Chore Chart, Line 1

Sometimes you have to start with the easiest & most obvious. It's that whole "taste of success" thing. As a stay-at-home-mom, obviously I'd clean something everyday. Ought to.

Yet sometimes I don't. Things like laundry seem almost Sisyphean. With the kids always curious about everything, especially the things out of sight/out of reach, it's often easier to pile things up in my room to put up later. I don't even want to think about the accumulation of dust on my furniture and the "whatever" on my floors. (To be honest, we're cat-people, but I'd almost get a dog just to eliminate frequent floor chores since that involves mostly the kids dropping food.) I kind of sound like a slob, don't I?

I'm not. I am a reformed "pig-pen" kind of kid. My mom still tells tales of finding dirty clothes under my bed and dirty dishes, too, when I was in elementary school. I remember having a dresser drawer just full of junk & rocks I'd find while I was walking. My desk at school was so full of jumbled papers, I'd lose my pencils & couldn't get my books to stay in. It was bad. But sometime around turning into a teenager, I saw the error of my ways. I could not find the stuff I wanted & needed. So I got neater. Everything had a place; but it was OK to make a put-away-later-pile. I just had to put things away before the pile fell over. People began to compliment me on my organizational skills. I got better in college with meeting the challenges of living in small, shared spaces. And packing everything I own into one car. (I'm good. I have the family packing gene.)

As a mom, I'm excellent, since our house is small. I often joke that I know where all the bodies are buried. But it's true, I know where just about everything is (except my keys & my glasses, but that's another story.) I might even be addicted to plastic storage containers. Yet....

Things get away from me. I have high-needs kids, that can interrupt and interfere with my efforts. I've been depressed, so I've been unmotivated. It's a vicious cycle. All the clutter & piles contribute to my depressed feelings; my depressed feelings leave me too lethargic to deal with the clutter & piles.

Which is why I topped the list with the most obvious "Clean Something." Most days it's the mundane thing like tackling the the laundry. Sometimes it is the Herculean thing like cleaning & reorganizing my son's room. Every now & then it is the odd-ball thing like cleaning off all the mildew spots that have grown on the back door from being cooked in high Southern humidity since the trees behind our house were plowed.

Just do something. Fight the static inertia. A body in motion will stay in motion until it is acted upon by an outside force. I do not want to let depression have that sort of force on me again.

Chore List

My son, as I mentioned, has Asperger's and ADHD, as well as being an elementary-age boy. Thus trying to get him to do anything can be a chore. To help him learn to help himself, we've set up a chore list with specific self-care tasks like "Eat All Your Lunch" and "Give Yourself a Good Bath." We are trying to motivate him to be a better & more independent person. If he does a task, he gets a small star; if he does a week's worth of that task, he gets a smiley star. For every increment of 8 smiley stars he gets (there's only 8 lines on the chart,) he gets a reward. He's allowed one "off day" for any task.

It's going pretty slowly.

But it seemed to me, that if I'm going to challenge him to be a better person here at the start of school, I should challenge myself to be a better person, too.

So I got myself a chore chart. Made myself a list of things I ought to do everyday, but am often unmotivated to do. Same rules for me, too, with stars, smiley stars, 8s and rewards.

After the same three weeks, I'm only one smiley star ahead of my son. Not that this is a competition.

When I started thinking about using my chore chart as a post, I realized that all these things are things I can do to help combat my depression. Well, new habits are just as hard to break in as old ones are to break out.

50 Posts, last published on Feb 19, 2011

OK. I'm a lousy Blogger.

The boy-child did survive-- quite heartily-- his gastro "spell."

I finally got on anti-depressants about a month later. Honestly, they do help a lot. Nope, I didn't immediately find a huge weight lifted off of my shoulder and felt compelled to sing my joy to the heavens. If THAT had happened, that would have been a bad thing and proved that I was bi-polar and needed something else entirely.

It's been a slow change. It has taken the edge off of some of my "bad" feelings. Has opened up a clear phone line between the part of my brain that knows the truth "life is actually good" and the part of my brain that whimpers loudly "I can't do anything." There's still much to do. I'm still marginally motivated, and spend too much time playing "stupid computer games."

But, it's getting better, little bit at a time.

Yea me.