My Endorsement of a (Somewhat) Messy House
A friend of two teenagers recently told me that she feels quite proud of herself because she has stopped picking up her house before her kids' friends come over.
Huh?
You mean you have been spending your precious Saturday afternoons picking up clutter around the house before teenagers come over?
What the hell is going on here?
Picking up a bit before you host Sunday dinner with your in-laws, yes, I can see that. Cleaning before a dinner party, sure. But before your kids' friends come over—the line needs to be drawn, and the insanity needs to stop.
As far as I can tell, unless there is a rodent nest with real, live rats or a throbbing mob of maggots moving like one organism across the floor, teenagers are blind to messes and untidiness. I have facilitated more family therapy sessions about teens leaving food in their bedrooms and ice cream bowls in basements than I can count. Teens are generally slovenly, and I dare not spend the little free time adulthood affords trying to please any teenagers with cleanliness.
But you and I both know my girlfriend was not cleaning for the teens. Not really. She was cleaning for herself and the view others have of her. We tidy so that we appear to have our sh** together. We tidy because we want to give an impression of organization, mastery of life management skills, and an aura of conquering all life fronts: work, family, and home (superhero theme music blares in the background as you read these words).
I am exhausted just writing about it.
What an utterly exacerbating task to try to pull off: a tidy, uncluttered, and clean house at any given moment while managing careers, children, fun, friends, marriage, and all the tedious obligations and responsibilities that are part of adulthood. Family life is inherently messy. These are facts. The majority of us don't enjoy living among clutter or in unclean homes. Still, it is an uphill battle to maintain things in perpetual order. How do we allow a tidy house to be a measure of our goodness? A client recently looked at me, pain and truth filling her eyes, and said, "My house is always clean—it all looks good on the outside, but I am lost and miserable on the inside."
I remember being a junior in high school and hanging out at my boyfriend's house, where you could, at any given moment, actually eat off the kitchen floor. I was in constant amazement that their bathroom waste baskets never had trash in them. How is that? Don't members of his family blow their noses and put tissues in the trash? Then, one day, I saw his mom carrying a bathroom trash can to the garage to empty it, which contained only one or two tissues. Ahh. Mystery solved. People in this house DO blow their noses, but as soon as they do, Liz swoops in and empties the waste basket.
Even to my teenage brain, Liz's cleaning seemed excessive. I didn't grow up in a messy house, but since both my parents worked, our bathroom waste basket (which was shared by six people) definitely filled up before it was emptied. My big brother cleaned our house every Saturday while he was in high school, so our bathroom trash got emptied once a week—reasonable enough to me. Many years and a master's degree in psychotherapy later, I now know cleaning as a coping mechanism is a complex and often misunderstood behavior. What looks like a productive habit from the outside can be a way of avoiding deeper issues and may be detrimental like other less socially acceptable coping strategies like over-drinking or overspending.
Often, people clean because they can't sit still and need to be occupied with something to avoid being alone with their thoughts. It is no coincidence that those who clean to cope with stress can also feel burned out and filled with resentment. As you might imagine, when someone is filled with resentment about all the work they do in their lives that seemingly goes unrecognized, perpetually cleaning doesn't soothe their sense of resentment; in fact, it feeds it. The internal dialogue often goes something like this: "Once I get all the chores and tidying done, then I'll sit down." Great! How often does that happen—that you sit down when all the chores are done? Not often, because the domestic chores are never done. Folks, there is no end to the chores that can be done around a home. As soon as we complete one task, our busy brains notice the next one. So round and round many of us go. Cleaning, tidying, picking up, hardly ever sitting down, feeling an anxiety that never really stops its jittery gnashing.
About ten years ago, I read Brigid Schulte's book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, and experienced a paradigm shift in my own relationship with tidying and domestic chores, inspired by Schulte's interview with a researcher whose life's work is studying time-use. This man was a master of datasets on how Americans spend their time: at work, on their phones, cleaning, running errands, paying bills, with their children, eating, sleeping, having sex, and showering. More than his fascinating research findings, it was his own behavior that changed things for me. After decades of research, it was clear to him that people delay joy, pleasure, and rest to engage in work, errands, and busyness. He had countless pages of time logs from ordinary people's lives, and hours of recorded interviews where he heard phrases like, "I don't have time," or "I am too busy." When he merged the two data sets, the time use logs and the verbal interviews where people said, "There isn't enough time for fun," he saw that people did have time. Still, they spent much of it on ongoing tasks, such as tidying and running errands. Upon this realization, he reflected upon and then reorganized his own life. One significant change he made was to stop filing all his professional paperwork neatly away. He said he realized he spent countless hours of his life filing paperwork, so he stopped. Now it is in tall, neat piles all over his office. He told Schulte that he still knew where everything was when he wanted it, and with less time spent filing, he leaves the office much earlier each day. He now pursues hobbies with those regained hours of his life and is happier than he has ever been.
One thing that wasn't covered in that chapter of the book is this: he clearly isn't concerned with what others think of his office and its piles of paper. He can separate his clutter from his worth, the value of his research, and his "goodness" from his unorthodox filing system. He can do two things: tolerate the clutter and tolerate that he can't control how others view him. He has come to terms with this notion: if others evaluate my character based on the way I keep my office, that is squarely out of my control.
I now adopt this radical notion: Let my house be somewhat messy.
When an unexpected friend shows up at my door, I'm learning not to apologize and say, "I am sorry my house is such a mess!" while frantically gathering up dirty kids' socks and throwing them in the hall closet. Because secretly, friends feel relieved that my house looks just like theirs. Backpacks haphazardly thrown in the entryway (even though there are hooks in the garage for these very backpacks), a kitchen table piled with crap (what is all of this stuff anyway?!), and shoes strewn all over the house. In other words, a house that looks like a family lives in it.
I routinely choose to leave some chores for tomorrow and go putter in the garden before the last of the evening light fades. Or I curl up with a book, my writing, or a new embroidery project while laundry sits in baskets in the laundry room, unfolded and yes (the horror), getting wrinkled.
I know you are trembling with discomfort at the idea of uncompleted chores—especially wrinkled laundry. And I know you are uncomfortable because when I discuss this with people who attend my groups and retreats, they say a similar thing: "Oh my gosh, I can't sit down until ALL the chores are done first," which, of course, means that many of them rarely sit down.
The logic is that if the basket of laundry goes unfolded for a day, but I work on a craft project or write in my journal, I will be much happier at the end of the week for having created some balance and time for myself. If the laundry gets folded, but I didn't do anything for myself all week, I will feel less happy. Multiply this by 52 weeks in a year, and the effects of punting the chores here and there to sit down and do things that nurture our souls are tremendous.
That's it. That was the paradigm shift. I now work some, play some, rest some, and don't always prioritize the chores. Radical idea: I put myself first as often as I can.
I can make the counter-cultural practice of slowing down and resting a reality by learning to decouple the daily tidiness of my home from my worth or value. I believe if people see my mess, they will know I am juggling a lot, just like them. They are also unlikely to judge me negatively. They won't see me in a poor light—they will appreciate that I am a normal human trying to balance all the things and feel some relief that they aren't alone in that balancing act.
So please do drop by anytime! I won't apologize for the mess. I will invite you in and offer you a drink of some sort, and because I am still a work in progress, I will probably quietly close the laundry room door as we walk down the hallway.
Tips for Learning to Put Yourself First More Often:
The Daily 10-Minute Pick-Up: This daily pick-up routine serves a proactive function in reducing clutter. If you have children, recruit them to help clean up once a day for ten minutes. If they are young, make this a fun game by singing the same song, or listening to playful music (also, read my blog Four Reasons Kids Need Chores). If they are older, tolerate the grumbling and eye-rolls. (You know better than to make a comment about a teenage eye-roll. It is completely counter productive to say anything. Keep Calm, Ignore the Eye Roll, and Carry On.) If you are the type to say, "It's just easier for me to do it than get my family to participate," then that is your own internal work to do. The I-am-just-going-to-do-it-myself mentality is steeped in martyrdom and quickly leads to overwhelm and resentment.
Give Yourself an End-Time for Tidying: To avoid the eternal cleaning, because there actually is no end to domestic chores, say something like this to yourself: "I am going to tidy up until 8:15 pm, and then I am calling it quits for the night." Whatever you get done in that time is enough for that day—then go do something for yourself.
It's About Tolerance More than Tips and Tricks: Although I just gave you two "tips," here is the real juice: The reason most of us don't rest or relax is because it is easier to work than rest. We have been taught to work from a young age, through the teachings of many faiths and the doctrines of our cultural values. To find balance, we have to build the muscle to walk away from work and towards play, pleasure, love, and rest. We have to practice calming our nervous systems so we can enjoy rest. Otherwise, when we go to rest, we encounter anxiety, which is a terrible feeling and a potent deterrent to rest. The number one strategy for more rest, relaxing, and you-time is to build a tolerance for not getting all the work done. This tolerance is built one day at a time by using tips like the ones listed above and then sitting down. There is always more to do, so each time you walk away guilt-free with a sense that you are worthy of the rest you are about to take, you will eventually build a beautiful tolerance that allows for balance. And like any muscle you build over time, the bigger the muscle you build, the more balance you eventually have.
Enjoy the slow- Heather