Shipshape
I can’t stand mess. I just can’t stand the look of it. I find it completely intolerable. When my surroundings are cluttered, my brain feels cluttered, and I want to declutter as fast as possible. It’s a little bit compulsive. I know that, and yet I continue to straighten up on a nonstop, daily basis. It is an ongoing battle. The minute I tidy up, the mess starts gathering its strength, rears its ugly head, and I am forced to beat it back again.
I get it from my mother. She ran a tight ship. She couldn’t stand mess either, maybe more so than me. When I think about it, it’s pretty amazing that a woman with so many children was able to keep her home as clean as a whistle and neat as a pin. There was, however, one distinct difference between the two of us. She was a clean freak/neat freak, whereas I am just a neat freak. I don’t like housecleaning at all. When my house needs a good cleaning, it takes me about a week to get myself motivated to do it. My mother never let her home get to that point. She kept it squeaky clean. I, on the other hand, just want to keep everything looking neat and orderly.
While I may have inherited my mothers compulsion for orderliness, my children inherited no such compulsion from me. I failed miserably in this regard. When they were small the last thing we did each night before they went to bed was pick up all of the toys and put them away. Then somewhere along the way, that routine fell apart. By the time they were teenagers, their idea of a clean room was a narrow path from their door to the bed with ankle deep wreckage on either side. I spoke to my parents about this one day, and you want to know what their advice was? “Pick your battles. Shut their doors.”
Now that they are grown, I don’t have to worry myself with that anymore. It’s a little easier to keep things in order, so if you were to call and say you were on your way over, I would not have to run around like a maniac trying to make the place presentable. You could just waltz right in anytime and make yourself comfortable..... but if you should happen to notice a little, tiny bit of dust on a window sill, try to ignore it.