Mom's Viral Post Nails Why It's So Damn Hard To Get Housework Done With Kids Around

This mom’s attempt at cleaning her kitchen will sound very familiar

If a man isn’t terribly intelligent, he might arrive home to a messy house and ask his wife, “What did you do all day?” It’s a dangerous question, because anyone who’s stayed at home with kids probably struggles to get any chores done. It’s so easy to be home from dawn until dusk, doing things all day, but never completing any of them.

This mom wrote a post that perfectly captures why that happens.

Mom of three Jordan Harrell writes about marriage, faith, and family on her blog, but recently, she took to Facebook to share some serious truth about why her kitchen can be so hard to clean most days. In a note she addressed to her husband, Harrell explains why some days she’s constantly working on tidying up, but never actually accomplishes that goal.

“Dear Husband,” she writes. “I know I said I was going to clean the kitchen today. So you might be surprised when you get home and see the kitchen is in fact, not clean.”

Well. If it were my husband, he definitely wouldn’t be surprised, but this isn’t about me.

She says, “First, I walked in to the kitchen with the sole intention of cleaning it. I picked up the hair brush and rubber bands off the kitchen table and walked to the bathroom to put them in the drawer.”

But when she got to the bathroom, Harrell spotted a pile of towels on the floor that had been “fermenting for several days,” so she headed for the laundry room. While there, she found overflowing hampers full of dirty laundry, so she got a load going and headed back to the kitchen.

On her way to the kitchen, she saw one of her kids, and she was “hangry.” “The child and her whines followed me into the kitchen, where I promptly handed her a cheese stick and told her to go eat it in the garage (because the kitchen is being cleaned right now, obviously).”

Obviously.

Seeing her child reminded Harrell that she owed that kiddo’s teacher an email about a classroom Valentine’s Day party, so she headed to her bedroom to hop on the computer. But of course, she was needed again, this time by her third child, who rushed into her room upset that his cape had fallen off.

Naturally, a meltdown ensued when Harrell couldn’t fix his cape the “right” way, so he began to throw a fit. She carried him to his room to let him calm down, tried to leave, and remembered his cowboy boots, which she then removed so he wouldn’t scuff anything when his fit turned into kicking the door.

PHEW. I’m tired just reading this.

Back to the computer she went, where she was promptly distracted by Facebook. She shut down the computer after 15 minutes. “Because, of course, I was in the middle of cleaning the kitchen.”

As she walked into the kitchen, Harrell noticed the oven clock — time to pick up her oldest child from school.

“So, no. It’s not clean. Nothing is ever clean. My life is just a constant state of doing and never completing.”

Absolutely same here. By the end of a typical day, my whole body is mildly sore, even if I never made it to the gym. When I sink into the couch around 9:00 pm, it’s often my first time sitting down all day, and yet, my house still looks very lived in and cluttered. I go around in circles, “doing” all day long, but rarely accomplishing anything other than chasing my tail.

Harrell tells Scary Mommy she wrote the post for exactly that reason — knowing that other moms can likely relate. “I thought there was a good chance I wasn’t the only one ‘in a constant state of doing and never completing.’ My goal was to make sure other moms know the chaos is normal and they definitely aren’t alone.”

Goal accomplished.