My kids hated to see me coming on a Saturday morning. They’d be scattered around the house – deep in cartoons, video games, or craft projects – still in pajamas, not yet fed. I’d barge in to whatever they were doing, agitated and overwhelmed, ranting about how everything was on hold until we got this pig-sty of a house cleaned up.
As you can imagine, this tended to go well.
They’d whine and flop around, sometimes frustratedly pushing back on my insistence. I’d get angry at their push-back, taking their seeming dismissiveness of my urgency as further offense. We’d start arguing about why the house needed to be cleaned up – which wasn’t really about that at all, but more so why my agitation about the house mattered more than their desire to play.
At the time, the answer to that seemed so obvious and so justified.
We can’t live like this!
I can’t even think in an environment like this!
We should all care about the space where we live!
You can’t grow up thinking that you don’t need to do anything!
I could use the way that I was feeling in my body – unnerved, overwhelmed, unable to focus – as evidence for these beliefs. I could call up nearly any mom friend and likely be met with empathy and agreement. I could go online and find support for my central premise – that I shouldn’t be the only one who cares about these things!
But here’s what happened. Despite all of my righteousness and research and my invisible army of people who agreed, nothing really changed.
I still seemed to be the only one who cared about living in a semi-organized home. I was the only one bothered by clutter in the kitchen. I was the only one who cared if clothes were put in drawers rather than pulled from a clean basket. I was the only one.
It shouldn’t be this way, I had told myself. But it was this way. So what was I going to do about that?
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I decided to experiment with something. I got up one Saturday morning, and I started picking up the house. I didn’t argue with anyone about it. I didn’t dramatically sigh as I picked up socks and granola bar wrappers. I just put things back together to the point where I mostly liked them.
Now, this might seem less like some experiment and more like what most of us socialized as women in our culture do on the regular – taking care of shit. But the experiment was not about what I was doing, but rather about the mindset with which I was doing it. To explain that, I have to back up a step.
Before I could start picking up dirty cups from my kids’ rooms without wanting to strangle someone (I’d only told them six hundred times), I had to come to terms with a reality that was equal parts maddening and – eventually – freeing. I’d had to realize that everything that I was attached to in this situation was an opinion.
It’s among the most inconvenient of universal truths, but the vast majority of what we hold as “true” is, in fact, a deeply held opinion. My opinion, in this case, is that it is better to live in an organized home. My opinion is that everyone in the home should take part in keeping it that way. My opinion is that everyone should care about my feelings and desire to live like this.
I tend to think these opinions sound reasonable and compelling. They are relatively aligned with our cultural opinions, and that’s part of what makes it easy to forget that they are in fact opinions. But we can tell that they are opinions because they have, either explicitly or implicitly, a “should” tied to them.
Anytime that we are in the realm of should, we are in the land of opinion.
An opinion is an idea of how I hope the world could be. We sneak in that “should” (how the world should be) because our attachment to that hope is so strong that we want it to be reality – the only reality. We don’t prefer to think about these hopes as opinions, so we dress them up as facts and recruit evidence to suggest that they are reality itself.
But here is the reality in my house for now. My kids don’t have a preference for a clean house. It truly does not bother them to have crumbs on the counter or clothes strewn around. I can decide it should matter to them, but that’s my opinion – not reality. What this means is that my attachment to the idea that it should matter and they should do this on a regular basis is keeping me in the loop of frustration. I actually make myself crazy by holding so tightly to my opinion of how it should be.
Which brings me back to the Saturday morning where I walked around and picked up the house. It took me about an hour, maybe a little more. I will admit that there were feelings of frustration that would creep in when I encountered certain messes. I’m not suggesting that I enjoyed this particular exercise.
But what I noticed was this: in the moments where I could return to the idea that I was doing what mattered to me – and that it didn’t need to matter to anyone else – I felt a little bit lighter. Less agitated. Less resentful.
When I could drop the should, I could focus on doing what I needed to do to regulate my own nervous system – which was to create a more peaceful environment. As you might imagine, my nervous system additionally benefited from not getting into agitating arguments with kids who had otherwise been perfectly happy doing their own thing.
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Before I say any more, I want to acknowledge something that feels really important. I know that from a certain angle, this can read like an encouragement to just do everything ourselves. And after millennia of women being forced to take on disproportionate domestic labor, the last thing that I am suggesting is to just put our heads down and swallow it.
I’m hope to say something different. It’s to suggest that we can want what we want without anyone else having the same opinion. That’s it’s actually perfectly okay to want a clean house even if no one else gives a damn – but that much of the suffering we feel about it comes from wishing other people felt or thought differently. If we can let go of the need for others to feel or think the same way, we actually reduce some of the suffering we feel about it.
In my experience, we have to get a little extreme here to drive home the point. We have to play around with this idea by using things that seem like givens and then really pressure testing them.
We can take a situation that is bothering us and invite ourselves to identify as many “shoulds” that are driving our unwanted feelings as possible. She should know how I feel about this. He should ask me about my day when I get home. They shouldn’t treat people like this. She should never say something like that.
We’ve just landed on a whole bunch of opinions. What’s important to note here is that them being opinions doesn’t make them valueless. We are wired to have opinions because we are wired to have things that matter to us. Acknowledging them as opinions simply helps us frame them in a slightly different way – hopefully in a way that gives us a little more room to move.
Our opinions can – and should – still guide our actions. For example, because having an organized home is important to me, I want to figure out how to make that happen. As far as I see it, I have two options:
- I can do it myself.
- I can ask solicit help – and if I don’t get it, let my boundaries guide what happens next.
If my kids don’t help out, I can decide what happens from there. Maybe I won’t be taking them to the trampoline park since I’m still too busy cleaning up. Maybe they lose a privilege or face a different consequence.
What I can’t ultimately do is change anyone else’s opinion on the matter. I can’t even really, directly make them do something. I can only choose what I’ll do if they don’t.
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In the work I do with couples, the recognition of opinions can be a powerful turning point. In intimate relationships, the ‘shoulds’ tend to run even deeper.
Let’s stay with the example of one partner wanting the home to be kept in a particular way. There’s the tension between different ways of approaching organization, but often the pain of the ‘should’ comes from more tender opinions.
He should know how important this is to me.
She should see that my love isn’t represented in laundry.
He should know after all these years what I need.
She shouldn’t expect me to read her mind.
Reading these now, it’s likely that your own opinions want so desperately to affirm one stance or the other. We tend to resonate with one type of experience and that resonance in our body will want to make a particular opinion a fact. Well of course she feels unseen. Well of course he feels misunderstood.
Recognizing that we are in the land of opinion – deeply embodied opinion — can offer us a path out of the perpetual looping that we tend to do in relationship conflict. Again, it doesn’t suggest that the opinions themselves don’t matter – quite the opposite. When we can acknowledge them as opinion (“I know this is my opinion, but what I’ve come to believe is that you should know how important this is,”) it changes the dynamic and the quality of the conversation.
We start to own our beliefs rather than treating them as facts. We can start to hear and even appreciate another’s opinion — and the history that developed it — once they aren’t claiming it as fact.
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Recognizing opinions for what they are might feel initially like permissiveness or resignation, but in fact it’s quite the opposite.
I can hold the opinion that my kids should grow up learning to take responsibility for their surroundings. That’s a reasonable opinion. And holding it as such – something important to me and connected to my own values – lets my frustration and resentment cool down a bit.
Recognizing my own opinions as such actually frees me up. When I’m not mired in the belief that everyone needs to feel the same way, I can actually start working on getting my needs met – more effectively.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s not yelling at my kids in my pajamas on Saturday mornings.
