As a single parent, my life is constantly busy (is this an excuse?) and when I finally finished my last degree I claimed that I was going to finally get my house in order, that was five years ago(?!?!). Let me explain, I’m a bit of a packrat…. I grew up in a house where my Dad saved things in case he needed them and he was amazing. He made leather pulls for the kitchen cabinets for the house from an old leather purse of my mother’s. He taught me the ability to problem solve creatively, think outside the box and trouble shoot strange solutions. This often requires one to think about the function of what you’re trying to repair and think about what you might be able to create from something else to fix things. I love that skill that came from my beloved Dad(RIP).
Oh but I think I’m getting off track, something I often do…I’ve never been like my younger sister. Her house looks like a hotel, she claims she is a hidden messy person it’s just all behind closets and etc. This need to clean my house, it’s the story of my life… there are infinitely so many more interesting things that I’d rather be doing with my time than cleaning my house. Am I just really lazy? I don’t think I’m lazy because if I was, I wouldn’t have been able to work 51 hours a week plus part-time school plus single parent plus commute to school an hour each way. In some ways I feel like I’ve never really learned how to keep my house clean. When I was a kid, my parents let us keep our room as we liked to….which meant mine was a mess. We had our house burglarized once and when the police were going through the house looking at what had happened they peeked into my room and then inquired to my Dad if the burglars had gone into my room and his response was “I don’t know”. The truth is, they hadn’t despite my gold jewelry hanging from my bulletin board. The burglars had gone into my older sisters room and rummaged through her underwear drawer and paged through her bible looking for teenage hidden money. My messiness is a sort of protection, who wants to deal with the messy girl (of course, you wouldn’t be able to tell that I’m messy by just looking at me!) it has been my security. It sends a clear message for people to leave me alone!
I sometimes wonder if I have a touch of ADD. It hasn’t impaired my life so much that I can’t be successful but perhaps I could be more successful if I could get some of this under control. I probably have developed enough coping skills that it hasn’t impacted my job or other areas of my life but keeping the house clean is just really hard not fun for me. It doesn’t help that my partner also suffers from this affliction. She lives too far away from me to be here much more than just on the weekends which has its own related challenges. My house isn’t so bad that I would be on Horders or even Clean House but it is bad enough that I have shame about it. It’s bad enough that I don’t entertain or have people over because of that shame.
Oops, I think I’m getting off track again. I tend to be such a communicator and it’s easy to go off on my various trains of thought that even though it’s all sorta related(isn’t everything related?), I lose my focus – this is where that ADD theory comes from.
I was doing research online (because I love doing this) about how to organize my house and while doing that I came across all these blogs from stay at home christian moms and all their Martha Stewart perfection. I can’t relate to most of them, I only have one kid(who is months away from being a legal adult) and while I did stay home with him when he was small that was so many years ago….and I’m more of an ambivalent nonpracticing (or at least not joining) Unitarian Universalist with an aversion to most capital G-od stuff. Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem if that stuff works for others but it just doesn’t work for me. My mom is a pentecostal evangelical practitioner as is my younger sister although maybe not as strong, my older sister (who is way cool) is about to graduate from a Disciples of Christ seminary and my Dad was probably more like me but didn’t ascribe to UU specifically but attending Quaker meetings and various other alternative religious events but without any strong attachment to any. My Dad was spiritual and loved the sacredness in the world but did it without many other people around.
Where was I, I’m off track again…so I was doing research about how to organize my house when I was going through lots of blogs and found Live Once, Juicy. Now here’s someone I can relate to! Granted she’s pretty new in this blog and I’m just learning about her but I like it so far! She has inspired me to really try to get on track and try to achieve more than just get my house in order but also try to prioritize what’s really important to me. She has passion about living her life with intention which I’m all over that! Sometimes life gets in the way and you’re just trying to get through it but maybe it’s because it’s the beginning of a new year (resolutions and etc) but I’m going to really try to do it this time. I have high aspirations, I try to hold myself to high standards for better for worse and I’m tired of the shame attached to how I keep my house so I really do want to change it this time.
My failed perfectionistic journey 