The Weekend Effect by Katrina Onstad

Author:Katrina Onstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

DO LESS AND BE MORE AT HOME

THERE ARE A COUPLE of equal, coexisting truths about our homes.

One: Home is a source of pleasure, a site of sanctuary and security that speaks for us, declaring our aesthetics and our histories.

Two: Our homes are major time-sucks that are destroying our weekends.

Repairing, cleaning, designing, cleaning some more—houses and apartments are takers. Time-use surveys show that people spend most of their waking time on weekends cultivating the domestic sphere, cleaning and shopping. I suspect we are shopping for cleaning products to clean the crap we just bought, or tools to fix the crap we brought last year. Then it’s time for a major household purge, which means taking all the worn-out and unfixable crap to the Goodwill. On the way home, perhaps it’s time to stop and buy some more crap to replace the absent crap. And then—Monday!

We can’t be too hard on ourselves. Weekends seem like the perfect time to tie up the loose ends of housework not completed during the week. For families, the weekend brings the added pressure to achieve maximum togetherness. One British survey suggests that during the week, parents are spending about thirty-six minutes per weekday with their kids in a manner they consider “quality time,” and that time is often spent in front of the TV, silently. So the pressure’s on to pack the weekend with enriching activities and hanging out. In my twenties, I had a friend I (in my inner voice) called Ms. High Expectations. Every movie we’d attend or bar we’d enter was going to be “the best.” At the doorway of a party, just before the door opened, she’d announce: “This is going to be the best party EVER. You are going to love these people MORE THAN ANY OTHER PEOPLE EVER!” My heart would sink. The expectations were too high, and the party would be agony and the people unbearable.

You are similarly doomed if you look to the weekend as a remedial makeup session for life unlived during the week. By thinking we can do everything in two days, we set ourselves up to fail. The Sunday blues aren’t just anxiety about work approaching, but guilt about a weekend of unfulfilled expectations.

But there are ways to let go of the fantasy of the perfect weekend and live an actual weekend that benefits all members of a home. It starts with asking a question: What gives my weekend value? My own list, from that long-ago audit, includes play, community, altruism. Second question: What prevents those things from happening? My list: shopping, cleaning, house-primping, kid commitments. The small obligations tend to swarm the only significant obligation that matters: living a life that’s meaningful.

The formula that seems to work for people who have good weekends is simple: doing more of the former—The Big Stuff—and less of the latter—The Little Stuff. On some weekends, of course, the value you need most is having a clean bathroom and doing laundry. But the rest of the time, the

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