Lyda here. I’ve been inspired by Laurie’s post on deep cleaning and by this article to come out of the closet.
The cleaning closet, that is.
I admit it. I’m a neat freak.
Searching the web for information on messiness versus neatness turned up a lot of information on compulsive personality disorders and such. And also this article in Newsweek, extoling the benefits of messiness. Both of which are discouraging to me.
Like being a morning person, being neat was an anomoly in my family.
I’m convinced I inherited the “morning person” gene from my dad. He and I spent hours together in the mornings while everyone else slept. (Then again, it could just be because he didn’t sleep well. Maybe that’s an inheritable thing as well…? But I digress…)
I think the degree of neatness or messiness in a person’s personality may be inherited too. Or may be inborn, like the color of your eyes and the way your teeth grow. You can have your teeth straightened, and you can learn to be more or less neat. But the basic tendency is still there.
Being neat is not usually well-received by other people (neither is being a morning person). “Don’t hate me because I’m neat.”
So I am inclined to hide my neat-freakishness. I’m embarassed that I clean out both my filing cabinet and my closets at least three times a year. I’m embarassed that my laundry actually gets put away the same day it’s done. I’m embarassed that I know where everything in my kitchen belongs.
As if it is something to be ashamed of. As if there is something wrong with being tidy.
Maybe it’s because I was born in 1960. (Go ahead, do the math.) See, growing up in the 60s and 70s was different. I was raised to be a free spirit, a semi-hippie, a liberal. Free spirits do not spend their time cleaning ovens, ya’ll.
As a child, I learned that “all you need is love” and “money can’t buy me love”. (Wonder how the songs I grew up with affected my attitudes about money? But I digress again…)
The Beatles never said anything about scrubbing floors and setting up filing systems, but somehow I learned anyway.
Maybe it was a reaction to my environment. I’m one of 6 kids and we only had two bathrooms. (Again, do the math.) Plus, my mom had given up on neatness, and my dad was not naturally tidy. Most of the members of my family were hoarders back then. Our house was overflowing with books on every subject, papers covered with my dad’s writing and coffee rings, tools and projects and homework and pets - you know - stuff, the daily mess of everyday life. My mom appropriated the kitchen pantry and the living room cabinets for her vast collection of fabrics and sewing things. (Okay, that is cool, isn’t it?!)
One time we had our TV stolen, and the police dusted the dirty dishes for fingerprints, ya’ll.
Probably scarred me for life.
When I finally had a room to myself (as a teenager), I had hardly anything in it. A bed, always made. A desk, with everything stored neatly in the drawers, a few books and a lamp on top. A chair. Some shells I had collected from the beach. Everything else was in the large closet, carefully organized and clean. I don’t even remember having pictures on the walls.
My third year in college, I finally had an apartment to myself. My first act was to clean and then paint. (And the walls in the tiny bathroom were crumbling in the Houston humidity, so I dyed some old curtains of my mom’s and hung them from ceiling to floor. Playing with fiber, ya’ll!) I had almost no furniture but it was awesome to only clean up after myself for a change.
My second apartment, on the third floor of an old residential hotel downtown, was bigger and had hardwood floors (and a cockroach population the size of Detroit) - but still hardly any furniture. It was great for parties - easy to dance, or sit on the floor, or whatever.
My current home has a lot in common with those first places. When people visit, they usually say, “It’s so peaceful.”
At certain times in my life, my motto was “I clean, therefore I am.”
I’ve sometimes been derailed from my neatnik ways. By the marriage, by motherhood, by FM symptoms for a long while, and lately by grad school demands. I learned to leave the dust alone, to live with a lower standard of cleanliness, to stop moving furniture in the middle of the night.
But I never learned to like it. And it was never who I was.
So I jumped on board with “Crazy Aunt Purl’s August of Deep Cleaning Zen-osity”.
I can hardly wait to get started tomorrow, and start getting my home back into focus as a clean, mostly clutter-free zone.
I find it more relaxing that way.
More me.
Plus, I can find the cat.
And the knitting.
