take this broom and shove it
Oct. 8th, 2006 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanMore on the whole cleaning issue.
First of all let me just say: I am a messy person by nature. Everyone who knows me, knows this. I do not have good housekeeping skilz. I hate cleaning and am bad at it. That being said, I do have a threshold of tolerance for messiness, and yes, my apartment is past it at the moment. The problem is that by the time it passes the threshold, it's soooo bad that cleaning it is a huge undertaking. And since I am not good at cleaning, I tend to get overwhelmed by it. I look at it and there's just mess everywhere, it stymies me, I can't see even where to begin. So I often just give up before I even start. I know this isn't healthy or productive, but it's what happens.
And just saying "well, get over it and pick somewhere to start and start it" isn't helpful. (Nor is "You just need to do ten minutes a day!" which is what my mom ALWAYS says.) When I'm well-rested and in a decent mood and not currently overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood, I can do that, but those moments are few and far between these days.
And when you have such a huge "backlog" of messiness to work on, and only small spurts of time in which to work on it, progress is very slow and difficult to see. Which further contributes to my discouragement. If I spend a chunk of time assiduously cleaning, and then I stop and look and can see absolutely no visible improvement, it discourages me and makes me feel like "what's the point?" I need visual evidence of the fruits of my labors to keep me motivated, and that's hard to do when it's as bad as it is, and when there are two little people conspiring at every turn to remake any mess that I manage to unmake.
Currently, one of the biggest problems in my apartment is that stuff keeps coming in (people giving me kid clothing, returning stuff I had lent them, etc.) but nothing is going out. The bags of clothing that's too small for Ruthie keep growing and multiplying, and I have yet to find someone to give it to. I also have several bags of (in my opinion) hideously ugly baby clothing that I think I'm just going to take to Goodwill (but when? in what "free" time?).
The bags/piles of stuff that's too small for Isaac but too big yet for Ruthie are also growing, which brings me to my other big problem: the basement. As you may recall, it flooded last spring when we had tons of rain. Since then, almost all the stuff that I had been storing in the basement has had to come up, so that it could dry out. And as time goes on and more "want to keep it, don't need to have it around" stuff accumulates, I can't take it to the basement, so it sits around in the apartment, cluttering the place up still more.
The basement at this point is probably dry enough to take stuff, but I'm leery of putting stuff down there in paper bags / cardboard boxes, so I want to find a way to protect it somehow; I only have currently one big Rubbermaid bin. I'm thinking of putting some stuff in plastic bags and double-bagging it for safety. But I haven't gotten to that yet, and thus, the apartment is still cluttered with stuff that ought to be in the basement.
Another factor is the simple fact that, when we are here more often, I see more mess. That means both that there IS more mess, and that I see it more. When we spend most of our time at the office/daycare, we aren't here making messes, and what messes there are, I don't see as much of. Heck, the simple fact that we now eat three meals per day here instead of one means a HUGE increase in the amount of cooking-related mess in the kitchen (and I don't have a dishwasher so I can't just hide the dirty dishes therein). If anyone thinks that the increase in the amount of time I have to clean is equal to the increase in amount of mess we're making, they are sorely mistaken.
As for the issue of actually finding actual time to do the actual cleaning: As I said in my post yesterday -- and numerous of you chimed in to back me up on this, which I appreciate -- it's HARD to find time for cleaning, or cooking, or hell, even personal hygiene when you're at home full-time with a kid or two. Especially when one of them is a baby who demands near-constant attention, frequent nursing, and so forth. I wrote that post yesterday in a fit of extreme frustration because I actually HAD gotten a few minutes to do some cleaning -- Ruthie was napping briefly and Isaac was playing by himself -- and I was just getting into a good groove, really feeling like there was going to be some progress happening, and excited about how much I could do while![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
metafrantic and sandykidd had Isaac. And then it all went to pot when they took Isaac away and Ruthie was just frantic and hysterical and refusing to sleep. So yeah, I pretty much lost it. If you could have seen me jumping around in the kitchen after writing that post, trying to shake out the frustration so I wouldn't scream my head off at Ruthie when I went in to get her -- well, let's just say I wasn't successful. :(
So, other than doing all my cleaning in those little 10-minute spurts when no kid is needing me, there doesn't seem to be much else I can do. I don't want to be the kind of mom saying "Sorry, I can't play with you now, I have to clean." (And yes, ideally I'd get Isaac totally involved with the cleaning and make it a game for him and kill two birds, etc., but so far all attempts to do that have failed.) And those spurts, although they can often be productive, are frustrating not just because of their brevity but because of their unpredictability. And furthermore, you know, sometimes when I get a few minutes' "break" I like to use it to, you know, eat; or pee; or just sit and breathe. I can't spend ALL my "free time" (ha ha) cleaning. I just can't.
Case in point, it just took me ~40 minutes to type this post, punctuated continuously by nursing, crying, requests for juice, diapers changes, etc. etc. etc. ugh!
It really just seems like the more I clean, the more mess there is, and I can never catch up, let alone keep up! And truly I'm discouraged and unhappy enough about it on my own, without the added stress of people telling me how great it is that now I have all this "extra" time for cleaning!
First of all let me just say: I am a messy person by nature. Everyone who knows me, knows this. I do not have good housekeeping skilz. I hate cleaning and am bad at it. That being said, I do have a threshold of tolerance for messiness, and yes, my apartment is past it at the moment. The problem is that by the time it passes the threshold, it's soooo bad that cleaning it is a huge undertaking. And since I am not good at cleaning, I tend to get overwhelmed by it. I look at it and there's just mess everywhere, it stymies me, I can't see even where to begin. So I often just give up before I even start. I know this isn't healthy or productive, but it's what happens.
And just saying "well, get over it and pick somewhere to start and start it" isn't helpful. (Nor is "You just need to do ten minutes a day!" which is what my mom ALWAYS says.) When I'm well-rested and in a decent mood and not currently overwhelmed by the demands of motherhood, I can do that, but those moments are few and far between these days.
And when you have such a huge "backlog" of messiness to work on, and only small spurts of time in which to work on it, progress is very slow and difficult to see. Which further contributes to my discouragement. If I spend a chunk of time assiduously cleaning, and then I stop and look and can see absolutely no visible improvement, it discourages me and makes me feel like "what's the point?" I need visual evidence of the fruits of my labors to keep me motivated, and that's hard to do when it's as bad as it is, and when there are two little people conspiring at every turn to remake any mess that I manage to unmake.
Currently, one of the biggest problems in my apartment is that stuff keeps coming in (people giving me kid clothing, returning stuff I had lent them, etc.) but nothing is going out. The bags of clothing that's too small for Ruthie keep growing and multiplying, and I have yet to find someone to give it to. I also have several bags of (in my opinion) hideously ugly baby clothing that I think I'm just going to take to Goodwill (but when? in what "free" time?).
The bags/piles of stuff that's too small for Isaac but too big yet for Ruthie are also growing, which brings me to my other big problem: the basement. As you may recall, it flooded last spring when we had tons of rain. Since then, almost all the stuff that I had been storing in the basement has had to come up, so that it could dry out. And as time goes on and more "want to keep it, don't need to have it around" stuff accumulates, I can't take it to the basement, so it sits around in the apartment, cluttering the place up still more.
The basement at this point is probably dry enough to take stuff, but I'm leery of putting stuff down there in paper bags / cardboard boxes, so I want to find a way to protect it somehow; I only have currently one big Rubbermaid bin. I'm thinking of putting some stuff in plastic bags and double-bagging it for safety. But I haven't gotten to that yet, and thus, the apartment is still cluttered with stuff that ought to be in the basement.
Another factor is the simple fact that, when we are here more often, I see more mess. That means both that there IS more mess, and that I see it more. When we spend most of our time at the office/daycare, we aren't here making messes, and what messes there are, I don't see as much of. Heck, the simple fact that we now eat three meals per day here instead of one means a HUGE increase in the amount of cooking-related mess in the kitchen (and I don't have a dishwasher so I can't just hide the dirty dishes therein). If anyone thinks that the increase in the amount of time I have to clean is equal to the increase in amount of mess we're making, they are sorely mistaken.
As for the issue of actually finding actual time to do the actual cleaning: As I said in my post yesterday -- and numerous of you chimed in to back me up on this, which I appreciate -- it's HARD to find time for cleaning, or cooking, or hell, even personal hygiene when you're at home full-time with a kid or two. Especially when one of them is a baby who demands near-constant attention, frequent nursing, and so forth. I wrote that post yesterday in a fit of extreme frustration because I actually HAD gotten a few minutes to do some cleaning -- Ruthie was napping briefly and Isaac was playing by himself -- and I was just getting into a good groove, really feeling like there was going to be some progress happening, and excited about how much I could do while
metafrantic and sandykidd had Isaac. And then it all went to pot when they took Isaac away and Ruthie was just frantic and hysterical and refusing to sleep. So yeah, I pretty much lost it. If you could have seen me jumping around in the kitchen after writing that post, trying to shake out the frustration so I wouldn't scream my head off at Ruthie when I went in to get her -- well, let's just say I wasn't successful. :(So, other than doing all my cleaning in those little 10-minute spurts when no kid is needing me, there doesn't seem to be much else I can do. I don't want to be the kind of mom saying "Sorry, I can't play with you now, I have to clean." (And yes, ideally I'd get Isaac totally involved with the cleaning and make it a game for him and kill two birds, etc., but so far all attempts to do that have failed.) And those spurts, although they can often be productive, are frustrating not just because of their brevity but because of their unpredictability. And furthermore, you know, sometimes when I get a few minutes' "break" I like to use it to, you know, eat; or pee; or just sit and breathe. I can't spend ALL my "free time" (ha ha) cleaning. I just can't.
Case in point, it just took me ~40 minutes to type this post, punctuated continuously by nursing, crying, requests for juice, diapers changes, etc. etc. etc. ugh!
It really just seems like the more I clean, the more mess there is, and I can never catch up, let alone keep up! And truly I'm discouraged and unhappy enough about it on my own, without the added stress of people telling me how great it is that now I have all this "extra" time for cleaning!
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 03:40 pm (UTC)We've spent hte morning cleaning hte bedroom so the delivery people who bring hte mattress don't get attacked by Monty Pythonesque dust bunnies (it's just a little dust rabbit ... AAAAHHHHHHH!). Eric is vacuuming now--eventually you get Isaac excited about some aspect of cleaning and get him to do it. At least you'll have company. :)
I'm paying Soph a buck to clean up the backyard of all the little pieces of crap they dropped all summer--pony tail holders, pieces of paper, etc.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 04:21 pm (UTC)I don't have kids, but I so understand what you mean about it being hard to find time to clean and then getting overwhelmed by the mess. I'm also a bit angry at the people who are telling you how easy it's supposed to be, because I can't help but think there's at least a bit of sexism there, whether those people intend it or not. As women, we're supposed to keep perfect homes no matter what else we have going on -- whether that's a career or trying to deal with the demands of young children or just trying to find a moment of peace to preserve our sanity. We're supposed to do it all and that's just bullshit. I don't think if you were a man you'd be getting the same kind of lectures about cleaning, and that's bullshit, too.
I have to wonder if any of those people are offering to come help you get caught up so you could just do the 10 minutes a day? If they put together a work party, you could probably knock it all out pretty quickly. It seems like that would be more productive than criticizing you, particularly considering all you've been through in the last few months -- like, you know, childbirth and surgery and major life changes. Do they realize how drained these kinds of things can leave you feeling? When I had gall bladder surgery, even though I wasn't in pain for more than a few days, it took a while before I was back up to full strength, and I wasn't chasing around an infant and a toddler.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 05:09 pm (UTC)If it is something you want to try, often warehouses, and other businesses will give you old pallets they are no longer using for free, if you put them on the floor and then put your boxes on top of them,( maybe on top of some garbage bags too) - it creates an air space and a buffer if the floor did get wet again.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-08 08:53 pm (UTC)One thing I've found that helps with the feeling of being overwhelmed and of feeling that no matter how much I manage to do, I've accomplished very little, is to divide tasks into the smallest possible parts. Not "do the dishes," but "gather the dishes," and then later on "group the dishes by category," and then in the next bit of time, "do the silverware," or "do the mugs."
Another thing that helps me is dealing with the largest objects first. If I have a dozen things strewn around the kitchen that have no homes, I try to find/discard/deal with the largest and most in-the-way objects first. That might only be 10% of the total mess, but it feels like 40% of the total because those things were taking up so much room.
Housework is evil, because no matter how much you do it, it undoes itself as fast or faster than you can keep up. The only way I've found to keep it under control is to do as little of it as possible in order to keep my habitat livable. Anyway, enough hindlegging -- my sympathies on your plight, and I hope it gets better soon.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-09 12:45 pm (UTC)I know just how you feel.
I attacked a pile of mess this weekend that had been there (I kid you not) since BEFORE OTTO WAS BORN. That's over 3.5 years right there.
Much of it was unsorted laundry. We now have a big bag to give away, with some of my maternity clothes in it, as well as a bag of baby stuff for my brother (I am about to be an auntie!) and a bag for storing in the roof (girl clothes - don't know whether I am getting a nephew or a niece yet).
All I can suggest is - can you find ONE place that you can clean and leave clean? Even if it's a corner of a room, although ideally it would be one room.
I hate feeling ashamed when people drop in - or keeping them at the door, because I know the house is too messy to let them in.
yeah
Date: 2006-10-09 02:22 pm (UTC)when i was little, and my parents would announce we had to clean our rooms ("and anything on the floor when you're done gets thrown away") i would have these massive panic attacks. where to start?
the idea of breaking things down helps me. a friend who was postnatally depressed said her husband would come in and sort things into small piles. a pile of books to be put away. a pile of laundry. and then when she was up for it, she would walk past and put one pile away. that might be all she did for a day or a week, but she did it.
...and if getting to goodwill is too hard, are you allowed to put stuff into bags and leave them by your garbage can, with a "free to good home" sign on it? because getting things Out Out Out made my life so much clearer. and yeah, if it's the garbage men who take them i felt a little guilty... but the feeling of Release was greater than the guilt.
...in your copious free time (har har), i read something about Paper Bag Cooking, which was all the rage in victorian england. supposed to be perfect for the bachelor who had to cook his own meals-- and no pots and pans to clean, afterwards. you'd put stuff in a waxed(?) bag and bake it in the oven, and then throw it away when you were done...
(guilty admission: there have been times when i've given sam tylenol [or whatever brand of sleepy-making medicine] even when he wasn't sick, just to give myself a Break...)
not sure that's coherant or even useful, but yeah...
me
no subject
Date: 2006-10-09 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-18 10:53 am (UTC)Oh, I know this one. Before it reaches the threshold, it's not so bad, so why clean it? After it reaches the threshold, it's so bad, how can I clean it? Catch-22.
The only way I manage at all, in fact, is that I hire someone to clean it for me every so often. Thankfully she's coming tomorrow. If not for that, it would continue to go downhill. And it's just me and the cats making a mess; I don't have two small kids as well.