As anyone who has ever been to our house will no doubt be aware*, I hate housework.
Not just dislike, actively loathe.
I'm frequently happy as a clam cooking, baking, preserving, sowing, potting on, pruning... I even quite like pegging the washing out. Repairing a tear or sewing a button on is pretty satisfying too. But tidying and cleaning? I'd rather have dentistry.
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| Even Gonzo's complaining about the mess |
A more recent impediment has been the short period of activity I can manage before I 'run out of knees'. If I've only got a good active 45 minutes I'll be damned if I'll spend it cleaning the kitchen when I could be in the garden or making a curry.
With Mark working full time, the lads with their stuff and B at school, this leads to the place becoming a bit of a tip. I'm the one with the time to tackle it and I don't or won't or can't. It becomes a vicious circle - the worse it gets, the more is required to put it right, and the more anxious and stressed about tackling it I get, so I put it off.
I was lying in bed this morning doing my physio exercises and feeling very fed up with the state of the bedroom and bathroom, hacked off with my pain levels and pretty pissed off with my lack of motivation.
The bathroom didn't just need a quick clean, it needs the steam mop on the tiles and grouting. The bedroom won't just improve with a quick tidy up, I need to sort out the massive stacks of clutter on every horizonal surface (except the bed - that just had the cat and me). After I washed the sheer curtains last summer I broke the wire and never rehung them, so that needs doing too. And the windows need a clean.
My instinct with each of these was to tell myself it's all awful, I'm a horrible lazy slob and to walk away and close the door on it all until one day I can't stand it anymore and burn it down actually get stuck into cleaning.
Then I stopped myself. I've done enough CBT to not get into this sort of unhelpful churning, for god's sake, so why wasn't I using it?
As Voltaire tells us, 'best' is the enemy of 'good'. I am a very thorough person by nature, but that's a stumbling block here. OK, I can't spend two hours with the steam cleaner on all the tiling. What if I didn't tackle the tiles and the grouting, but did clean the sink, toilet, mirror and shower screen and stopped? No, I wouldn't have a glistening lovely bathroom, but I would have one much nicer than now.
A good 80% of the clutter in the bedroom is books I can't currently put away. If I'm not up to (yet another) big book cull, what could I improve in 5 minutes? Simply putting the travelling bag away, removing clothes from the chaise longue, making the bed, collecting the laundry into one place made the room less of a disgrace.
I had internalised that if I wasn't doing cleaning 'properly', it wasn't worth doing. That's nonsense. It's not a binary of acceptable and unacceptable. There's a sliding scale from Show Home to Shit Tip and a nudge in the right direction is a good thing.
It's simple, it's obvious but I couldn't see it. I don't have to do everything thoroughly or not at all. Similarly, I don't have to commit to 'little and often' as a permanent approach. I've been an All Or Nothing person my whole life, it's not likely to change now. But I can just decide "I would feel better if I spent 5 minutes on that job" and do it, without pressuring myself to do the next bit and the next. And without walking away from it all because it's too much.
One day there might be a utopia in which I can make my friends' dinners and they do my cleaning - or I work out how to monetise my disparate skills and earn enough to employ a cleaner. But until then, doing a bit when I can is better than my current approach.
I generally write things down here when I think I'll need to come back to them. (This is usually recipe or garden related!) I know my housekeeping debacles are a recurring theme, so I'm going to need reminding of all this. Type it out, find the right words, rewrite a bit until I make sense to myself and POW the muddle of emotions and anxieties in my head becomes something I have Thought Through (another favourite thing of mine) and no longer has to power to stress me.
Words make things so much better.
*I once had a friend who used to come around frequently tell me "If my house was like this I would never invite anyone over." She did have a cleaner 3 times a week though.
