Hello, and welcome to your weekend!
I love the feeling of a Friday night, even although these days I am not donning my gladrags and dancing into the wee hours.
I love knowing that I have about 64 hours together of not having to do school runs, or even bother leaving the house if I so choose! I feel free!
I stay up to ridiculous hours of Saturday morning and think of things I have wanted to ask Google all week, or I write a list of tasks that need done in a fit of optimism, I read a chapter of a book, or I tap about social media…
Then I wake up on Saturday morning, realise that I have about 30 things to accomplish in the next however many hours are left, and feel a bit deflated. Mainly because there is always cleaning/sorting/tidying/maintenance to be done.
I love a clean and tidy house, I just hate the process of doing it. I know that it will make me feel very proud of myself, and that if I put on music I’ll enjoy it more, blah blah; but the reality is never as good as my theory.
If the kids hear me playing music, they want to shimmy about whatever room I’m in, and if I put my headphones in, and they spot me, they beg me to hand them an earbud so they can tell me whether I am selecting satisfactory tunes (or not). Then I have to explain that a free Spotify account doesn’t let me pick a specific tune, so they get huffy…so not worth it!
As the sunlight that broke through today (yaaay) hit the sideboard our TV sits on, I was made painfully aware of how dusty the livingroom was. Took me a good twenty minutes of dusting and vacuuming (and wiping the leather couch) to get that looking ok. Then there was the ten minutes of stairs and landing vacuuming, the chasing of crumbs in the kitchen and diningroom, the shooing of Youngest from the playroom to clean up the carnage in there without sucking up all the magnetic letters that spring from the whiteboard…
I find it all boring and overwhelming, and I do resent the fact that it never stays clean for more than a few minutes. So I wrote the below:
Phenomena Curator Bliss Prediction Volume Holding Hacksaw Anywhere Unsure
Bizarre phenomena surround
The ritual of the tidy-up-for-guests.
How suddenly any free corner
Becomes the curator of curios;
That no one really wants,
But cannot see binned…
That frantic rush towards the bliss
Of things not in our sight!
The false prediction
That we shall sort through this tub
On another, less-rushed day
In a near future.
When I finally die, I know
The volume of my tat
Will rain down on some mournful head.
I, myself, will be boxed up forever
While the vessels holding all my years of words
Will be airing.
I hope sentimentality
Will not hacksaw at nerves of steel.
I hope those after me can do it:
Discard my deeds and possessions
(Donate them anywhere
But under their feet)
I am always unsure
If what I tossed was valuable;
I hope they turn that corner,
And with it greener leaves.
So yeah, I am faced with a dilemma because I don’t want my boys learning all my slovenly ways! I don’t want them living in a mess, and feeling burdened by it and resentful of it, the way I do. The negative self-talk that goes on in my head when I am cleaning really isn’t nice.
I’m pretty sure that if the inner critic would just can it, I would find cleaning up a much more enjoyable experience! After all, although I am more inclined to clean/tidy when I know someone else will have to try and exist in my chaos, I do actually want to live in a nice space for my own mental wellbeing.
I sometimes (like at the moment) leave my boxes of random junk lying about, just so that I have to manoeuvre around them and get fed up enough to sort them out! Do you ever do that?! It is a pretty effective strategy, as long as you don’t mind stubbing your toes or shouting in your head.
Are you a bit of a hoarder? Do you ever watch TV programmes about people who need dug out from under their junk, and think “totally see how that could happen to a person”?!
Let me know in the comments 😉
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