Housework must go

I did a very interesting exercise the other day with a counsellor I see on and off.

In the middle of the table, she put down 30 little tokens. These tokens represented my available time and energy. Around the tokens I then put out different coloured pieces of paper. These represented different parts of my life such as being a wife, being a mother of my most difficult child, being a mother of the other two, social life, time for myself, my writing, church ministry and the housework.

I had to allocate tokens to each piece of paper to show how much time and energy I put into each area of life at the moment, and then how much I wanted to put into each area of life.

It was a very illuminating exercise to actually see where I put my efforts in a physical form.

A few things came up. I want to put more energy into writing and our marriage. But to do that means cutting down on something else. And hopefully it is the thing that eats up so much of my time... the dreaded housework.

I came away from the exercise trying to think creatively about how I can reduce or reorganise the housework (without getting a cleaner, which I can't afford), hopefully including all the rest of the members of the family so that we do it together.

We're about to have two weeks of holiday, so I'll use that to have a break from the current routine and then introduce some changes!