I am innately a messy person. Left to my own devices, I have a messy living space and have for my entire life. I’m trying to keep the house cleaner lately, as it prevents panicked angry cleaning before parties (and freakouts when people drop by), but I am baffled by how to do it.

Here’s my issue.

I can be messy and pretty pleasant to my family, or I can be clean and waver between Nagging Harpy and Martyred Bitch.

What I don’t need is advice on how to be relatively neat on a consistent basis (I CAN do it. I don’t hate cleaning. What I hate is the Sisyphean aspect – how nothing every stays clean.).

What I DO need is advice on how to be relatively neat and how to be pleasant (and not bitter and rageful) when it mainly involves picking up after everyone else.

I don’t think my husband is going to change and I’m not interested in nagging him. I have plenty of faults that he doesn’t nag me about.

The 3 year old is old enough to help with cleaning tasks but not old enough to pick up after herself on a consistent basis, and her help means everything takes 4 times as long. (I do it with her, because that is one of the whole things about parenting is that it takes longer to teach people to do things than to just do it, but it’s not something that will keep my house clean because doing one thing means the rest of my house will degenerate into despair.)

I know Swistle has been doing some habit-changing stuff with her messiness and it has been super motivating. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone address the emotional aspect of keeping a house clean, when it doesn’t come naturally to you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 2:44 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.