Selected Excerpts from
Desperate Households: How to Restore Order and Harmony to Your Life and Home
by Kathy Peel
Kathy Peel is known as “America’s Family Manager” by media and families alike. Kathy has helped numerous desperate families make over their lives under the glare of television camera lights (for Oprah, HGTV, The Fine Living Network, even Ladies Home Journal). Her new book, Desperate Households, offers these same life-changing principles and tips to everyday readers—without the nosy cameras!
Desperate Households offers makeover tips in ten specific areas: priorities, marriage communication, family teamwork, morning routines, school days, dinnertime, clutter, time management, financial, and self-development. Following are adapted excerpts from the book.
Desperate Households
Desperation. Most of us arrive at this destination in one way or another at some point in life. We wake up one day and realize that things are out of control—and we’re not quite sure how they got that way. Somehow issues about home, marriage, kids, schedules (or lack thereof), career, finances, appearance, in-laws, or blended families have collided, and life feels as if it’s on the verge of unraveling.
So where did things go wrong? Before we married, all of us dreamed of a happy home. Hand in hand with the love of our life, we’d take on the world. We’d start a family and be exceptional parents. We’d create a warm and welcoming home, make family dinnertime an honored tradition, and host memorable celebrations for family and friends.
Sure, these were lofty dreams, but we all thought we could do it. None of us vowed to create a chaotic home and miserable life when we stood at the altar and said, “I do.” But as one harried mother put it, “I love my family, but I sure didn’t sign up for this.”
Here’s the bottom line: Family Management is serious business. Running a only a great privilege but also a big responsibility that we need to take as seriously as career success, because home is where success really matters. Whether we’re changing a diaper or closing a deal, our work has dignity, honor, and value.
The family is a great invention. When it’s working at its best, the family unit is a uniquely loving and supportive place. It’s where unconditional love finds rich expression and produces lasting rewards. However, whether we’re office managers, Family Managers, or both, we are only human. We need help in balancing life’s demands. We can’t do everything by ourselves—and that’s what family is about.
Kathy’s Desperation
Despite the fact that I was domestically challenged when Bill and I married, I launched a one-woman crusade to become, if not the best Family Manager in Texas, then at least a candidate. I was blazing new frontiers, optimistic that anyone with a new college degree could learn to keep a home sparkling and running like clockwork. I mean, we’re not talking about aerospace engineering here. (Although I decided later on that training to be an air traffic controller would have proved helpful.)
To achieve this goal, I hit the books and read everything I could about how to clean, cook, maintain, and organize—faster, better, smarter, and neater. I also searched for a role model—a woman whose life I could emulate. Someone who excelled in the art of home management, who did things “just so.” Whenever I found her, I was bound and determined to be just like her.
I wondered, though, how I would recognize this woman. Would she be wearing an apron? How many times a day did she vacuum? How often did she clean the oven? Did she alphabetize spices and canned goods? Could she make a bed with hospital corners? (The right question here, of course, is does anyone care, unless she’s a nurse or in the military?) Could she see her reflection in her dinner plates? Could she operate a pressure cooker without summoning the fire department—or getting third-degree burns on her arms?
Managing Expectations
It’s a well-known business principle that workers who buy into the company’s goals are more likely to work to meet those goals. So start by talking with your family about expectations. What do you—that would be the plural you, everyone in your family who can talk—expect? This might include everything from an orderly home to eating dinner together most nights a week to keeping everyone in clean clothes.
If you approach your family with the notion of teamwork and find it’s a hard sell, consider that they might be hearing you say that you only want help doing things your way—according to your expectations. If this is the case, you will need to rethink your wants and your ways. What are your husband’s goals? Your children’s? How could working together as a team help each of you meet your individual goals?
Be willing to negotiate. What’s spick and span to one person may be filthy to another. Everyone has a different tolerance level for dirt. I think there’s a lot of truth in the old adage “Home should be clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” In other words, I don’t know of anyone who likes bugs crawling on their countertops. But on the other hand, who cares if the sink gleams if Mom’s always playing chief nag?
House Rules
When parents want to know one thing they can do to get the atmosphere in their home back on track, I tell them to start here. House Rules are important tools for peaceful family living, and they benefit everyone. Parents benefit because they can stand united—“We all agreed that we wouldn’t slam doors when we get angry”— when kids break the rules. Children benefit from having clear boundaries about what is and what is not allowed. It gives them a sense of security to be able to say, “This is the way we always do it at our house.” We wrote our House Rules early in our family history, and although they evolved over the years as our children grew older, we still live by many of them.
Creating your own house rules will help you maintain order and save a lot of emotional energy that otherwise would be used to fuss and argue. But there are long-term benefits also. The relational skills your kids learn at home—respecting others’ feelings and property—will make it easier for them to form healthy relationships with friends, college roommates, spouses, coworkers, and associates in the future. If you decide to write your own House Rules (which I highly recommend), you can use our House Rules as a starting point—the same ones I gave to Grace as a model. Keep in mind that they need to reflect your family’s priorities and goals for your home. Also, you’re not writing rules in stone. Your family’s House Rules won’t be perfect, and they’ll keep changing—because kids grow, situations change, and schedules are altered.
Food and Teamwork
Food and teamwork go hand in hand, perhaps more naturally than any other area of Family Management. Eating and cooking together build bonds. Even the youngest child can, with encouragement, participate in family conversations around the dinner table and carry flatware or dishes to or from the table, wash carrots (even if they have to be rewashed), or help stir the corn bread batter.
But it’s difficult for some women to delegate something they feel, for one reason or other, is “their job,” especially something as integral to their family’s welfare as food. This may sound like a small thing, but I felt indescribably free when I decided that it didn’t make me less of a woman to let the men in my family take over the kitchen. And it didn’t make me less of a mother to let someone else create my boys’ birthday cakes. Each boy always wanted a special layered lemon cake—the same kind every year. I finally decided it was okay to order their cakes from the bakery. The boys were delighted, I was not crying over another cake I’d baked that looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Bill was happy that he never again had to bail me out by decorating over another cake disaster.
If delegating in the kitchen is difficult for you, or if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like your kitchen messy or has a hard time letting someone else do something you could do faster and better, consider the gift you are giving your children when you pass along to them on a daily basis the skills and knowledge you have about food. And consider how you and your husband could enjoy preparing dinner together while discussing the day’s happenings—especially if you live in two different worlds most of the time.
Priorities and Choices
None of us can always control what happens to us, but we can choose how we react to it. Let’s say your dog is vomiting on the carpet, your ten-year-old has decided to cook dinner and just dropped a jar of spaghetti sauce on the tile floor, your five-year-old and your seven-year-old are starting World War III in the backyard, and your husband calls to say he’s bringing a friend home for dinner. You have some choices: You could beat the dog, tell your daughter that only a stupid person would pick up a jar of sauce with wet hands, knock your boys’ heads together to teach them that violence isn’t a way to solve problems, and tell your husband that you’re not running a restaurant.
Or you could stop and ask God for patience, wisdom, and the ability to remain calm and not say anything you’ll regret later. Then you could tell your daughter you’ll help her clean up the broken glass in a few minutes. You put the dog in the backyard with the boys, telling them to take care of her, thereby distracting their attention from the fight. While cleaning up the dog mess, you call your husband and ask him to take the long way home, buying yourself time to clean up the kitchen and pull something out of the freezer for dinner.
The point is that we do ourselves and our families a favor when we’re anchored by our priorities and are able to wisely and calmly meet the inevitable crises we face day in and day out. That is easier when we bend with the interruptions instead of standing against them.
Here’s the bottom line: A home is where human beings develop. The choices we make day in and day out involve a lot more than how often we vacuum, when we clean house, and how we organize our closets. Home isn’t just a place to hang a hat; it’s a place to restore souls, find shelter from outside pressures, grow support for talents, and receive inspiration, comfort, and aid. It is a place where family members learn to love and be loved.
Out With the Clutter
If you’d like to tackle the clutter in your home but just aren’t motivated or able to devote a full day to declutter yet, don’t give up. By taking the following small steps, you’ll begin to address the problem.
· Set deadlines. Deadlines are the best guarantee a job will be done. Jot down on your calendar the time or day you want to have a task completed. If need be, ask a friend or family member to hold you accountable.
· Make appointments to get things done. Don’t wait for time to free up. If you have a big project to accomplish, schedule work appointments with yourself in thirty-minute or one-hour blocks. Be serious about this time like you would any other appointment. Before you know it, you’ll have the project licked.
· Be prepared. The projects you have the tools or resources for will be finished before the ones you’re not prepared for. For example, if you schedule time to organize a closet, have on hand various sizes of organizing bins, self-sealing plastic bags, garbage bags, and boxes for giveaway items. Whether clutter is a big or little problem for you, when you start winning the battle against it, you’ll notice how good it feels—how much easier your life is without it. After I worked with Katie, she told me she felt as if she had a new lease on life and every step toward conquering the clutter in her home was more than worthwhile.
Your Own Worst Enemy
Be careful not to sabotage your own efforts to become a smarter Family Manager. For example, don’t hold unrealistic expectations. Don’t try to change too many things too fast. If you do, it will be easy to become discouraged and give up on making any change at all. Set realistic goals about how much you can do and how long it will take. Don’t try to paint your house before your in-laws arrive this weekend or lose twenty pounds before a reunion that’s coming up in a month. You’ll likely end up discouraged. Being hard on yourself can also scuttle your ship. When you’re having trouble moving forward, it may be time to offer yourself some compassion. Are you telling yourself that you’re a bad person if you don’t check everything off your Daily Hit List? Are you using fear on yourself—If I skip working out for a few days I’ll never lose weight and my husband will leave me? We wouldn’t try to motivate our children like that, yet we often persist in talking to ourselves that way. We need to give up such thoughts. They don’t work, and they’re unkind.
One Step at a Time
Arriving at the point of desperation doesn’t just happen overnight. When we choose not to take control of our lives, we fall prey to destructive habits, poor decisions, and a less-than-satisfying life. When we put off making changes, little problems can easily grow into big ones. A problem Bill and I encountered in our first home serves to remind us of this principle.
We had a small leak in one of the water pipes connected to our washing machine. By the time we finally discovered it, the entire kitchen floor had rotted and had to be replaced. A relatively minor amount of water leaking over time had caused a big, expensive problem. If we had known it was happening, we would have done something immediately. But we could have decided, Well, it’s such a small amount of water; what can it hurt? Unfortunately, this is often how we reason when making important decisions about our homes and families. Small problems left unattended can have big repercussions.
But it’s also true that small positive changes can have big repercussions in a good sense. For example, creating a family rule that whenever you buy something new, something old goes out the door will help you keep clutter at bay. Deciding that every night your family will do some housecleaning for ten minutes (in that time you could vacuum a couple of rooms, fold a load of clothes, or wipe off mirrors and fixtures in the bathroom) will help you keep on top of housework. Committing to saying you’re sorry to family members when unkind words slip out will help you be mindful of changing the way you communicate and set a good example for your kids.
Do Yourself—and Your Kids—a Favor
You’re doing your kids a favor when you require them to help out at home. They learn life skills—like running the washing machine. You also teach them cooperation and collaboration skills that will serve them in any walk of life. Delegating also helps balance and workloads between marriage partners. And it builds on the idea that home belongs to everyone; therefore, everyone contributes to its care.
Many parents wonder what to do when their kids won’t cooperate. If you can relate to their problem, consider these questions: Does your son or daughter watch TV? play video or computer games? enjoy using favorite toys or electronic devices? Those activities, and others like them, are privileges, not rights. We do our kids a favor when we have a policy that says: Until you fulfill your responsibilities, you do not get your privileges. Granted, kids won’t like this—but they’ll bow to it if you stand firm.
Even more important than your children’s cooperation is the lesson they learn about real life. After all, that’s the way the adult world operates. If you don’t fulfill your responsibilities for your job, you won’t have the privilege of getting a paycheck or maybe even having a job at all. Your child deserves to learn this at home, where the stakes are small, rather than in the cold, cruel world, where the stakes are enormous.
Excerpts selected from
Desperate Households: How to Restore Order and Harmony to Your Life and Home
By Kathy Peel
Available July 2007 from Tyndale House Publishers
For reprint permission, review copies and interview requests:
Pamela McClure, pamela@mmpublicrelations.com, 615-595-8321