It Ain't Gonna Lick Itself

Introduction

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All by Hanne Blank Boyd. 

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Illustration by Elizabeth M. Tamny

It ain’t gonna lick itself.  I first saw this phrase on a belt buckle worn by a woman working in a filling station convenience store in suburban Maryland, just outside the Washington, D.C. Beltway.  The look on her face said she had pretty much had it with absolutely everybody’s bullshit, but she had showed up for work anyway with her hair done and her makeup on, wearing a good bra under the ugly polyester polo shirt with the store logo on it that she had to wear at work.  The customer ahead of me in line asked her for a pack of cigarettes. She stepped back from the till to get them and  I caught a glimpse of that belt buckle.  I did a doubletake, I admit.

When I got to the counter I leaned in a little and said “I appreciate that belt buckle.” 

A fraction of a smile reached her lips as she scanned the barcode on my Diet Coke.  She looked me in the eye as she took my money. “Words to live by.”

“Amen,” I agreed.  I took my change and left.  That belt buckle and that brief exchange have replayed in my memory a thousand times since then, though, and never more often than when I’m doing household work.

Household work is part of having a life.  Living spaces and households are only functional if they are set up to be and kept that way.  This takes initiative and energy and effort.

All the work that maintains our lives and the quality of our lives is necessary work.  Cleaning the toilet.  Taking out the trash.  Washing the laundry and putting away the clean laundry.  Wiping down the kitchen counters.   Figuring out what to do with all the clothes you never wear any more and actually doing it. Watering the houseplants.  Dusting. Remembering to buy more toilet paper.  Emptying the dishwasher.  Organizing papers.  Scouring the cheese crust out of the lasagna pan and sweeping the floor and cleaning the cat box, not to mention dealing with the fact that it’s springtime and the goddamn ants have gotten into the goddamn pantry again and why can’t someone please make a cat food container, just one, that is truly ant-proof?

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Many people dislike doing this work because, well, it’s work.  It’s labor.  Many, though not all, people prefer to have less of that in their lives wherever they can manage.

Many people also dislike that it’s not necessarily particularly fun work, nor work that is challenging in ways that people tend to find mentally engaging.  

People sometimes dislike this work because it forces them to reckon with their own lives in ways they’d rather not. It’s not necessarily that their lives are bad in any way… some things are just a lot more fun when you don’t have to think about the fact that doing them leaves a mess.

Many people also have a lot of mental baggage about this kind of work.   By “mental baggage” I mean all kinds of things.  Childhood trauma.  Unpleasant associations of being scolded and yelled at by parents, or forced to clean your room or do your chores when you wanted to be doing other things. Sexist or misogynist or racist bullshit about whose job it is, or should be, to do “that kind of work.” Pathological demand avoidance. Feelings of incompetence.  Fear of failure.  Sheer overwhelm.  Choice paralysis about where to start.   

That’s all real.  That’s all stuff that can be overcome.  None of it is as important as the fact that it ain’t gonna lick itself.  What to do, what to do?