering — if we understand mothering as the parts that cannot simply be substituted: connection, regulation, love and care — are not the same job at all. Yet we do not only conflate them; we judge one through the other.
My children do not want another mother. I cannot be replaced. My cleaning can.
This is not about who deserves relief, or whether the mother who needs a break is somehow less capable than the one who can keep pushing through. There is no single right kind of support.
For some families, having somebody else clean has almost no cost to anyone’s regulation. The children get more time with Mum, which may be particularly precious when she is already working and has less time with them. In another family, cleaning may itself feel regulating, or may offer Mum a break, while the children are happy with somebody else and even enjoy that time.
Not one right way. Just different people, different families and different costs.
Then there is a third job, which I sometimes forget is a job because I can do it: the planning and organising of all the who, what, where and whens. For some brains, that is also expensive, stressful, out of reach or even impossible.
It costs me, but I can do it. It is a completely different skill set — no more or less valuable than cleaning — although perhaps harder to replace because it requires specialist knowledge of my family.
Twenty pounds can buy me some executive-functioning help. It would not buy enough cleaning to make a dent.
The part nobody can take
My child loves art class, swimming, gymnastics and meeting friends at the park. But when a hospital appointment lands in the middle of the week, I need to work out whether they can manage all of that too. Which activities will regulate them, and which will stack up until everything becomes too much?
If art comes before the appointment, will there be enough left in the tank to get through it? Would art be better afterwards, when it might help them settle? Does gymnastics need to wait? Will seeing friends be too much, or exactly the balm they need?
A lot depends on how the appointment goes. Did they engage well but force themselves through something frightening, such as a blood test, using every available resource in the process? Did they scream and shout and need space to run it off afterwards? Or do they need to go home, curl up somewhere safe and watch a film?
Nobody else can make those calculations from a rota or a care plan. They are built from thousands of small observations: knowing this child, on this day, with this particular accumulation of demands. It may look like nothing. It may look like cancelling an activity, leaving a room untidy, buying lunch instead of packing it, or saying no to something they usually enjoy.
But this is part of the work too.
Back in the consulting room
Chaotic probably does sum up our home. It is sometimes messy, almost always cluttered and perhaps incomprehensible to anybody who does not live there, with its swings, beanbags and sensory toys. It is often mid-clean, so even the chaos is a moveable feast.
And here is the strange thing about the doctor’s compliment: she is already holding direct evidence of the thing she is there to assess.
My child’s health has improved. My regulation is right in front of her, in the middle of a difficult moment. She has seen the work it took to get my child through the door, into the appointment and able to engage. The state of my floors tells her nothing about any of that.
And yet I cannot quite believe that, if she saw them, they would simply sit alongside what she had already witnessed. I fear the mess would reach backwards and cast doubt on it. Perhaps the progress is not what she thought. Perhaps she has missed something. Perhaps the calm, connected parenting in front of her is less trustworthy because the dishes are still in the sink.
We do this to mothers all the time. We take one category — often the one that can most easily be replaced — and use it to judge all the work that cannot.
We don’t see the ledger. We don’t see what she chose, what it cost, what she protected, or what had to drop away so that something more important could be held.
And still, we judge her most by how clean her house is
