Ok we have been talking about cooking and cleaning tonight and those skills are valuable but I also think it is important for us to talk about how much pressure is placed on ADHD women by society’s expectations of women doing all of that housework and labor.

I’ve been in seminars and conferences and watched women just sob because of how broken they feel because they can’t keep a house clean. But not JUST because they can’t keep their house clean. They cry because of how nasty their husbands and families and friends are about it.

Women across the board are expected to take on the vast majority of the housework, and when you add in executive function issues, it is a recipe for disaster.

We are so much more than the labor we do for our families. Please remember that you aren’t defined by housework.

I will never forget how it felt as a wife and a stepmother to continually realize that no matter how much I did to nurture, support, and encourage my family, no one cared because my house was always trashed.

It didn’t matter that it was my equally ADHD spouse making the messes and I was too exhausted to keep up. It only mattered that in the eyes of society my home being messy was a significant sign of my failure as a woman. The worst part is that my husband leaned into this.

When we make women into record keepers and appointment setters and house cleaners and household budgeters, we don’t care if that isn’t a skill they have. We don’t care if they feel an almost constant shame no matter their other accomplishments. We expect women to kee clean homes.

And then let’s add in being a Black woman. And what a problem the community still has with misogyny. To be a woman who isn’t pulling her weight by doing her “wifely duties” of being a household mule is not just a failure, she is to be mocked.

So basically we strip women of their humanity in favor of profiting from their labor while we rag on them for not doing enough. Women are not wives and mothers and household managers first. They are people. People who are NOT the only ones responsible for a household.

Shit, you’re supposed to plug things when they get retweeted a lot. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t. Ummm, hit the blog: https://blackgirllostkeys.com 

Or the store: http://blackgirllosttees.com 

Or the patreon: http://patreon.com/blackgirllostkeys