(This is a modified but recycled post from my old blog so some of you may have read this before).
"Your goal : Try to make sure your home is a place of peace, order, and tranquility." -from The Good Wife's Guide, circa 1955
Remember Monica Gellar from
Friends?
She was obsessive about keeping her living space clean, so obsessive in
fact that she could not even go to sleep at night if she knew that
there was a pair of shoes lying out in the middle of the living room
floor. My sister used to call me "Monica" because I was exactly that
way. In my first marriage my ex husband used to marvel over the fact
that as soon as he put down an empty glass it would be whisked away to
the dishwasher... and sometimes the glass wouldn't even make it to
emptiness. I used to be Monica. In fact, I still am. There's just one
problem that I have that I didn't have in the days of pre-motherhood:
MY HOUSE IS NEVER CLEAN.
I
spend HOURS every day on cleaning. But at the end of the day no matter
how much I've cleaned it ends up looking exactly like the picture
above. That's what a 7 year old, a 3 year old, and a 2 year old will do
for you, I suppose. Not to mention my husband. Oh he helps clean, a lot, so this isn't a
rant that he's a useless lump that won't help 'cause he's not. It's
just that his messes that he leaves before he cleans are nothing short
of amazing. Thankfully the 7 year old is now old enough to help quite a bit, but the messes are so frequent and huge that both of our efforts kind of equal the little boy that stuck his finger in the hole to plug up the dam. Now there are days that I "take off" and don't clean and
just choose to catch up on DVR backlog. But the whole time I'm sitting
there full of guilt and beating myself up feelings.
The
thing is I wish I could stop obsessing about cleaning. Because in
between actually raising my kids, working, spending time with The Family Guy,
exercising, brief spiritual practices, and cleaning I have NO time left for anyone else. My scrapbooking box
gets left under the bed. The pile of books at my bedside remains
unread. Excluding
Titanic 3D, I haven't
seen a full length movie in almost a year. I have no friends outside of
one sentence updates on Facebook and no social life at all. And for
what? Nobody actually CARES if my house is clean except ME. And yet I
cannot let go of the guilt. Two years ago my daughter contracted a case of
head lice from school. Being as obsessive as I am I got the case under
control within a day (while the poor girl had to endure hours of lice
shampoo treatment, comb throughs, and me ranting and crying). But
before I found out it came from school my first automatic thoughts were,
"It's my fault, my house is so dirty, I'm officially a bad mother."
But therein unearths a much deeper issue: every since the failed
cosmetology career fiasco of 4-5 years ago my constant thoughts about
almost everything are: "I'm not good enough, I'm only average at best,
etc." Something else has been getting to me as well. I look at friends my age with
their Facebook photos and they are living in nice brand new homes. We
are not. (My husband and I had to start life all over with no credit and a huge loss of income while most of them didn't). That's the the really unhealthy thing about "Fuckbook" (as my hilarious bloggy friend,
Hippy Jersey Devil , calls it). It's like Mind-Fuckbook. Everybody is hotter, smarter, and lives in a better house than you. I think something inside of me says: "Well I don't have it as
nice as they do but maybe if I keep what I have nice it could come at
least semi-close." Ugh... what a waste of time, energy, and everything
else.
As bad as I feel and as icky as the energy feels here my home never looks like we need to call
Hoarders to come set up a camera crew and a few 1-800-JUNK trucks, so my efforts aren't totally in vain.
I'm really working very hard to not dwell on these things constantly. Despite being a Domestic Goddess, one can only do what they can do.
