I spent the majority of the first 18 years of my life living in hovels. My dad had a hard time keeping a job and my mom tried her best but daycare just doesn’t pay well. So we could never really afford a house big enough for all of us. There were a couple of times we got to spend a few months living in a house that had a room for everyone…but not often. Most of the time, we ended up in a two bedroom house. My brother and I would get our own rooms and my parents would sleep in the den/living room. There was always “stuff” everywhere. My dad is a bit of a pack rat. Well…let me rephrase that. He WAS a bit of a pack rat…now he’s more of a “hoarder”. But that’s another story.
Also, just so this makes sense, I wasn’t like those kids who grew up in one house during their entire or childhood…or even two houses…or three. If I sit and think for a minute…I can remember living in ten different houses between the ages of 5 and 18. This does not include places we lived before I was 5 years old…because I can’t remember back that far.
My point here is…I spent my life living in a mess. Our house could never be clean because there was never any room for everything. So there was always “stuff” everywhere. Stacked in every room…on every surface…in every corner…there was stuff. It was not organized, it was not neat…it was always a mess. Add to that…that many of the places we lived were old…and ended up being infested with roaches. So, many of the places I lived during my childhood…had bugs. Not all…but many. It wasn’t because we were dirty. We kept the kitchen clean…kept the trash out…kept food put away…the houses were just old and we often lived in the country. There was one house that we even had an exterminator come and treat…but the bugs just came back.
Most of my life I avoided having friends over because I didn’t want them to see what the inside of my house looked like. I was embarrassed. I had a few friends that I eventually got close enough to that I would let them come over…but it was still hard for me…especially when I had been to their nice, clean homes. It was a hard way to live.
When I got out on my own, one of the things I promised myself was that I would never live like that again and I would never make my kids live like that. I never wanted my kids to be embarrassed to have a friend over. I am not the cleanest person in the world…I never really learned how to clean properly so I struggle…but I have never gone back to living the way I did when I was growing up. Thus, it’s pretty important to me now to keep my house at least relatively clean and uncluttered.
I do have some pack rat tendencies. I’m very sentimental…and growing up poor will make you turn into a bit of a collector. You want “things” just to have them…because you didn’t have them before. Things that comfort you and make you feel happy.
The key is to avoid having so many things that you can’t see the floor in any room of the house.
Basically, every day is a struggle for me to keep my house clean and uncluttered. I’m relatively organized by nature but it’s very difficult to organize when you don’t have a lot of space. So I try to think of new ways to keep things organized and neat even though I don’t have the room to do it the way I really WANT to do it. Some days I wish I could hire someone to come in and organize it all FOR me and then I could just attempt to maintain it. Alas, services like that are not cheap…and would probably require more of my time than I have to give. But it’s a nice dream.
Someday…in a perfect world…I will live in a house big enough that it has a place for everything so that everything can be in it’s place. My house will be neat and clean and organized all the time. And I will sit on my front porch swing, with a drink in my hand…and watch the pigs fly overhead…
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