self conscious of my "balabusta-ness"

amother

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?

amother

Wed, Sep 03 2014, 4:21 pm

I am the same exact way! I guess it is what I picked up from my own home...we were never allowed to have anyone over unless the house was spotless and so in short, we never ever had guests and I always had to sneak friends into my private entrance in the back.

Nowadays, whenever I open the door I only open it a crack so that no one sees the mess, and mind you, it's not really all that messy. I look around and seems like everyone has got it together with especially clean houses and try as I may, I never feel like my home is as thoroughly clean as others.

However, my DH feels that I keep the house very neat and does not understand my big insecurity about it having to be perfectly clean. I am stressed out from the minute the guests walk in no matter how much I scrubbed down beforehand and can't wait until they leave just as you described.

It's hard not being a born homemaker and finding myself constantly cleaning up but never having a clean home. It's especially frustrating because I really do want to have an open home where people come in and out but I just can't have someone pop in unannounced in fear that it won't be presentable.

Hug

zaq

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.