Disregard my previous missive.

While that advice may have been sound – in a low-level survivalist sort of way – it was ordered toward others rather than centered on you.

Yes, it suggested simple ways to keep the lid on things at home with small children – and you would be the one responsible for completing them – but that’s the only part of YOU that factored into that equation.

It put you at the center of others’ judgment of you – via your home and your housekeeping skills.

Rather than giving you the legacy of neurosis founded on society’s standards of good parenting and homemaking, I challenge you to give yourself the gift of not caring what unexpected guests think of your house; of not deriving your own worth based on how the physical place you share with a slew of other people with their own free wills and sets of hands and collections of things looks.

And if you want to stay in your pajamas all day, please do so without explaining yourself to anyone. You work damn hard and deserve a comfy pair of pants when you want them.