"Happiness is not a tidy house" is my new mantra! Or at least it is slowly becoming so. And as I am quickly realizing it is more than just a few words said over and over again when the house has reached peak disaster levels but is actually a lifestyle choice. One that is not an easy choice to make, stick to and not lose my marbles over.
You see, as a stay at home mom I cannot help but hold myself to a very high standard. After all, I stay at home. Is not the main job, besides the actual hands on child rearing I am lucky enough to do, to keep the house in a clean and orderly fashion? Should not all things have an organized place to be returned to, all corners be clean and disinfected, all socks and underwear laundered and returned to their drawers before the panicked cries of, "I have nothing clean" are shouted? Should I not have some fabulous routine that has been fine tuned, perfected and put in place for keeping our house in a tidy fashion at any and all given times? A standard operating procedure, as one might say? Alas, I do not. I have nothing even close.
See, here is the kicker. I hate to clean and I am not very tidy by nature. My mother used to call me "the slug" growing up due to the fact that everywhere I went I left a trail of crap behind. My bedroom was always a disaster, a secret source of rebellious pride. My car was always cluttered. My laundry never done. The closet looked like a scene from Hoarders. And my dirty dishes never returned to the kitchen. My father even adopted a technique to combat my stubborn pride about tidying up my little bit of space. When it had gotten to a Haz-Mat situation he would wait for me to leave the house and then pull everything out of previously mentioned closet and put it all on my bed. More than once I came home to a beautifully empty closet and a bed that was no longer distinguishable from the floor, except for the elevated level. Genius, I realize now. Dreadful to come home to at the time.
The thing is I did not choose to stay at home to keep a clean and tidy house. I stayed at home to hang out with my kids, have a plethora of time to do random adventures with them, volunteer at my daughter's school and generally have my focus be on the family and not miss a minute of this precious and finite time with them. And while I love organization, to the point of almost sexual satisfaction, as the only member of a household of four who feels this way, I have come to discover that keeping the organizational plans I put into place going is nothing more than an effort in futility. Plus, I in no way anticipated, in fact did not even consider that I might remotely care about such things when I was making the decision to stay home after the birth of our second child. Talk about being blind sided. Never in a million years did I think I would care about my house being tidy nor how it would be perceived by others. And more importantly, my beloved family does not care if our house looks like a commercial for a cleaning product or a set from a television show about "real families". They would much rather live in utter chaos with a relaxed and happy mother/wife than always know where every item is at any given time and have me constantly stressed from trying to achieve an unobtainable and unnecessary goal. I have finally come to realize this. The old adage now applies, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Here I go.....
So besides the one day a week I insist we all band together to get the house in less than disaster-alert-red shape I will just breath my way through the moments when all surfaces look like a page from an "I Spy" book, chant my way through my children riding the wave of dirty laundry that is escaping out of the bathroom door and drink my way through the end of the week catastrophe that our house devolves into.
After all, Happiness is Not a Tidy House!
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