Mom Goes On Strike From Household Chores & Shares What Happened in Hilarious Tweets

By
Heidi Hamm
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Every once in a while I like to play a fun little game I call, “When will they notice?” Bonus points to whoever actually does something about it.

For example, when will someone notice their lone smelly sock sitting on the stairs for two days AND COUNTING?

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Or, when will someone notice the dirty dishes piled up beside the empty dishwasher? Or when will someone see the sweater casually tossed across the back of a chair?

Who will notice the ever-growing mountain of laundry? Or the piles of miscellaneous items that start out small but then morph and multiply? Or the tsunami of shit on the counters?

You know…stuff like that.

Because for some strange reason, things that are glaringly obvious to moms tend to be invisible to everyone else.

Weird, I know.

Eventually, someone does notice, namely my husband. My kids? Yeah, not so much. Blessed be the fruit.

Which makes me wonder, is it possible that they just don’t see it?? Because honestly, I really don’t think they SEE it. 

And while my family is always quick to pick up all.the.things.when I ever-so-lovingly (possibly loudly) point out their existence, sometimes it gets a bit, well, infuriating to always have to remind them.

Because the reality is, no matter how invested your family is in helping with household duties someone still needs to be in charge. Delegating work, teaching how it’s done, micromanaging the details. And more often than not, this defaults to mom.

And sometimes you get tired of nagging. Sometimes you really just want someone to take notice and actually do something without being asked. Sometimes you want what YOU SEE to be SEEN. Sometimes YOU just want to be seen.

Which is exactly how this mom felt. So she decided to do something about it. Or in this particular case, to do nothing at all.

Going by the Twitter handle, Miss Potkin, our new hero silently up and quit. ALL.OF.IT. 

The dishes, the laundry, changing the empty toilet roll…And then she patiently waited to witness the fallout.

 

Thankfully for us, Miss Potkin documented the whole sordid saga on Twitter and it is both hilarious and painfully relatable. 

Day 3 – they’ve used the last of the big bowls and they’ve run out of spoons. No one is saying anything about the big pile but I can hear their brains ticking. No, family, I will not be loading the dishwasher today.

3 days. 3 days during which NO ONE she co-habitats with seemed at all bothered by the lack of clean dishes or counter space.

Lest you think all is lost and Miss Potkin is doomed to living a life in squalor, fear not. There was a brief flurry of activity and hope surged when the garbage was taken out…

But alas, that hope died a quick and ugly death. Along with a single sausage left sitting in a pan.

There is a pan on the cooker with a single sausage in it. It’s been there for two days. I can’t look at it because it’s turned the colour of the man that washes up in Cast Away.

As the situation became increasingly dire, Miss Potkin showed incredible restraint. She merely observed as her partner, “Irish”, resorted to making tea with the baby’s weaning spoon and the “emergency cup.”

She remained stoically “mum” as piles continued to breed like bunnies. Piles of dishes, piles of laundry, piles of empty shampoo and body wash bottles in the shower… 

Her house continued taking on a post-apocalyptic vibe as toilet paper became scarce, bringing back painful flashbacks of darker times…

The last of the loo roll in the downstairs loo was used at 7:04pm last night. It hasn’t been replaced. The downstairs loo is now out of action for anyone that remembers. For anyone that doesn’t…god help them.

And an empty cereal box sat abandoned haphazardly on the stove. (Conveniently right beside the sausage of death.)

“Someone obviously ran out of cereal this morning, decided to just leave that there, as a fire hazard, so we can all just burn in our beds, potentially.”

Eventually, her partner finally reached the ceiling of his shockingly high tolerance level and decided to pitch in: scraping days-old cereal out of bowls and loading the dishwasher.

But alas, FORGETTING THE DISHWASHER ACTUALLY NEEDS TO BE TURNED ON IN ORDER TO WORK.

Prompting the ever-patient Miss Potkin to pose the question:

Q – Do I switch on the dishwasher? It’s killing me. Knowing the dishwasher is full but just sitting there is KILLING ME.

Spoiler alert: She didn’t.

Slowly, things started happening. Toilet paper appeared in the downstairs bathroom. And then In ALL the bathrooms. So much toilet paper.

The dishwasher was eventually turned ON.

The mess on the kitchen floor was cleaned.

And then…this:

3 days. 3 days of not washing or picking up or tidying.

WE MADE IT! (I’m not doing that again)

Unsurprisingly, the Karen Brigade couldn’t help themselves and they came out in droves to attack Miss Potkin, her experiment, and her family.

But our hero? Was having none of it.

I see that judgey fucking Twitter has woken up so let me say this once and be clear – We do not ‘live like this’.

This is a lesson in wanting to be heard and respected and not having to repeat yourself when things slip. We’re navigating the day-today in extraordinary times and for me, the past two days have been funnier than anything else.

I think we’re all entitled to run our own experiments, be amused, push a situation to its limit if we so choose. No one needs to be lectured by those that have failed to see the silly joy in what’s happening here.

She went on to say:

We keep our homes tidy because love. We cook food and set tables and fill the air with scents of roses and fresh laundry because love. Love is patient but love is also fucking tired because she works 14 hour days.

She added:

I know we are ALL tired but I am most tired. Me. I AM ALL THE TIRED.

A-freaking-men. 

And Miss Potkin? Is not alone. For every Karen that rained judgment down, there were countless others who applauded her experiment and shared their own stories of solidarity.

We love our families. We do. But we also want to feel valued and appreciated. We want to feel SEEN.

We want our family members to recognize the amount of work it takes to run a household and that everyone needs to do their part. We don’t want to shoulder the burden alone. Nor should any one person have to. 

As for Miss Potkin and her family? It took 3 days for her “mom strike” to garner results. Here’s hoping the lesson lasts a lifetime. 

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