Stop Sweeping it Under the Rug

Growing up, my bedroom was never clean. I always had too much stuff, and I didn’t know how to organize well enough to keep my space clean. After I got married, my house was never clean. Yes, I scrubbed the toilets and mopped the floors, but my house never felt clean. It was always cluttered, and even when I cleaned it, it still felt messy. When I would have a gathering at my house, I had to spend hours cleaning up to make my house presentable. Even though I would pronounce that this time it was going to stay clean, it usually wasn’t more than a week before the dishes were stacked up on the counter, there were “I’ll handle this later” piles in every corner, and there was no evidence that I had worked so hard to clean it at all. Determined to change this, I have read every book I could find on de-cluttering and keeping house. Some things I read seemed a little over the top, and I knew they would never work for me, so I discarded them, skipping entire chapters. I cannot tell you one book that worked for me, it was a culmination of books that came together until I found what worked for me.

I had to start with the clutter. When I was eight, my mom packed up everything we owned and put it in her friend’s garage. My sister and I went to California for the summer, and my mom went on a trip of a lifetime with her friend cross-country. We were only supposed to be gone for a few months, so we packed things we could not live without – mostly clothes. When my mom came to get us, she decided not to go back to Phoenix. Everything from the first eight years of my life was gone. Every photograph, every toy, every thing I had – gone. I began to attach things to memories and hold on to them. I saved every birthday card, note, scrap of paper, anything that had a memory attached to it – good or bad – I saved. On a rainy day, I would pull out the vintage chest my aunt bought me for my tenth birthday, and go through everything inside. I would remissness about the past, re-reading notes and looking through pictures. I couldn’t throw things away, even if I no longer needed them. I spent twenty-five years this way, accumulating massive amounts of stuff that I didn’t really need. Every time I moved, I would move boxes from the old garage to the new one. I never even looked in them, I just moved them. They became a weight.

In the summer of 2017, my husband and I bought a new home. I knew the move was coming, so I read several books about de-cluttering. I was determined to get rid of the boxes that had moved with me over the years. I had to go through each one, physically examine every item in the boxes, and then decide if I could part with it. Here is the thing, it wasn’t the item that was so hard to get rid of, it was the memory that it represented that was hard to part with. It was as if I thought that discarding the item would remove the memory from my brain. I know this seems illogical, but that’s the way it felt. My son’s first pair of shoes, the ones he learned to walk in, could I part with those? Or how about the card my mom got me for my ninth birthday, the one with the ballerina on it, could I toss the first item that I saved after I lost everything? It wasn’t the card that I struggled to throw away, but the decision it represented. It was with that card that I decided that I would keep my own things and carry them with me when we moved, for fear that if I trusted someone else with my memories – I mean my things – they wouldn’t keep them safe. I will tell you that the decisions I made caused physical illness in my body. I don’t know if it was stress or anxiety, perhaps it was even grief, that caused the intense feeling of unrest to come over me. I spent several days sorting my belongings and then had a yard sale. At the end of the weekend, I made a decision that surprised not only me, but those who knew me well. I asked my husband to get rid of everything that was left – nearly two truckloads of stuff. We found a charitable cause and made arrangements, and I left it up to him to haul it all away. I was afraid that if I had to box it up or haul it off that I would end up with a box of stuff that I couldn’t part with after all. Having hated my clutter all of our years together, he quickly obliged – before I could change my mind. I hate to use the word grief, it seems so silly now, but that’s what followed for quite some time after. I am not sure how long it lingered, but at some point, I began to notice that I felt lighter, that my house stayed cleaner, and that the weight of stuff was gone. About a year later, I purged again, and a few months later, one more time. I am sure there is still more that I could part with, but it is a process. The guilt from getting rid of things people have given me is gone. They never meant for me to keep the item forever, and the joy that I had was in the thoughtfulness of the gift, not in the gift itself. There was so much shame in keeping stuff, the clutter, the mess, having to keep closet and garage doors closed when company came over, and when that shame lifted, I wanted to get rid of more. The liberty that came by shedding the things I thought made me who I am, left room for me to actually discover who I wanted to be.

After the clutter was gone, I still struggled to keep the house tidy. I created chore charts for my kids, I even created chore charts for my husband and I. You’re laughing? My husband did, too. The desire to have a clean space to live in usually took a back seat to life. Right before the first de-cluttering, I developed what has become chronic granulomatous mastitis, and just weeks after I developed abdominal wall endometriosis. There were days I just couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed, and I certainly wasn’t going to haul the laundry down the hall. I am in pain more often than not. I have undergone surgeries, hospital stays, you name it, I have probably experienced it. I struggled to keep up with basic housework, and I also struggled to ask for help. I needed a solution. So I turned to my Libby app (an app where you can read and listen to books from the library for free), and downloaded every book I could find about housekeeping. The best piece of advice I read was simply do the dishes.

Doing the dishes is the first step of this whole change-your-house process. Doing them again tomorrow is where the magic will happen.

Dana K. White, How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House’s Dirty Little Secrets

I cannot explain how that little change trickles down and makes the rest of the house stay clean…but I promise you, it works. I have a hard time running the dishwasher unless it is full. So, if there was room for a few more plates and a cup or two, I would wait to run it. The problem was that when I went to load it again, there were more than a few plates and cups, and I had to run the dishwasher while leaving dishes in the sink. Which meant I was perpetually behind. I bought a new, energy efficient, water saving dishwasher, and I have resolved to run it every night, full or not. I have tasked my nine and ten-year-old with unloading it every morning, and throughout the day we all load our dishes as we go. It can’t be that easy, I know that is what you’re thinking. And you are right, it wasn’t easy. I had to tell everyone, every day, several times a day, that the maid had been fired, and they were now required to load their own dish as soon as they were done with it. I felt like a nag, and I am pretty sure I irritated my husband for weeks. Now, it has just become the way things are. Somehow, the burden of not having to do dishes has made it easier to keep the rest of the house clean. My kids each do one chore every day (unloading the dishes is tasked to one or the other every day – even weekends), and the house just stays tidy. Now, when a friend drops by unexpectedly, I invite them in and have a cup of coffee with them. I don’t spend a few seconds throwing things in my bedroom before I open the door, or pretend that I was right in the middle of doing the dishes when they knocked. Having a party at my house might mean a ten-minute tidy, but nothing compared to the hours I spent before. When I am having a super painful day, I don’t feel guilty for not doing any housework, and I don’t get behind.

I am the sole owner of an accounting firm, and I have no employees. I homeschool my two children. I run the children’s program at my church. I struggle with chronic illness that causes intense pain, and I am looking at surgery during tax season. I don’t say any of that in a bragging sense, but I want to give hope to the mom who is reading this saying, “I wish I could keep my house clean, I just don’t have the time (or I am too sick, or whatever you say to yourself).” You’re busy, I get it! You work, I know. You have chronic illness that leaves you out of commission for stretches of time. Me, too. It won’t happen overnight, and it will never happen if you don’t make it. If you can’t get out of bed, ask someone to bring you a box from the garage every morning and sort it. If you work full-time, take 30 minutes a day and clean one corner at a time. If you have toddlers, you probably feel that by the time you get done cleaning up, you have to circle back around and start over. Maybe you will have to work while they nap. Find what works for you, wherever you are. Get rid of some stuff, and do your dishes. And don’t give up, it will be worth it when you wake up to a clean house every morning.