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Parenting

08th Nov 2017

Mum goes on strike from cleaning kids’ room for very good reason

'Today, I shut a door. On this.'

Jade Hayden

She’s probably not the first, and she certainly won’t be the last.

Heidi Humm is a mum.

She’s also a mum who regularly cleans her kids’ rooms.

Like most, she doesn’t really enjoy this task, but she does it because she’s expected to do it and because she doesn’t want to see a mess in her home so often.

However, recently, Heidi went on strike.

She, of course, loves her kids but she decided to put herself first for once and stop cleaning toys up off the floor.

Heidi took to Facebook page, Her View From Home, to explain why she made her decision and to tell the story behind it.

“Today I shut a door. On this,” she wrote.

“For years I would spend a few minutes every night, cleaning up after my kids. I would hate to calculate just how many hours of my life have been spent picking up toys. A heck of a lot.

Too many.”

“I love a clean house. I do. It’s the one thing in my life that I feel like I have complete control over. If my environment is organized, life is just, better.

“But, kids.

“I love them. So much. They’re amazing little humans.

“But they’re messy.

“And they don’t care. I don’t get it. Clearly they are lacking in the clean gene department.”

Heidi then went on to give an example of the conversation she constantly has with her children.

She said that they don’t care about the mess, and that they want to “play hopscotch around the toys.”

One night, Heidi said, she was exhausted from picking up pieces of Lego off the floor.

It was only when her husband told her to just shut the door that she realised what she had to do.

“These days everybody is talking about how self-care is so important when you’re a parent. And it is. It’s so easy to lose yourself in taking care of everyone else. But self-care? Yeah, it’s not so easy. It takes time, and energy and asking for help.

“So now? The kids clean the play room once a week. Not me. Them.

“The other 95 percent of the time? It looks like this. And that’s okay.

“Because this shut door in my life? Is one that I can live with.”