A working mom depicted the difficulties of keeping her house organized with young children and a partner who refuses to help by sharing video clips of her home and what happens to it when she is gone all day working.
After days of the never-ending messes being neglected, she took it upon herself to step in and organize the entire house herself. The mom worked six 10-hour days in a row and, eventually fed up with her husband’s lack of care, decided to do something many wives and mothers probably think about.
Lynalice Bandy is a mother of five who works tirelessly both in and out of the household. During the summer, she left him in charge of the children and the household while she worked six days in a row for 10 hours each day. She only had one day off that she used as a sick day.
After only six days with Bandy out of the house, nearly every room was completely trashed, with piles of clothes, food, and toys littering the floors to the point where they were barely visible.
In contrast with this chaotic scene that greeted Bandy daily upon returning from work stood the apathy exhibited by her husband, who remained preoccupied with his cars in the garage throughout these events, unmindful of everything else happening inside their home.
“I’d like to pretend I’m not the only one who cleans here but as you can see these rooms don’t get much attention when I’m not here,” the mother wrote in the text overlay of the TikTok video.
The footage depicts Bandy single-handedly re-organizing and tidying up room after room with little assistance from her children. Her husband was conspicuously absent throughout this process.
“Every single day I’ve gotten home from work I’ve been met with one disaster to another caused by inattentive parenting,” she shared.
The messes included shampoo, nail polish, hair, and nugget covers embedded into the carpets, medications that had gotten into and destroyed, and a bin of dog food that had been smashed. According Bandy, her husband was preoccupied with working on his cars in the garage and turned a blind eye to the rest of the household.
“His obsession has hit an all-time high and he’s even brought car parts into the dining room and left oil everywhere,” she said.
Bandy admits that her “soul aches” since she is unable to feel safe and happy in her own home, as she is always left to clean up. At the end of the video, the mother shows off her fresh house, which looks like a completely different one than it did in the beginning.
Whether it’s men still holding outdated beliefs about women and domestic responsibilities in the home, or expecting their wives or partners to bear the brunt of the chores, it’s clear that something had to change for Bandy.
More than a year after her original cleaning video went viral, Bandy is divorced from her husband. However, she’s still responsible for cleaning up her kids’ mess, which she still continues to TikTok.
Linalice Bandy said, “From this point forward I am working on trying to bring the positive into my life, let go of the past and move forward looking for the joy while healing the pain.”
