Some days I care. Some days I don’t. Some days I pretend I don’t care. Some days I think I should care more. Sounds normal, right? I wish it were more normal.
If the house is messy, and by “messy,” I mean – anything other than perfect, and sometimes maybe even smelling like a dog, a baby diaper, or some dirty underwear that got stuffed into the bottom of the basket that holds all my kids’ balls. (A word or two on that, by the way, don’t yell if you find a child’s underwear, perhaps in real bad shape, stuffed somewhere. It’s normal. They won’t be doing it when they’re 16, and if they are, yelling wouldn’t have helped. Right?)
Back on track – so when it’s “messy,” or even in real bad shape, we start to percolate over a “reason.” Children are making memories (on my mantle), I have a two year old (see my previous posts for this fine maneuver sprinkled in here and there), we were all sick, guests were here, just returned from travel/skiing/store/grandma’s, “she/he’s just a really busy, active child,” he’s not a “tidy man,” and oh there are more/more/more. Maybe an occasional “I suck at this!” thrown in there?
I have recently, angrily, scrubbed a bathroom or two, called a housekeeper, and felt defeated, possibly in that order. The reason the house is messy is because it’s lived in, and houses people live in get messy, and sometimes downright dirty. Then we have to clean them, and though the feeling of a clean house is fabulous, cleaning the house absolutely sucks big time.
Hence my writing on this issue today, and to be honest – facebooking about it, and starting a pinterest board entitled Ordinary Homes, and uploaded a few pictures of my house, without any preparatory tidying. I’m feeling brave, and a day or two ago, I was actually looking at pinterest, loving that little collection of awesomeness and disreality. I realized, with a full on mindfully still yogi cat level of acceptance, I will likely NEVER have a house that looks like the ones I pin. Then I snorted and thought, I should pin pictures of my actual house and start making that look sexy on pinterest. It made me laugh, for about 3 days, and then I did it, and now I’m speaking up about it.
We’re all in different versions of this chaos, unless you are fortunate to be one of those persons who have no idea what I’m talking about. By the way, you guys make me feel weird, but that’s just because I can’t pull it off without becoming an unkind lunatic. It’s jealousy, and we can move on to my real point, which is my wish for us all, to have permission to stop justifying WHY it’s messy, stop hoarding tricks to make it easier, and stop shaming each other. We’ll all clean when we can, and maybe there’s a nap that gets in the way.
Having a dirty toilet doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a person. I believe in others, that they will clean their toilets on the very first day that cleaning a dirty toilet is at the top of the priority list. It might be good, too, to add: ”trying not to care if people judge me” right near the top of that priority list. Get that done first? Stop the mayhem, and start congratulating yourself for being an awesome mom/pet owner/partner/worker bee/skateboarding slacker. All of these get in the way of cleaning, and it’s no one’s place to tell you you should be cleaning instead, so skate on!
