Warning - long post ahead!
Boy, did I get behind the 8 ball, as they say, starting Monday, in housework. It was "kitchen debt", "laundry debt", you name it....it looked like someone had taken the whole house and turned it literally upside down, oh, and shaken it in the process. I must have stood at the sink for well over an hour on Monday night trying to catch up on what hadn't happened during the day.
It is no different than missing one payment, say, on the credit card....if you let yourself get behind in one area, one payment, then it is really hard to stay on top of things and you end up paying for it later in terms of the stress it causes, or in my case, the piles of things around the house. Sometimes, when this happens I get quite down on myself and who God has made me and I "wish" I were that born-organized mom. I'm realizing that is not a helpful approach to dealing with the mess. It's just the same as looking at the debt and saying, "I wish I were a better spender and more frugal." That doesn't make the debt go away. Wishing I were someone else does not clean up the mess! I'm learning to develop a new way of thinking about this and a new way of dealing with mess that keeps the stress at bay, as well as the fiery darts of wishing I were someone else and all the discontentment that brings.
Now, to be fair to myself, it wasn't a typical day. The mess began first thing in the morning....the night before, the house was clean, honest! Early Monday morning, my husband took over the loft room for his work. It is now a painting center. He's got a whole bunch of equipment he manufactures that need to be painted, so all the furniture had to come out, all the riff raff needed to be attended to that had been living under the couches, etc., so it was quite a mess, but I couldn't deal with it at the time as I was prepping meals for a new mom, sewing a blanket for the same mom, trying to homeschool little ones who kept running away.....argh!!!!! It was quite comical if someone had watched me all day. There were other contributing factors as well.....
Don't get me wrong, I love cooking meals for other moms who have just had babies, but I'll tell ya, it isn't as easy as it seems, especially if you add a new blanket you promised to make for them as well! You know you aren't that organized when you make a meal for the new mom and you don't appropriately double it for your own family, leaving them with nothing and the new mom with a wonderful meal! Yup, that's what happened....the new mom got pork chops, potatoes, salad, bread sticks, and apple pie and my family got a plate of nachos, no salad, only a few potatoes, left over pork chops from the day before, no dessert (until much later).....pretty amusing. Plus, I'm so focused on getting the meal to the family hot and on time that I end up leaving the kitchen in absolute disaster mode and everyone just has to cope with that until I get home. Ah, the behind the scenes of my life would be quite the funny reality show.
These kinds of days always make me wish I were like my organized friends. They would have known their husbands were going to be moving in and would have anticipated it and had all sorts of things set up, like bins for toys, bags for garbage, etc., etc. They would have known to take out more frozen food the night before in order to have enough for the new mom and their family! Not me. I'm definitely more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants girl. But I suffer for it. I'm trying to be better. I really am, but days like this always reveal that I'm just not quite there.
Sunday mornings have a way of doing that, too. For years I've known, your Sunday morning really starts on Saturday night. Your Sunday morning will go waaaay better if you plan ahead a little. I know this!!!! Again, to be fair, I have improved a lot over the years, but there is still a little part of me that just loves winging it.
That was one of the main criticisms of me that my associate teacher gave when she assessed me as a new teacher - "She wings it a lot!" I got a lower grade from this associate. She was SUPER ORGANIZED and saw that I wasn't. That isn't great if you are a teacher. It's true. Some things never change. Sigh! And now I'm a teacher at home and trying to run a house at the same time with my students living with me 24/7! That is hard on a person who isn't born-organized!
So, winging it, flying by the seat of my pants, not planning ahead - these have to be my greatest weaknesses and they show themselves on days like yesterday. I can recover from these kinds of days by putting in slightly longer days to recoup the lost time or when I get up early to write I quickly throw in a load of laundry (which I did yesterday and today!) but one day I hope I'm organized enough to not need to.
By the way, that is another quick money saving tip that I ignored for a long time - doing the laundry during "off hours". In Ontario, here, there are cheaper electricity times, such as before 7 am and after 7 pm. That is when it is cheapest. I used to do laundry all day and not care as I felt I was not about to be penalized for having a large family, so guess what I was really doing....."cutting my nose to spite my face" as the saying goes. I was being penalized, but by myself!!! So, after I realized that, I made a much more conscious effort to do the laundry when it was the cheapest. I'm up anyway and it just takes a few minutes.
Back to me and my lack of organizational skills. I am a funny character. God could have made me more organized, but he didn't. He's forcing me to learn how to do this. It is so hard when you are not naturally like this! It is really a daily struggle for me. I've come to accept that God has a plan though and that there are reasons he made me this way.
I thank God for creating me to be who I am. This way I can teach it to my children, as I learn, as I have a couple who are just like me and are aren't born-organized, too. It also keeps me always on my knees asking for God's help. It also allows me to accept help from my organized children (I have a couple of them, too) and guess what, I learn from them!
My born-organized friends say that I bring the "spontaneity" into their lives! Super. Spontaneity, however, does not do the laundry or clean the house.
In my mind I think the ideal mom would be super-organized, super-fun and spontaneous! Why can't we be both????? But it seems, if you were to do a survey of all moms, you would find you are either one or the other. If you are both, by some miracle, it is because you have either learned to be organized over time, or learned to be fun! I honestly do not think you get to have both skills at birth. That's my theory anyway.
I think my kids are grateful that I'm learning to be more organized as they do love a clean house. They always claim that their houses will be impeccable when they have their own - can't wait to see that! I think my kids are also glad they have a spontaneous mom who drops things on a dime and whips out to do something fun once in awhile. Perhaps God really is trying to develop both skills in me. I wish it were easier, but it isn't. I wish I could get more organized faster, but I'm not...it's taking longer than I hoped. Babies, toddlers, and a whole bunch of older people have a funny way of slowing my game plan down.
I always tell Renaissance Man - if I only had one thing to do, I'd be AWESOME at it! He knows. He's patient with me. He watches the 3 year old bound through the house like the Tasmanian Devil from Bugs Bunny, literally leaving a wake of devastation in his path. He knows. He does have higher standards than me though and sometimes I wish he would just be my cleaning lady, or uh, guy! He's way better at it than me. But again, God made me the mom, not him.
So I will not question it. I will accept my weaknesses "for when I am weak, then He is strong" - so true. I'm still aiming for more order and I will learn it eventually, just in time for the last one to leave the nest.
Wait, there's more, and this is another way I am now trying to view the mess. There are a couple different ways to view the mess and I really am always having to assess this. I can get down on myself and listen to the lies in my head that tell me I'm an awful mom to let it get to this or I can be honest with myself and ask the hard questions, "Did this mess happen because you were lazy or because you are a procrastinator?" or anything that will help me get to the root cause......OR, and I want all those moms who are like me, not super-organized, to read this as it will give you hope, I think.....perhaps the mess isn't all bad! It's true!
Once in awhile, I think even the most organized mom gets mess, especially if she allows her kids to live! Mess can sometimes indicate life happened here! I think we can get in the way of life happening in the name of CLEAN! Let me tell you why....
It was 6:30 pm on Monday night. The house was still a mess, a baby was already in bed, the older ones were on the couch sitting quietly. Renaissance Man and I were having a cup of tea together. We were both tired from the day and I knew I still had a lot of clean up ahead of me. I told him, "I know the house is a mess, but you have to know, lots went on today and in a way, the mess proves it!" I went on to tell him what our oldest boys were up to. I reminded him of how we had once read a blog by a Christian man who talked about his sons and how he was preparing them for the future. Our favourite line from the blog that we now repeat all the time is, "I don't want my sons to be helpless men." Read on...
My second son, who is 12, has become very interested in being in the kitchen. He makes bread sticks which are becoming his signature dish. The whole family loves them and begs him to make them all the time. This has led to him helping out whenever I need a hand and he is becoming quite adept. Yesterday he decided he'd make the bread sticks for this new mom to go along with my meal - perfect! My oldest boy who really only knows how to make toast and scrambled eggs also decided, while watching his younger brother, that he also wants to learn to cook and his words were, "I don't want to be a helpless man." He actually said that to me that day. I loved it. So, even though I had not planned this, I said sure - go to it. (See? There's that spontaneity!) So he did and before you knew it, he had made a braided loaf of bread from heaven. It was AMAZING. I told both of them there will be LINE UPS of young women (or moms looking for husbands for their daughters!)once they find out how capable they are! (I'm secretly trying to breed more "renaissance men" - a rare breed these days....) The thing about boys, even organized ones, is they just don't clean up quite the same as girls, so the mess began early that morning and just stuck around as I was in the other room sewing.
The reason I write this, is to show you the mess, though big, was a sign to me at the end of the day, that life had happened, learning had gone on, in a major way. I could have stayed on top of it by limiting the boys, but when do you see a pre-teen, let alone a teenage boy, interested in being in the kitchen? So, in that sense, the mess was great!
I'm trying to communicate so many things which is why it's taken me two days to get this out.
1. I'm trying to communicate that God has created us all perfectly. The born-organized mom and the born-spontaneous mom are just what each family needs.
2. Mess is bad if it is because we are lazy or procrastinating or if we aren't trying to learn how to be more organized.
3. Mess is good if it means we've been teaching something, if learning has gone on, if it's in the name of future character that is being built. Learning to clean up as you go will come with time and more life lessons.
4. Mess is just things out of place temporarily (great definition! just made it up!). All things can be put back in order eventually and I will not sacrifice my children's learning opportunities (that sometimes happen without me even planning them) on the altar of micro-managing cleanliness. It would have crushed my oldest son if I had stopped him from baking that day just because I wanted a clean kitchen. My husband and I have learned to ask ourselves, "Why do we always say no?" A good friend of mine who was dying of cancer gave a talk that changed lives around the world (the website may even still carry her talk "Death is Not Dying"). In her talk she described how once she knew she was dying it made her assess every thing she did in a completely different light - she, too, started asking herself, "Why do I always say no?" She began to say yes a lot more as it brought such joy to her children and she realized the reason she'd been saying no was because it was too inconvenient to say yes. Upon realizing her death was imminent, nothing was inconvenient anymore - she wanted to live a lifetime of inconvenience as she knew she'd be gone soon and she'd give anything to be inconvenienced! That was her message to those listening - be inconvenienced. You don't know when your last breath will be. She did eventually die only months later.
What a long post - I could have broken it into two I suppose, but I didn't, sorry!
I love order, hate mess, hate order, love mess - love organization, hate the mess that comes with spontaneity, hate the pressure of being organized, love being spontaneous and fun......arghhhhh!!!!
It kind of sounds like Paul the apostle in Romans 7,
"15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Isn't that a great way to end? Even Paul sounds crazy, but I love what he says as he's about to lose his mind, "Who will rescue me 'from myself' (my interpretation!)? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
So, there's even a Christmas message there - it always comes back to being rescued by Jesus, from ourselves, from mess, from being a micro-manager, from sin that entangles.....he's literally all we have.
Blessings to you today as you go from mess to mess, as you struggle with either being born-organized or not, as you try to create character in the mess, and as you clean up the mess (that is temporary, don't forget!)
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