Too Much Stuff Brings Me Joy

I'm clean with my body and how I dress. The kids are clean. I'm clean where I cook and eat, but that's pretty much it. I'm a mess and I know it and it's more about clutter than anything else. It's something I have to work on. Here lately it's been getting out of control more and more. I'm almost afraid someone is going to send over a TV crew and will force me to do a show about clutter. I'm afraid that as I'm getting older I'm going to become a Miss Havisham.

The top of my desk clean.

Two days ago you couldn't see the top of this desk. We just kept adding stuff to it to the point that you couldn't even see anything that was there. The only reason I left that gold bird cage in the corner is because my daughter seems to have some things in there, like her quill and ink. I took everything down and put it in a box that she will have to sort through when she comes back from her father's this weekend. 

Those things I left on top may seem weird but they are little things that mean something to me and I can display my daughter's art. I also have two art pieces by Lizbeth Ortiz there, the Bride of Frankenstein from a Post It show and her sacred heart in a shrine box. Later I added my big gold sacred heart and the nest we found outside on the ground.

Things that bring me joy

I went through the whole house doing this. I looked at areas and decided what needed to go. I cleaned out my work space corner in the dining room and that was a feat on its own. 

I've never watched this Marie Kondo woman everyone is talking about but I get the gist of what she says so I'm trying to follow her mantra, "Does this thing bring me joy?" The sad answer is that too much stuff brings me joy! What I do know is that there is such a thing as too too much. I get it. I know that as Americans we are all about excess and I'm no exception.

I posted on Facebook on Saturday that sometimes you have to do something radical to do anything at all. That's how I approached my cleaning that day. I had to be radical and I know that Marie Kondo would not approve on how I went about it. This is in no way advice on how to clean. This is just what I had to do to motivate myself and to make myself move.

I took that basic "Does this thing bring me joy?" concept and added my own twist. I asked myself, "What would you take with you if the house was burning down?" I know kind of the same thing but instead of keeping those things I left them and I removed everything that I didn't need any more or that I was kind of on the fence about, and I put them in boxes. This is the part where I realize I added an extra step for myself but I had to do it this way to do anything at all. I don't have the time to sit there and do the 4 container method: "give away," "throw away," "storage," and "put away." I just needed to work quickly to feel like I was getting anything accomplished.

I put the boxes in the garage and on another day, when I have enjoyed my clean house for a while, I will take on the project of cleaning out my garage. I have some boxes I need to go through slowly to look for paperwork. I couldn't risk losing some things.

Even doing it this way, I spent eight hours on Saturday working on just the kitchen, dining room, hall and part of the living room. There is still a whole hot mess going on in the living room that I need to address. I couldn't believe that working on just those three rooms took me that long. According to my optimistic calculations I thought that I could get through four rooms in eight hours, if I spent two hours in each room. Somehow it didn't work out that way.

Today I'm working on my bedroom, my biggest thorn in my side, the bathroom, and I need to finish the living room.

My goal is to have a clean house where I feel happy but it's also about having a cleaning lady to keep things from getting out of control again. I realize that for so many years as a working mom two people kept my life in order, my baby sitter and a cleaning lady (I had a few).  It has been years since I hired a cleaning lady, first because I couldn't afford it on one income and then my house was too out of control to let anyone see it. I am literally cleaning so I can have a cleaning lady again and bring order back to the universe. Wish me well. 

It's Never Too Much or Too Long to Mourn

Is nearly six months too long to mourn? Different cultures have different traditions. Although there are the set days of mourning governed by society, be it 40 days or 3 years, your heart doesn't have a clock.

I was given three days of bereavement by my workplace and if I needed more I probably would have had to take vacation days. Don't get me wrong, I appreciated the time, but in the US we are expected to get over it and move on. I wish someone had told my heart and my mind that too. I've survived because I had to. I had to jump right back into work because I'd already been off for about a week, when my father was in the hospital.

I also had to keep going with the kids doing all those things I had to do with them and being a mom. This summer alone has been busy with summer programs, a short vacation to the Hill Country, visiting colleges, Driver's Ed, and now senior pictures before school starts in three weeks.

I wrote about that in May and how I felt paralyzed. Then I was trying to get back into the swing of things when I cut my ankle. I haven't run in months and I hadn't really really cleaned since before my dad died. Forget about packing up my dad's room... 

Then finally something happened this week. The catalyst was this damn bike. After being targeted with ads, from billboards, to direct mail, to digital ads, and commercials on my Hulu, I broke down and bought a Peloton.

I had been looking at the cost of gym memberships for the three of us and the cost was a bit much, unless I joined the local, one location, Y. I was on the fence about what to do when the Peloton ad on Hulu found me during a moment of weakness. They got me with their 0 down and 0% interest and I bought the bike.

Then the realization hit me that the bike was going to be delivered by human strangers who were going to have to enter my house and that I needed to clean. The living room had become a wasteland of junk and legos that had spilled out from their original corner. We had a lot of work on our hands, (seriously) but with the help of the kids I finally overcame my paralysis and I cleaned my kitchen, living room and dining room.

I feel so good now! It felt so good to come home today and to see clean rooms. It's like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders and  I feel like I'm on a roll. My goal is to start packing up my dad's room this week. Once I can do that I can move on to each task on my list and the list is long! It will be nice to set up Seth's furniture in that bedroom and to help him decorate it. Cleaning these three main rooms really makes me feel like, what are two more rooms downstairs?

I won't even talk about the second floor yet but there's a goal for those two rooms too. Yes, I'm still sad and I know that packing my dad's things is going to be hard, but moving forward in my life is healing.