Housework seems to be a big topic for me. I grew up with no younger siblings, had my own room that I kept very neat and orderly. My mother was a tornado of dusting rags and mops never leaving anything unclean. She is a real cleaning whiz. My dad grew up with 8 siblings and their rule was you take it out you put it right back, he has always kept his spaces fairly neat. I really loved the satisfaction that came from a clean room, a cleared table, sparkling floors! Yes, I used to shine my floors before I had children. Oh the thought of a perfectly clean house to sit down and enjoy a good novel is like a beautiful dream I don't want to wake from. A fresh, lovely oasis for the queen of her castle.....a place for everything and every, dust free, thing in it's place.....
Oh ok, so I still love that feeling of just having organized something or making a room look like it jumped right off the pages of a Better Homes and Garden's magazine page....
But, the messy reality of kids and a husband, 3 home cooked meals a day, 4 baths, water on the floor, and ketchup stained shirts is a different dream altogether and for this recovering neat freak, a rude awakening to my own lack of patience.
I often fight the urge to just grab some jumbo size black trash bags, load em up with everything that got left on the floor and everything that doesn't have a place in my kitchen, (which is rather lacking in storage space), and throw most of our belongings out the back door and out of my life. I have a split second thought of, if it is on the floor the owner of said item must not care about it too much, let's get it out, purge, clean, visual calm and neatness is what I crave!.....then I calm down.
I remember how much we paid for my dear husbands good work socks and how much his feet hurt after a long hard day working the prison and I calmly pick them up and take them to the laundry room. I remember just how much my little Gavin loves his buzz lightyear and that is why he takes it out every single day to play with it.....and how expensive that was and how happy I was to buy it for him in the first place. I remember that Larissa just loves to play dress up just as I did and that my nightgown is one of her favorite "party dresses". I try and try to remember just how silly it is to need things to be perfectly in their place all the time. It isn't a reality, not for this mama and probably not for most.
I remind myself that my house isn't here for others to stand in awe of how beautiful my house is, or how great of a housekeeper I am, this house is for living in, for loving and playing. This house is a house I keep for my family. I remember that things can and do get cleaned and picked up, but they don't have to stay that way all day long. What oh what would I do sitting here with two toddlers in the middle of a spotless house? I know! Make a MESS!!!
All this to say that God is using this mess, these toys, dirty dishes, and piles of laundry to teach me to work hard, be patient, and force me to focus on what is important: my family. And this keeps me from thinking too highly of myself and my ability to take a house void of mess makers and turn it into that dream of me sitting all alone calmly reading a book uninterrupted in my castle of sparkling freshly shined floors.... Sounds lonely.
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