My Messiness

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing." -Phyllis Diller

At some point before I had a child I heard that a messy house is good for a child's brain development. Now that I have a child I refuse to actually look that fact up to see if it's accurate because I don't want to find out it's not true. At least now I have a good excuse for the perpetual state of disarray my home is always in.

I can hear my mother now: "I raised you better than this! How did you learn to live like such a slob?" And to my mom's credit, she really did try. Growing up, I remember all the fights we had about cleaning my room. Now days, she loves to tell the story about how she found a glass of moldy milk under my bed and had to throw the cup away. And the story about how I had fleas in my room for a while. That's always a crowd pleaser.

Now don't get the wrong idea. It's not that I purposely left that glass of milk under my bed. I just forgot about it. And the fleas were from my cat! I swear! And they were quickly eradicated by the best flea bomb money can buy.

But I AM just a tad bit messy.

Going to college really didn't help my messiness. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on who you were) my roommate Leana had a similar tolerance for disarray so we lived quite happily in our filth. Other friends thought differently, though. I still remember the day my good friend Brooke came into our bathroom armed with rubber gloves and a bucket full of chemicals, because she "just couldn't stand it anymore." When she was done, I was surprised to find out that our sink and counter were actually WHITE, not that pasty gray-brown we'd been living with for so long.

Okay, before you get TOO nauseous, please know that I have gotten better. Half way through college I began realizing the error of my ways and started making a concerted effort to change my bad habits.

But bad habits die hard.

Poor, poor Jerry. I married a man who does not share my love of clutter. We're so different in how we clean, in fact, that a year into our marriage he admitted to me that when we first got married, he would re-wash the dishes that I had already washed after I went to bed. We definitely have butted heads a few times over this topic, but I think it's fair to say that we're starting to meet more in the middle. He doesn't rewash the dishes any more (at least not that I know of) and I....well, I just keep trying.

I like to think that when we have a bigger house, I'll have more storage space for all the clutter that seems to always find its way back to the counters, tables, floors, and chairs. But realistically, I know that a bigger house will just mean a bigger mess. So what's the solution?

Those of you who are not like me are probably thinking right now, "Just get off your lazy arse and clean your house already!" But for some reason it's just not that simple for me. Am I lazy? Maybe just a tad. But it goes deeper than that, I think. It goes to the core of my personality, of who I am. I don't mind clutter. I don't mind a little dirt here and a few crumbs there. In fact I think there's a small part of me that actually LIKES it. Does this make me a bad person? A bad mom? A bad wife?

I have to believe that I am a good person despite this flaw. That perhaps this flaw of mine is actually a blessing. God knows I spend much more time playing with Andrew than I do cleaning up after him. That's got to count for something. And when the kitchen is hidden under mounds of pots and pans and splatters of food, at least I have a good meal to show for it. And when I decided to just sit and hold hands with Jerry and watch TV in the middle of a cluttered room, I know he wouldn't want me to be doing anything else.

So I shall console myself with these thoughts, while still trying to motivate myself to do a little better. With God's grace (and Jerry's) I'll succeed.