Putting a sock in it

The Domestic #MeToo movement

Oct 02, 2025

This is my life. I used to backpack round the world, swim in tropical seas, climb magnificent mountains. Now I just face a mountain of socks so vast it deserves its own postcode. A colourful Everest of rejection, abandonment, and unpaired despair.

I posted this picture on my Instagram stories the other day and was met with a deluge with “Me too!” replies from women nodding, sighing, swearing in solidarity.

This, my lovelies, is the Domestic #MeToo movement.

We all know it. The laundry pile. The unpaired socks. The Tupperware lids that vanish into thin air. The endless chores that somehow, despite our best attempts at fairness, land right back on us.

This is part of what I call the Triad of Mayhem:

Constant Mothering - caring, nurturing, feeding, cleaning, loving everyone in our life.
Often Martyring - doing it even when you don’t want to, because someone has to. And that someone is us.
Relentless Managing - orchestrating, reminding, list-making, organising.
The result is relentless resentment. I feel it constantly. I know my clients feel it. I’ve realised that a lot of it is caused because so much of the domestic workload is unseen and unrecognised, we fall into the trap of asking for “help” but not articulating what exactly we’re expecting. YOU know it, but no-one else seems to.

People think laundry is one job. It’s not! Laundry is an 8-point expedition:

Gather dirty clothes.
Get them to the machine.
Put them in and press start.
Remember to take them out before mildew sets in.
Dry them (line, rack, or dryer).
Bring them back in.
Fold them.
Distribute them.

But ask a teenager to “do the laundry” and you’ll get step 3. Maybe. The rest? Firmly in your bucket.

Dinner works the same way. It’s not “make food.” It’s:

Think of something (torture).
Check ingredients.
Realise you don’t have them (torture).
Go to the shop (again. Torture).
Cook.
Eat (while trying to enjoy their company).
Clear up.

If someone “helps,” they do one stage. Stirring a pot is not the same as carrying the whole circus in your head.

Choosing Sanity Over Standards

I’ve written before about the importance of choosing sanity over standards.

When I lived alone, my flat stayed perfect. It took 15 minutes to clean because as my mother always said, I would “clean as you go along.”

But when you share your home with other humans, chaos is inevitable (their chaos, not yours). People mess up your stuff. They generate clutter. They spill, drop, and abandon. How hard is it to put the scissors back where you found them?

And yet we cling to standards as if we’re still in our spotless one-bed apartments. It’s madness. No one can hold to those standards while juggling work, kids, caring, and life. So sometimes, you have to choose your sanity.

For me, the dropped standard is laundry distribution. I’ll wash, dry, fold, and get it upstairs. But after that? Everyone’s on their own.

But then this pile happens. The dregs of the laundry basket which no one wants to do.

My three girls come and pick up their piles. But not in one go. Oh no. They swoop in, snatch one item at a time, topple everything, and leave the rest. My landing looks like a landfill site some days. And the socks? The socks are never touched.

So the mountain builds. Layer upon layer of lonely, unmatched socks until I break. Actually I threw most of them out. Because of course, naturally, unbelievably - literally none of them matched. (A frustration only rivalled by missing Tupperware lids, which I suspect are in the same parallel universe as the socks.)

And here’s the thing that breaks most of is - no matter how much I delegate, the responsibility still falls to me.

Like Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, I have many names. None of them are Mother of Dragons (although it can certainly feel that way some mornings!) I am Alana, Siren of Socks, Tamer of Tupperware, De-clogger of Drains, Rememberer of Every Extra Point in Every Job

That’s the heart of the Triad of Mayhem. It’s not just the doing. It’s the managing -the invisible, relentless mental load. The remembering. The checking. The nagging. The chasing.

That’s why women burn out. Not from folding the odd T-shirt, but from carrying the invisible responsibility of an entire household.

Resentment is real.

The sighs. The muttering. The slammed dishwasher doors. The fantasies of running away to a Greek island.

I’ve a client at the moment who is trying to make her live-at-home 20 year old more independent. It’s a battle. Daughter arrives home from a music festival and dumps her back of muddy, soggy clothes in the kitchen. According to my client they’re still there, three weeks later. Because she had told her daughter that she must do her own washing. She thinks her daughter doesn’t actually believe her. But she must stop constantly mothering, often martyring and relentlessless managing this child’s (adult’s) life in order to have one of her one.

Because it’s the managing - the endless mental load of remembering, chasing, checking, organising - that tips us over the edge. That’s what seeps in quietly but steadily, eroding our joy. And the socks pile up again.

Putting a Sock in It

So what do we do? We have to say it out loud. Start making the invisible work visible. I’ve said this to so many clients - never do anything domestic when you are home alone. That’s your golden time. Do not waste it on changing a bed and then wonder why you’ve no time for yourself. Children should never assume the house gets cleaned, their rooms get tidied and the dinner lands on a plate by miraculous fairies. Children (and partners) should always know what each step of every job is.
“Laundry is an 8-point job. Which points are you taking?”
“Dinner has 7 stages. Choose one.”

Most of all, we must resist the martyrdom. It is not our job to do everything.. despite what you were society-splained growing up. We have to let the socks go unmatched (or just throw the feckers out). We must let the festival bag rot in the corner. We must lower standards where sanity matters more.

And most of all, we must refuse to be silent conductors of the household symphony.

Because putting a sock in it - literally and metaphorically - stopping the over-mothering, the over-martrying, and the over-managing might just save our sanity.

Apparently Einstein once wrote in a letter to a friend: “When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.”

Let’s just stop. So to all the Sirens of Socks, Tamers of Tupperware, and Champions of Sanity Over Standards, I see you, and I’m with you. Let’s get on with more exciting things in our lives.

And as always for paid subscribers, just email me for a lovely little exercise on how to maximise your golden time - alana@alanakirk.com. Happy to then give you feedback once you’ve done the exercise.

Putting a sock in it

The Domestic #MeToo movement

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