There is something infinitely freeing about doing all your own chores. For years I tried multiple different approaches to get my ex-husband to help me: dividing the chores in half (e.g. bathroom & bedroom vs kitchen and sitting room), rotating them week to week, indoors vs outdoors, sharing them according to rough time commitment. When that didn’t work, I tried writing down the hours I spent on chores for our shared lives on a notepad on the kitchen counter, I asked him to contribute and I even tried complaining about how many hours I spent, etc etc.
Nothing worked. After numerous fights where I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t contribute to our shared life, I looked at the budget, made some changes and hired a housekeeper. This was a mistake.
A housekeeper doesn’t do everything, and inevitably my biggest task was to work with my own resentment. At the time, working with my resentment seemed less stressful than trying to have a conversation which always resulted in my being on the receiving end of loud vitriol. Who wants to be in a partnership when one “partner” does all the work? When he walked out for the fourth and final time & realized that I was not going to take him back, this was one of a number of issues that I was happy to leave behind. If you didn’t already know, my marriage ended in divorce.
I lived in the marital home for eighteen months after the separation and while I changed and felt lighter and happier – which those who know me, including my children, frequently commented upon, it did not feel completely right. I had to leave that place and the negative energy behind. The marital home was large and I had lots of sad memories and so, it wasn’t until I shut the door on that place, for the last time, that I felt the change. After a long and exhausting day of packing, movers and friends helping, I stood in the front hall, with an old friend, and looked up the beautiful curved staircase and wept for the last time in that house.
What has been a revelation to me these past 12 days in my new home, is how I have felt with respect to chores. While I’ve been unpacking with the help of my beloved friends, I have also started really living here. So, all those chores: unloading the dishwasher, washing dishes, tidying, laundry, shoveling the snowy driveway, salting the front steps, paying the bills, taking out the garbage have begun here, in my new home.
I feel NO resentment! This is my home. These are my chores and I’m working on completing them, without any issues, and it feels really good to have let go of that resentment.
I work hard in my life on letting go of resentment. As I work hard to let go of anger. It just eats you up inside and takes up too much mental headspace. I would rather be enjoying the moment right now, rather than contemplating my anger and resentment and what should be happening.
For me it’s about changing the way I think. In my old home, when I was standing there doing the dishes and started to feel anger well inside me, I would notice the warmth of the water, the color and shapes of the dishes, notice the food that had been cooked in the pots and who had enjoyed it.
Sometimes it’s not going to work, but give it a shot: what have you got to lose? Concentrate on the present, revel in the visceral experience of what’s coming in through your senses, contemplate the shape, color and location of your anger and, as with all things, it will inevitably change and dissolve.
I am sure things will come up in my new house that will frustrate me, and that people I live with or work with act in ways that I will find annoying. So I am keeping this strategy under my belt:
Change your thoughts & you change your world!
Copyright Tamsin Astor, YogaBrained LLC, 2016.