Friday, January 11, 2008

Perfectionism or Nothing....

I get nothing!
For those of you that know me, really well, would most likey never peg me as a perfectionist. My life, my hair, my house, my kids, my....everything is far from perfect (or even appearing so). I never, ever thought of myself as a perfectionist. When I read, from my sweet life organization mentor, FlyLady that I was indeed a perfectionist I was shocked. Some examples of true perfection;

You might be a perfectionist if........ you remake your childs bed after he or she just made it to make it look better
....you reach into the cabinet to get that bottle of the latest, greatest cleaner and end up on the floor cleaning the cleaning supplies.
.... if your closets, cupboards, and drawers are tidy but the house is a mess because you don't have time to put everything away perfectly!
....You make the same list everyday over and over again because you did the list out of order, so you have to make a new one.

These aren't my examples. I get so overwhelmed because I can't get the house cleaned perfectly that I can't clean at all. When I first got married, I didn't think I could vacuum without moving the furniture each time to vacuum invisible dirt away. Can you believe I'm still alive? My push for a clean house, an organized house are simply thoughts of discontent.

I've come some way in realizing that life looks like movement, not a magazine. My hair will look just like this until I walk away from the mirror. My car is clean until we get into it again, muddy shoes and gum wrappers and all. My house, well, my house is in movement. Being cleaned slowly, and there are volcanoes in most of the other rooms. But this is life. This is how we live, with things all over, and the fingerprints on my wall are just evidence of the little boys you see in the photos on my wall.

I'm still learning to let go. This struggle will hopefully end one day, but for now it is my lot in life. My sweet neighbor reminded me how quickly my kids will grow up and go off, one day I'll have so much time on my hands to clean that things won't need cleaning. How depressing.

I think I'll take the crazy house. Of course, I'm still cleaning...

1 comment:

The Daileys said...

I'm totally hearing you on this... of course I am beginning to see that if I lived all alone things would stay clean so that I need to see the messes as evidence of the miraculous blessing my little (and big) mess-makers are. There are so many single, childless women out there that would love to have my messes to clean up. Imperfect perfectionism is really discontent, you are perfectly right. Thanks for the reminder today! Keep up your pursuit of contentment- I will too ;)