So as you may recall, one of my goals in life is to keep a neat home. I don’t know if that’s how said it before, but there it is. I want to have a sparkling clean home.
But, I’m a slob. I just am. I have been my whole life.
I challenged myself last week to start with the small step of maintaining my kitchen counter top, table, and floor.
It didn’t happen. Well, it kinda happened.
I have to say, I wasn’t perfect. I did try though. Does that count?
I went into my kitchen this morning and I evaluated my performance. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t the perfection that I wanted it to be.
There were a few dishes in the sink and on the counter, mostly because I forgot to turn on the dishwasher and so I had no place to put the dishes. The kitchen table had a few items of mail and my son’s summer homework, along with a discarded pop tart.
The floor was clean, though a couple of items were on the floor next to the garbage can waiting to be taken out to the recycling bin.
So while it wasn’t perfect, it was an improvement. I’m going to take that as a draw.
I also wanted to reflect on why I feel like housecleaning is such a struggle for me.
I have come to realize that for me cleaning or not cleaning is a form of control. Other people made the cleanliness of my home such a point of contention that I felt forced to clean rather than choosing to clean. Once I started living on my own, there was no one around to measure my worth by the state of my home. So I let it go. I let it go HARD. Not having to use up all my time cleaning was FREEDOM.
I guess I’ve gotten over that stage. I don’t have to rebel against anyone else’s ideas of who I should be, nor does my self worth hang on that external metric anymore.
Now, I want to do it for me. Not to prove anything to anyone else, but to value myself enough to keep everything neat and clean.
I’m going to keep working on my kitchen and I may come back next week shouting on rooftops that my kitchen was beautiful in its cleanliness. It could happen. Seriously, it could. I doubt it though.
Instead, I’m going to choose to try to be better. Not perfect. Because perfect never did anything for anybody. Onward!
Seeking Pearls 