Life With My Elderly Father- One Year Later

One year ago on May 3rd  I quit my job of sixteen years, tried to start my own company and my dad came to live with me June 26th. He had been living with my older sister but he was tired of living so far away and I live closer to the places he's familiar with.

Initially I didn't know where I was going to put him. Although I have a 4 bedroom house, one upstairs room is never used. My daughter sleeps in the other upstairs room and eventually I know that I have to clear out that other room to fix it up for my son.

We have two bedrooms downstairs, one was my son's and the other was mine. I chose the easiest route and put my dad in my bedroom and I moved into Seth's room to share with him, thinking that I would eventually switch rooms with him and go back to my own room.

Here we are a year later and I am yet to make the room switch. Some people would say, "But you work from home, how could you not have enough time?" Good question. I don't know how. One of my excuses has often been that by the time that I'm done cleaning all the main rooms and have time  time to get to the bedrooms I have start all over again because the other rooms get dirty again.

We know that that's just a procrastinator's excuse. Here recently I have been incentivizing the kids to keep the main living quarters clean and it's actually been working fairly well for the past two weeks. That is a record for us! No more excuses that I have to start over cleaning these rooms if we can keep them fairly clean every day.

SO this weekend the kids are at their dad's house and I told myself I was going to work on the two downstairs bedrooms to start the switch. The whole day went by and I got one thing on my list accomplished. ONE. Cleaning some things in the kitchen. Well, at least it was one, and really three because I did three things in the kitchen, but it wasn't in any way close to the bedrooms.

Tomorrow I will try again. Even if I just get one thing done, like clearing out the closet in Seth's room for my dad's things. He now shares with me in my room because I have a closet and an armoire but even then we don't have enough room, thus the reason I have 2 closets for me to begin with.

If keeping the main part of the house this clean feels this good I have to imagine how great it is going to feel to finally get my dad in Seth's room and to get my own bedroom back. I've felt like I'm staying over at someone else's house for over a year because I'm sleeping in another room, in another bed.  All my clothes, shoes, and dresser things are in my room.

I have to get back into my room so I can feel balanced. My life has been out of balance for so long. It's time.

Getting Organized, Getting On with My Life

A long time ago, it seems, I could afford a cleaning lady. It was awesome. I had someone come in either once a week or every other week to help me with the heavy lifting. I loved the feeling of coming home to a clean smelling, dust-free house. That was months ago, maybe even a year ago. I can actually remember the very last time I had my house cleaned by someone else and it was around February 11. I remember because it was close to my 42nd birthday.

Image by annetaintor.com

I am not going to lie. I've said it before and I'm not embarrassed to say it. I hate housework. Not just a little. I mean I REALLY hate housework. I hate cleaning, washing dishes, doing laundry, folding clothes, ironing clothes. You name it and I will tell you I hate it. I'm much happier reading and writing.

I hate gardening and anything yard related. I detest it.  Of course I would love it if someone did all these things for me. I would love it if I had a cleaning lady again and had a professional landscaper come in and design my yard. I have such a huge yard that I could have a beautiful garden. I'd love it, but I don't have it.

Back in May I blogged on my skirt! blog about getting un-unorganized. (if you read that blog you'll understand the why) It's July and I'm barely starting on this project. I keep saying I'm going to do it and I don't. This and that gets in the way. I get in my way. My anxiety gets in the way because I just get overwhelmed with the whole thing.

Well this week I was finally able to somewhat overcome that overwhelmed feeling. I approached it by tackling one room per day. I started with the kitchen, then the dining room, the living room and now I have to tackle the hall and the restroom. I got to the point when I said enough is enough. I have to get myself organized in order to get on with my life. After the restroom I am going to start on the even bigger challenge of tackling my bedroom. My bedroom alone is a week long project.

I have literally been letting this get in the way of my moving on with my life. I feel like if I can do this then I can move on. It's weird and it's a psychological thing I'm sure, but it is what it is. I have let this get bigger than me to the point that I don't even want to accept visitors.

My house is a symbol of my failed marriage. I've always felt like that. It's not that my marriage fell apart because we never remodeled this house. It's that my marriage was like this house or, this house is an example of what my marriage was like. We could never fix it... We said we would but something always came up and we never did. We had a very "all or nothing" approach to it. It seemed like we either wanted to fix everything at once, or nothing at all. We couldn't tackle one project at a time.

I was talking to my father about it this week and I told him that I really want to remodel this house on my own. I want to be able to say I did it and on my own. It will be the final self-therapy that I need. When I do this I will feel like I've truly moved on.