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Forum
-> Household Management
amother
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 4:12 pm
I am not a teriible homemaker, but not the best either.
My house is clean but disorganized. I simply cannot keep the toys, clothes, shoes, kitchen utensils etc perfectly neat all of the time.
My bookshelves are slightly untidy, one too many papers lying around, I am sure you get the picture.
Here in the problem lies, I am under the impression that the rest of the world are domestic goddesses and I am somehow lacking. It makes me feel less worthy as a person and therefore HATE people coming to my house.
I hate having guests for fear of being "judged", when I do have guests I am on edge until they go home.
And now with school starting again I dread the "put together"mothers picking up the kids from play dates, and seeing my sometimes disarrayed house.
We are fairly new in our neighborhood and want to have shabbos guests. But its almost like I have this irrational fear of having people over.
There must be some kind of emotional scar to have this negative reaction(Or is that pushing it)
Can anyone relate?
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amother
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 4:47 pm
My mom is a neat freak and I am not. I always feel inferior for this. My house is not dirty. Just I don't have everything in it's proper place at all times and we do get areas of clutter now and then. Even though most homes I visit are no better (cleaner/ neater) than mine I still feel shame about it.
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PinkFridge
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 4:50 pm
I thought you were going to tell us that you were self-conscious about being such a good balabuste when so many people seem to struggle. Now that I see what it's about, I can say this: welcome. Welcome to my world
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amother
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 4:57 pm
Op here, yes pink fridge I realized how misleading my topic was only after it was too late.
But at least we can commiserate.
To the other amother. Thank you for replying. Weird thing is my childhood home was chaos.
Maybe I'm scared of becoming that.
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amother
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 5:01 pm
amother wrote: | Op here, yes pink fridge I realized how misleading my topic was only after it was too late.
But at least we can commiserate.
To the other amother. Thank you for replying. Weird thing is my childhood home was chaos.
Maybe I'm scared of becoming that. |
As was ours! As I said, we could only have friends if it was clean and it was never clean so...
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amother
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 5:09 pm
Sorry, misread that. The difference is my mother didn't care and we still always had guests. Which is strange because I hardly have guests and I was brought up on it.(op)
But either way its difficult. I want to have peopl but to emotionally draining.
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zaq
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Wed, Sep 03 2014, 6:16 pm
It's all about perception: yours, not theirs.
We all think everyone else is managing so much better than we are, and we all tend to magnify our own shortcomings and minimize everyone else's. Tell the truth: do you ever look at anyone else's baseboards to see if they are dusty? (You DO????? In that case, you are a head case and all bets are off.) But I bet you look at yours and sigh, right? Double standard: one for you, one for everyone else. Perfectly normal, perfectly unfair to you.
All those people you think are scrutinizing your "squalid" home (which from your description sounds pretty normal for a household with young children, comfortably lived-in but not a candidate for condemnation by the Health Dept.) are not. They're most likely looking at you exactly the way you look at them.
You don't want your home to be TOO neat and clean. You want people to feel comfortable, not as if they should be removing their shoes at the door and afraid to sit down lest they muss up your perfectly symmetrical furniture array. OTOH you don't want guests to come face-to-face with boogers on the wall or enjoy the "roach motel experience" when their shoes get trapped by a sticky floor.
I'm very fond of "Guerrilla Cleaning" tactics: quick emergency action before guests arrive.
First, open the windows to freshen the air and dissipate any stale odors.You may not notice odors when you're inside, but anyone coming in from outside will. Since smell is the first thing people notice about a house, you want it to smell welcoming and good, but homey rather than perfumey. Baking cookies is a classic realtor's trick to make a house more attractive, so if you like baking cookies, do so. If you don't, fake it by boiling a small pan of water into which you drop some whole spices like stick cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. The house will smell fabulous and people will be impressed.
Concentrate on public-access areas of the house. Most guests aren't going to be touring your bedrooms and closets, after all. So what parts will they see? The entrance, dining room/living room, and kitchen. Grab a big laundry basket or something and dump into it everything you see that's out of place. Stash the laden basket in a back bedroom or closet for the duration. Don't sweat narishkeit like bookshelves that don't line up like soldiers on parade; books slightly awry show that they're being used. Perfectly lined up books are either not being used, or belong to a person suffering from OCD.
Next, have at the dirtiest visible areas. Start at eye level and work your way down. Whatever slaps you in the face, attack with a soapy sponge, Magic Sponge, damp cloth or other appropriate tool. You don't have to get it pristine, just clean enough that grunge is not visible from the expected viewing distance. If you can write your name in the dust on the coffee table, dust it off, but if it's not dirty, don't clean it. Ditto everything else.
Any guerrilla worth her salt knows about camouflage. If you can't clean it or move it elsewhere, cover it! Coffee table too grungy for words? Throw a little tablecloth over it, or a big scarf that isn't too slippery. Crocheted afghans can cover a multitude of sins on a sofa or easy chair. Side tables with legs can be covered with floor-length tablecloths to hide all kinds of junk underneath. If your computer table is a mess, throw a flat sheet or tablecloth over it--lots of people do this to hide the computer for Shabbat, so no one needs to know that you're also hiding a balagan.
After you've done all this, recite the following, aloud, three times or more: My housekeeping is just my housekeeping. It has no bearing on my moral values or my worth as a human being.
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