A funny God

I was talking with my therapist recently about how life seems to keep circling back around to my unresolved issues. He mentioned the phrase "a funny God," which at first confused me. And then I realized he was talking about what I was talking about -- that, until you have really, truly worked through something, life/God/the universe/whatever you want to call it will keep bringing you the same situation until you work your way through it.

I moved this weekend, downsizing from an 1800 square foot house to an 850 square foot apartment. Not surprisingly, this means I now have WAY too much stuff. Stuff stacked in boxes around the apartment, stuff stacked in piles that I have to work around. Stuff that has made my home chaos.

I was staring at all of this stuff today, feeling overwhelmed and triggered by memories of growing up in a house where you couldn't actually walk straight through most of the rooms. You had to pick a path over, through, and around the piles of stuff. I felt very much like I was back with my mother, surrounded by an unmanageable chaos. And then, all of a sudden, I realize that wasn't true at all. Too much stuff, yes. Chaos, yes. But, this time around, I have the ability to simplify, discard, and organize. I have the power to make my life what I want it to be. My mother's issue no longer needs to be my issue.

A funny God, indeed.

I heart routines

This post made me realize afresh how much I really, really like routines. Apparently, it's not just me. Granted, as an elementary school teacher, I probably have more routines than most people. Math at 8:30, read a story at 10:00, lunch at 11:00.... The more time I spend with tiny people, the more I realize that kids really do thrive on that routine.

And that makes me think about the complete and total lack of routine that I had growing up. Waking up in the morning, I never had any idea what that day might be like. Will I have any clean socks? Can I even find my socks? Which side of Mom will I see today -- the fun-loving, childlike mom, or the angry, moody one who's obsessed with her stuff? Looking back, a complete lack of schedule, routine, and predictability meant that I drifted through most days feeling completely unmoored.

As an adult, that may help explain why I have such a deep-seated need to be able to predict, with reasonable certainty, what today will hold. Life has definitely underscored the lesson that there are many, many things that are not under my control. The struggle for me now is to create a routine that takes into account what I actually can control, while letting go of the things that are simply uncontrollable. It's  still a work in progress, but the fact that I can articulate the struggle at all makes me realize that I've come a long way from that kid searching for clean socks amid the hoard.

If wishes were fishes

When I was younger and just starting to come to terms with my family's dysfunction, I wished a lot for things to be different.

I just re-read that sentence and realized that, while true, it isn't entirely accurate to phrase it only in the past tense. I am still coming to terms with my family's dysfunction. On occasion, I still wish for things to be different. The wishing usually happens during a phone conversation with my mother. We live one state apart and don't talk all that often, but our conversations still have a way of making my want to hurl my phone out of a window. So far, I've resisted the urge, but that's still no guarantee for the future safety of the phone. The most frustrating, button-pushing conversations are those that deal with her chronic good intentions. Either her long-term memory is extremely selective, or she is the most blindly optimistic human I've ever met. Either way, the umpteenth conversation about "As soon as I get my life in order" tends to send me over the edge. What she means by that is "as soon as I clean out and discard roughly 3000 square feet of trash, I will start living my life." And what she means by that is "I wish my life were different, but I just can't seem to figure out how to make that happen." If wishes were fishes, as my grandpa would say.

The problem with growing up with the "I wish" mentality is that you don't ever really learn what to do to change a situation when you're unhappy. Wishing, unfortunately, doesn't make it so. Over the past few months, I've embarked on a quest to fill in some of the skills I never learned growing up. I'm figuring out the housework thing (don't walk away from the dishes after dinner -- you'll get distracted and forget about them until the next morning), making friends (give yourself some credit for being someone other people would actually like to befriend -- a little self-esteem goes a long way), and generally just trying to be aware of changes I can make that will make me happier. So far, actually making changes works a lot better than wishing. Huh.

If Barbie were a hoarder...no, seriously.

I'm not sure whether to file this under "This is hilarious!" or "Someone has too much time on their hands," but Barbie can add now add hoarder to her extensive resume. She's been an astronaut/race car driver/trophy girlfriend/dentist/lifeguard, so what's one more occupation, I suppose?

Photographer/artist Carrie M. Becker has created a series of photographs titled "Barbie Trashes her Dreamhouse." She created ten different, insanely detailed dollhouse dioramas, filled them with doll-sized detritus, and photographed the series. It's kind of awesome and kind of horrifying. If you'd like to check it out, go here.

Eureka!

I've spent the last, well, forever making covert observations of other people's housekeeping habits. Whenever I go into someone's home, I scope out the cleanliness level (or lack thereof) and compare it to my own house. Granted, comparison is typically a losing game, but growing up in a hoarded home gives you no point of reference for how to function in daily life. I've spent most of my life observing other people to get some idea of what "normal" is. Housekeeping skills are no exception.

I tend to basically ignore typical levels of dirt and disorganization in other people's houses. What really stands out to me is when a house is impressively clean and organized. If it wouldn't make me into some kind of weirdo social pariah, I would sit the oh-so-together hosts down and beg to know their secrets. How do they do it? How do they keep their houses so clean in the midst of everything going on in their super-busy lives?

I find that keeping the house clean has been a losing battle for me. We children of hoarders tend to fall into two camps -- obsessively, compulsively, spartanly neat or hoarders ourselves. I fall somewhere in the middle. I'm definitely not a hoarder, but neither am I particularly clean or tidy. This didn't really bother me as much when I was younger, but as I've gotten older, I find my inability to keep a clean house increasingly irksome. I've tried all kinds of strategies to solve the problem (Mrs. Meyer's Clean Home, Organizing from the Inside Out, scheduling tasks for specific days, apps designed to create a customized system), but nothing's really solved the problem. The house is still dirty and cluttered most of the time. And no matter how much I remind myself that this failure doesn't make me a failure, it still feels pretty darn bad.

Or it did, until I unexpectedly found my eureka moment in this book written for adult children of alcoholics and other dysfunctional parents. Housework isn't mentioned once in the book. It did say that children who grow up in dysfunctional families are never taught how to complete large tasks, so we feel overwhelmed when facing big jobs and often won't even start. And with that, my friends, something clicked. Maintaining my house completely freaks me out because I feel so overwhelmed by the size of the task. And no matter how many times I've tried to break it into smaller chunks or come up with a workable system, I eventually just throw up my hands and quit. The feeling of relief here is profound. I'm not lazy! I'm not irreparably damaged! I'm just overwhelmed! And so I have decided to scrap all of the systems I've tried in favor of an egg timer. I set it for 15 minutes a day and clean for as long as the timer is ticking. No assigned rooms, no particular task, other than whatever seems most important at the moment. If I still feel like cleaning when the timer goes off, I can. If not, I can stop. Somehow, this seems completely doable and lessens the pressure that I've been putting on myself. While my house may never be as neat and tidy as some of the homes I've seen through the years, right now it's totally livable and getting better all the time. And while it's far from perfect, it's finally good enough for me.

Only a hoarder's child

So I just read this post about a kitchen fire in a hoarded kitchen and I had to laugh out of sheer recognition. I've posted several times about daydreaming that my mother's house would catch fire, thereby eliminating the eventual need for my brother and me to clean it up. Apparently, I'm not the only one out there who would appreciate a little divine intervention in the form of a house fire. But I'm pretty sure that only another hoarder's child would file a kitchen fire in the hoarded home under the category of "a Christmas miracle." Under the circumstances, it seems totally understandable.

People clean their dishwashers?

One of the issues with being the adult child of a hoarder is that you're playing catch-up on a lot of life skills that other people take for granted. Housework, for example, is something that I'm still figuring out. How often do people clean their baseboards? Wash their walls? How much time are you supposed to spend cleaning your house every day?

There are a surprising number of websites out there dedicated to cleaning and organizing. This fact makes me feel much better, as I am obviously not the only person out there who's still figuring this stuff out. And, as an added bonus, once in awhile I run across a cleaning-related factoid that makes me laugh. For example, it never in my entire life occurred to me that a person might need to clean their dishwasher, but apparently you can. If I ever get to the point where the rest of my house is so clean that I'm concerned about the inside of my dishwasher, I'll be doing pretty well.