I received very little advice when I quit my job to stay at home with the kids full time. My cousin gave me my first piece of advice. She told me not to obsess about my house. She gave advice as someone who had left a job and went through the difficult transition as well. I wasn’t sure at the time if she was directing this particular tidbit towards me believing that I have some control issues and being confronted full time with the state of my home may leave me in a frenzied whirlwind. But I accepted it and am so grateful for it. I definitely have more time to devote to maintaining order in my house, tidying and cleaning up. But even though it may receive greater focus from me, it still has the same ranking on the list of priorities for my husband and children. I try to remind myself of that, as I hang up their jackets for the third time in a day, or rinse the toothpaste out of the sink where they brushed their teeth.
The second piece of advice I received was from a friend who had also left a job to stay home. She told me that when she first stayed home she fell into a habit of procrastinating. Always being at home, it is easy to think that you have all the time in the world to tackle the one task or set of tasks that linger before you. Eventually she came to the conclusion that though she was no longer leaving the house to go to “work”, this was her “work” and she started treating those pesky tasks as part of her job. It seems like such a simple concept, but I still marvel at it. Procrastination can overtake you gradually, until one day you realize there are no clean clothes to dress the children and you never called the washing machine repairman like you “intended”. You create your own chaos with a series of neglected tasks that were never urgent until they were.
Certainly we all learn our own lessons in our own time. I reflect on this advice and I think that each piece made part of my transition easier. I only wish I had received more.
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