I've been sitting here stewing for a while and thinking about all the things that make me crazy. They're really just little things like dishes, laundry, vacuuming, personal hygiene, my bedroom that hasn't looked clean since we moved in, and the like. These are all everyday things that shouldn't make me want to cry when I think about them, right? Well, I've broken it down and figured out the culprit behind my madness.
It's the deceiving concept known as "done."
No wonder it makes me crazy to think about the dishes. Every time I declare them to be "done" I turn around and the sink is full again.
Every time I fold and put away 3 loads of laundry and declare it "done" Claire poops through her outfit, I find a pile of dirty clothes in the closet and Danny needs me to wash his slacks for work.
Every time the stars align long enough for me to shower, as soon as I'm "done" I get pooped on or puked on and my "clean" feeling goes out the window (there's another culprit..."clean"...).
I only have a two options here:
I can either invest in disposable dishes, disposable clothes and LOTS of deodorant and body spray
OR
I can do away with "done."
I've always been a list maker. I live for checking something off a list. Making room for more. Wiping the slate. Moving it from my mental RAM to the recycle bin.
I can't make a list for chores. How can I ever be "done" with the daily casualties of life?
I'll never be "done" with dishes until we stop eating.
I'll never be "done" with laundry until we move to a nudist colony.
I'll never be "done" showering until Danny and I lose our olfactory senses.
I can't stop making lists. I've been doing it for too long. Instead I'm going to try changing my "To Do" list into a "Work in Progress" list or an "Projects Inbetween Snuggling Claire" list.
Check marks are dead to me. And so is "done."
Their progress
2 days ago
4 comments:
this is genius.
I was just thinking about this today, so this helps. I always go back to every thing has a season. someday I won't be picking up petra's toys for the tenth time that day, and that's because she will be all grown up. don't want that to happen so fast, so I guess I will enjoy the day, messes and all.
of course, every once in a while I just neglect the children a smidge for one day and attack the house to get my sanity back.
and so well written... two writers in the family, I see.
I'm one of Danny's old friends from school and he posted about your blog. I just wanted to say that taking care of baby is such a monumental task, and it gets so much easier. But remember everything that you do you're multitasking! Oh you showered? No, you showered and took care of a baby. And try eating out more. That solved my dish problem. :)
AMEN sista!
You are so right. I think you should think of it as "Less than I had to do before" rather than "done". Everyday, while my kids are eating lunch, I begrudgingly unload the dishwasher and then load it with more, just so I want be grumpy when the sun shines through my window-cover-less windows in the late afternoon and shows my dirty floors in HD. My house is never clean, but I know that I can't happily handle HD dirty floors and a sink-full (or counter-full) of dishes at the same time. Choose what you can handle.
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