FlyLady

In a comment to a recent post, EJ wondered what formula there is to *finally* getting one's house in order. She complained that if it is the magical age of 48 that did it for me. Um, gee. Thanks, EJ!

Speaking as one who has certainly not arrived, this is only my mild musings on the topic. My mother was what FlyLady calls a BO- Born Organizer. As a child, I had no idea how the house got cleaned. It just was. We didn't have a ton of money and I didn't have a ton of toys, so the problems in my room--when I finally got one of my own at about age nine--didn't have a chance to get too far out of hand. And I played outside a lot. My four older sisters seemed to get the inside chores. They hated doing dishes with me. If I was washing and they were drying, they spent a lot of time twiddling the dish towel asking me to hurry up. If they were washing, the drain rack was always STILL full and that slowed down their washing. As a result, I got out of doing dishes a fair amount.

I do remember burning the trash in the barrel every Saturday, though, and dusting the living room, including the plastic geranium and polishing the silver platter my parents got as a 25th anniversary gift from mom's siblings. (I snagged that when we down-sized my mother after her stroke--someday I'll polish the thing again and put it on display in my china cabinet!)

My mom didn't have patience with help in the kitchen, either. Though the mother of five daughters, she didn't teach any of us to cook though I did learn to bake cookies and cakes. I went to boarding school for high school and she spent the first half the summer making all the stuff I liked because I'd been gone for ten months, and the second half the summer making all the stuff I liked because I WOULD BE gone ten months. I limped through keeping a half-way tidy room in the dorm.

Then I married Jim, and I had no idea what hit me. He just dropped stuff where it landed. I'm not sure what I thought would happen. That my mother would come clean the house? I had no idea how to cope. I could barely get meals on the table, let alone follow things around and pick them up. We followed our wedding with a baby 13 months later, and that didn't help either. Our house was a disaster.

I felt like I was always cleaning, always doing dishes, and yet the place was never clean. Never.

My kids remember the Saturday drill at our house as I tried to bulldoze everyone into action to clean up. Or even worse, someone had phoned and was coming by and I would holler at the kids: "Everybody get to work; we have 20 minutes to get this place clean!" Once I tried to get them moving and my son asked, "Why, who's coming over?" and I said wasn't it okay to have the house clean just for us?

I had to laugh when I read FlyLady's definition of CHAOS: Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome. Oh, how true. Back in the days when I was a SAHM, I used to occasionally get on the phone in the morning and invite friends over for supper. That helped motivate me to get the house clean over the course of the day. I bet the shape of my house has been the biggest deterrent for us in having company over. I can't stand people seeing it a mess, but I can't seem to stay on top of it either.

So in the last few years the kids have left home...and two years ago, Jim left home. He works out of town and is gone four days out of eight. Even after all those years, I still thought he was the problem. And so I was quite surprised to discover that I still have a messy house. Um. Could I be part of the problem?

Astonishing.

True.

I do a lot of things right, but I do them in marathon form rather than a little every day. I wait until things are right out of hand and are driving me bats before dealing with them. It's like I can't be bothered to put away one or two things, so I wait until they multiply and over-flow available surfaces. Then I flip out and clean with a vengeance.

For the most part I've learned that I like myself ever so much better in the morning when I have left the kitchen clean the night before. Or at least done the dishes. Stuff creeps onto the counters, too. Right now there are a couple canning jars that need to go to the cellar and a few rinsed out tuna cans that need to land in the recycling box in the porch. Why? Why not just deal with them? I don't know.

I first heard of FlyLady a couple years ago. I read through the website but couldn't bring myself to sign up. I had sound reasons, such as that sort of website is for people with severe problems, not people like me who just need a few tips here and there.

**Roll of eyes.

What I need is a live-in maid. I guess I am her.

Okay, I'll be honest. FlyLady's site is a little over the top. To someone like me she seems to have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). So...why not take what is useful and ignore the rest?

The bulk of the method is her email reminders. There can be like 15 emails a day. My mind freaks out at that thought. Anyway, I'm at work all day and I don't need emails telling me what to clean in my house this minute while I'm at work. So I signed up for the emails in digest form, meaning I get one a day with 15 sub-parts. I can skim them and delete them. Such power!

So FlyLady's number one thing is to have a shiny sink every night. And I mean polished, not just uninhabited by dirty dishes. Um. OCD? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'll likely never know, because that isn't my goal. Those dirty dishes are my goal. I'm perfectly fine with the second sink having a permanent dish rack in it, partly because I bought a nice new stainless steel one for the new kitchen. Those are CLEAN dishes, and I put them away a couple hours later, or the next morning, or while I'm cooking dinner. I'm good with them. It's the dirty ones that weigh me down, so they're the ones who have to go.

So that is July's mission (from the 3rd onward): leave no dirty dishes as seed for the morning. So far, so good. Baby steps, as FlyLady says.

July's new habit from FlyLady? Swish and swipe: swishing the toilet bowl every day, swiping the bathroom counter and sink every day. Every DAY????? It still looks clean from yesterday. Um, yeah. And we could keep it that way. Shocking thought, I tell you. I've cleaned my bathroom oftener this week--but not every day--than any other week in my life.

Did I have to be 48 to do this, whatever *this* is? No. I had to be frustrated enough to deal with it. I'm under no illusions that this will be a magic cure for ever. But if I can establish some good habits along the way, it's worthwhile.

Meanwhile I'm resisting the impulse to cancel the emails. There's good stuff in there. And today, upon FlyLady's advice I cleaned the top of my stove. It wasn't THAT dirty yet; not dirty enough to really bug me and spur me to action the old way. But why wait? Now it's clean. And the kitchen looks pretty darn good. Even with a couple of jars and cans in the corner.