How to Keep House While Drowning

This tiny book taught me how to be more self-compassionate in some very practical ways. On the surface, this book is about housekeeping and chores, but it’s much more than that. When I read this book, I was in burnout, and “doom piles” of unfinished tasks were building up in my home.

KC reminded me that I could unhook from the unrealistic expectations I had of myself, see this mess as “morally neutral,” and understand that my home being messy did not mean I was a failure. She gave me practical strategies to show “kindness to future me,” and I… show more.

As a new mom, I barely had time to read this past year, and I still struggle to balance mothering and work with a seemingly endless list of care tasks. I listened to this audiobook, soothed by Davis’s compassionate, non-judgmental take on things like cooking, cleaning, and hygiene in contexts such as post-partum, depression, anxiety, neurodivergence, bereavement, and more.

Davis, a licensed counselor, shifted my perspective on keeping house from moral to functional. For the first time, I was able to view tasks in service of myself and my family, not some perceived (often societal) other, and I began to… show more.