monday

I had a bit of a melt down on Monday. Monday is the day I try to get most of the cleaning done. As a teenager and young adult I resisted my mother's weekly cleaning schedule kicking and screaming all the way, but as the years have gone by and I've added on a husband and children, weekly cleaning has seemed more and more reasonable. Now that we are out here in this enormous house in the bush, it's a necessity. By the time a week rolls around you can see the dust piled up in the corners, and the dog hair and the sand, and the mud and the dead insects. So Monday is cleaning day, and that's just how it is.

It's still holidays of course, so getting the house cleaned with three tag-alongs is an undertaking, even in the best of circumstances. I decided to turn it into challenge for the two big girls, with manageable tasks, and plenty of rewards. We started off really well. They tidied the floors of their bedrooms, cleaned the vanities in the two bathrooms, and had a go at cleaning the toilets too, after I'd done most of the job . They were pretty happy, but I hadn't even started the vacuuming, because I had to manage them all the way, and we were more than half-way through the morning. I started vacuuming while they carried on in the bedrooms and unloaded the dishwasher, and then it all fell apart. Abigail had turned the dishwasher on while we weren't looking, and it had run long enough to make all the clean dishes wet again. So Greer, very gallantly at first, had to dry everything before she could put it away. Ella was supposed to be carrying on tidying up the piles of chaos in her room where she'd cleared the floor by just picking stuff up and dumping it somewhere else, but, as usual, her tidying kept turning into playing or reading. Greer was slowly getting the dishwasher unloaded, but she had Abigail as a very keen helper, and by the time I went to check on them a bit later, unloading the dishwasher had become a vast picnic game, with every single dish from the dishwasher laid out  in an arc on the floor. The floor that hadn't been vacuumed yet, let alone washed. I think you can imagine.

I stayed calm, at least I thought I stayed calm, and left them to undo their playing, because all I really wanted to do was get on with the vacuuming. I like vacumming, as long as I don't get too many interruptions, but here it takes hours, so I really had to get on with it. A few minutes later Greer was standing in front of me, telling me that she had been carrying some plates and one of them had tipped onto the floor and broken. My heart sank. I followed her to the kitchen. Sure enough, one of my favourite plates was lying in pieces on the floor. I walked out with tears in my eyes. I didn't want to talk to them, and I couldn't face cleaning it up. I walked down to the hall, shut the doors behind me, sat by the bookcase and started putting the books that were on the floor carefully back on the shelves. The tears kept rolling.

I wasn't sad, and I wasn't stressed, but my brain felt like it was full of exploding fireworks, and I was exhausted. Micro-managing three children while trying to clean the whole house had done me in. I sat on the floor crying over the books for ages. The girls kept coming to see how I was and to ask when they could have their next marshmallow. All they wanted was ticks and rewards and a prize-giving and it just made me feel small and tired and taken for granted.

I managed to pull myself together, but I was quiet and slow for the rest of the day. I told the girls I wasn't ready to do ticks on the chart or marshmallows, and so they eventually stopped asking and went off to play. I sat and ate lunch by myself with a good book, and then I read something that was a revelation.

I'm reading "Intimacy and Solitude: balancing closeness and independence" by Stephanie Dowrick. I'm reading it with a pencil for a book mark and I'm underlining and scribbling notes everywhere, because it's that good. The part I was reading was was about the development of "inner security" through a child's early relationships. This was what jumped out at me;

"When things are going well for an infant, the mother stands in for the parts of the infant which are helplessly immature, and comforts the infant through the stages of learning which teach the child that although need is felt within, it must be met from without."

I realised in a flash that what had worn me down wasn't the cleaning, or trying to do it with three children tagging along; it wasn't the broken plate, or the fact that the day was more than half over and I still had so much to do, although it all contributed, it was Isobella's room. Isobella is a whirlwind, her brain is like a whirlwind, and her room mirrors this exactly. For her, tidying up is torture. It is nigh on impossible for her to sort through her chaos and create even a modicum of order. I have been her chief tidy up-er for nearly eight years. I never expect her to tidy up completely on her own. I always have to make her tidy up, and always micro-managing. "Put that there, move those over here, throw those things out."  And I always carry on where she gives up. I have been "standing in" for her need for order her whole life. And for the first time I admitted to myself that this causes me to feel a constant low-level, often unnoticed, stress. It was time to stop "standing in."

I know I am making this out to be simpler than it is. There are all sorts of questions that arise, such as, does Isobella really have a need for order, or am I projecting my own need for order onto her? But the fact of the matter is that I need her floor to be clear so that I can vacuum it, and she needs to be able to clear her surfaces so that we can dust, mostly because Greer is allergic to dust, but also because I think it's important for her to have use-able space in her room and for her to learn take care of her possessions.

The back-story here is that a couple of months ago I figured out I am pretty dyspraxic. That's another story for another post, but I'll tell you this much. It means that I have enough trouble keeping my own stuff ordered and organised, let alone anyone else's. So my daughter's chief tidy up-er is, by nature, an average tidy up-er herself. And Paddy is no more skilled in this area than I am. I tell you, it's the blind leading the blind.

I've written about my struggles with chaos before, and order was my word for 2011. I wrote about chaos and order, and sought to find my own version of order, well before I even knew what Dyspraxia was. I was searching for some kind of ordered nirvana, and yet, instinctively, I knew my order was never going to look like any one else's.

If tidiness is just not on your radar, or you're happy with whatever level of tidiness is achievable on any given day, then you might have come to my house as a visitor and thought it looked pretty tidy. If you are a sworn and proud tidy person (like my sister and Mum are) then you'll have come to my house and seen that there is always something that needs doing. Always a basket of washing sitting somewhere, dishes on the bench, a cupboard in disarray, or a bedroom down the hall that hasn't been tidied for a week. And this is my reality; I actually like a certain amount of order and cleanliness. Clutter and mess for me are like visual white noise. So whatever tidiness and order you see on any day, it will be the best that I could do, and was probably hard-won.

This is quite an admission. I spent the first part of my life trying to rebel against my mother's strict sense of order. I was labelled the "messy one" in the family. As I grew older I realised I wasn't that messy at all, and decided that I had been unfairly labelled. Nevertheless, chaos was always my default setting. I never could quite understand why no matter how hard I tried to be organised, chaos was only a scratch under the surface. I partly came to terms with this last year, when I wrote a post about having grown up living in two worlds. That was really a breakthrough. As soon as I admitted I had my father's relaxed and anti-establishment home-making genes, as well as my mother's, I somehow gave myself permission to be tidy, as contradictory as that sounds. I gave up my rebellion against order once and for all, or so I thought. The house was definitely tidier.

Then we moved here, where it takes half an hour just to vacuum the lounge and dining room, and where dirt, in every form, is a daily part of our lives. The girls spread out from one bedroom to three, and for the first time Isobella had her own desk, her own bedside table, her own dresser, and her own wardrobe. You might think that would make it easier for her to keep her room tidy, but it's actually had the opposite effect. She now has three or four times as much surface area to spread out her creations and clutter, piles and treasures.

Right now I'm writing at the dining table while the girls play around me. I'm not ignoring them, but I am getting the words out while I can, because this story is good for me to write. They have taken out pretty much every puzzle we own, and have spread the pieces around on baking trays and tins as "biscuits" and put them all in the oven. They are happy, and they are occupied. Right now I don't care about the inevitable chaos. The puzzle pieces that will be strewn from the kitchen and down the hall to the lounge. I don't care that the puzzles will be all mixed up, and I don't care that someone, probably me, hopefully with helping hands, will have to sit down and re-order it all. I'm happy because they are happy, and I'm happy because I'm getting these words out.

You see, I can handle chaos. I've grown up with it close, either from within or without. I've learnt to control it, and when I need to I can. But my brain is like a tight rubber band that has to let go with a ping and unravel regularly, and that's exactly what my environment is like too. Chaos and order come and go like the tide. It's the two worlds of my upbringing, it's my wild brain, and it's the dyspraxia. It's just the way I am.

I can't expect any more of my eldest daughter than I expect of myself. Her brain is even wilder and harder to control than my own. But I don't need to take responsibility for something she's old enough to take responsibility for herself, even though she may seem to be less than capable in that area. So I am resigning as her chief tidy up-er. I'm not saying I don't care how messy her room gets, not at all. But the micro-managing is over. I am making peace with her precious chaos.

full circle

This photo won't look anything special to you. It could be any family, sitting down to any meal, any where. You've got photos like this. That's Greer eye-balling the camera, eating a sausage. Abigail's in the high chair, and the other two kids are the birthday boys. Paddy is sitting next to my dad, then there's my step-mum, with my brother-in-law next to her. Sounds pretty ordinary, yes. Then there are the people just outside the frame. My sister and my mum are in the kitchen, and there are more kids in the lounge behind me as I stand taking the photo.

I guess that kind of makes me right in the middle. Which is exactly how I've grown up feeling. I'm the only child of my parents, who split before I was two. My dad re-married soon after, and I have two half-sisters on his side. My mum had my sister when I was three (I've already told you a bit of this days of our lives saga here) and we grew up together, so although she was technically my half-sister, our half-ness was never really an issue.

How that played out for me, though, was that I lived my life in two worlds. One world, the safe, ordered, controlled and loving world of home with Mum, and the other the completely different but exciting, fun, and slightly wild world of my dad's place.

When I was sixteen I went on a school trip to a french film. It was "Romauld et Juliet," a modern revision of Romeo and Juliet. In the movie a high-powered executive falls in love with his office cleaner, and is so smitten that he leaves his wife for her. By the end the wife has found herself a new man, and the final scene is of a picnic in a rambling garden, where the entire family re-unites, along with the new partners on either side. It's a loving, warm and very happy scene. The executive is blissfully happy with his new love, his ex is happy with hers also, and their children play and laugh and eat happily between them. I'm not going to edit out all those "happy's"... because happy was exactly the word for it, and the thing I remember vividly, twenty years later. I knew right then that that was my dream of dreams. I dreamt that one day all the parts of my crazy family would come together, happily. I kept it to myself, but I never forgot.

Fast forward twenty years to this weekend, and that scene at the top of this post. We were at my sisters' house, celebrating the birthdays of her sons, with my mum, plenty of friends, as well as one of my half-sisters, my Dad and step-mum. At one point I was sitting at the table with Mum on one side, and Dad on the other. And we were all happy.

Could I, at sixteen, ever have imagined that scene exactly? No, I couldn't have imagined it at all. It was a wild dream, the stuff of movies and happy endings. But it happened. I got my happy ending.

I wasn't the most important person in that room, not by a long shot. I sat in the background for much of it, enjoying the good company. But it was a special day for me. I've spent most of my life living in two parts. One side the part of me that fits with my mother, and the other side the part of me that fits with my father. I haven't always seen it quite like this, but it's taken me a long time to figure myself out, and this is partly why. It's also the back story to that chaos I told you about when I last wrote. This chaos I've had to come to terms with has partly come from living as if I've still got two worlds inside of me.

A couple of days after I wrote that post I went to spiritual direction. Wouldn't you know it, but we got talking about my crazy life, housework, and chaos. We also got talking about what my parents' respective houses were like. To say they were different is an understatement. I realised then that I have never fully acknowledged that my values and opinions about life and keeping house come from two completely different sources. If I've ever felt confused and slightly split-personality about these things it's understandable. And the fact is, I'm not a chip off either block. I'm my own random version, as we all are in some way. But I really am my own version. And during spiritual direction I realised that I need to start living like it. I need to integrate my two inner-worlds into a new one, uniquely mine, and get on with my life.

Funnily enough, within two days of that realisation, that chaos I wrote about was all but gone. The vacuum cleaner got put away after three weeks of waiting. I found the camera charger! The corners of chaos in the study and master bedroom are dealt to. The house is mostly tidy, and mostly clean, which is pretty much how I like it. I know Mum will always see something that needs doing, and that Dad may sometimes turn up and find it too tidy for his liking, but I'm ok with that. It's my house.

And as far as special family gatherings go, I'm thinking I'll be getting plenty more of them. It might even get so that they don't feel so special any more. For our girls those gatherings are already normal. They think nothing of having three sets of grandparents, they don't think it's strange that I have a step-mother, or sisters that are not sisters to each other. They love and feel at home in every part of our extended family. In fact, they are richer for it. And so am I.

my chaos

I would have started this post with a photo. If the camera was charged up. The camera hasn't been charged for nearly a month. Finally today I thought, "that's it, I can't bear it any longer"and I went to find the charger. Problem is, I couldn't find it. I looked in several obvious places, but no joy. It does have a home. It usually lives there. But somehow, sometime since the camera was last charged, it has got seriously lost.

I don't like losing things. It makes me feel like my grip on reality is not as tight as I'd like it to be. It seems to be happening more and more often. I could blame it on my age (which most of you would scoff at) or I could blame it on chaos. To be honest with you, I think it's the chaos.

Chaos is entirely, exactly the right word for the state of mind and state of life I repeatedly find myself in. Chaos is the tiredness that threatens to overtake me at the moment, the result of two weeks of living in the land of sickness. Chaos is the washing piled up on the couch waiting to be folded. It's the baskets of folded washing in the hall, waiting to be put away. (First there was one basket, then there was two, "that's got to be a good thing, hasn't it?" I said to Paddy. "One basket of clean folded washing is a good thing, therefore two baskets of clean folded washing is even better?" He didn't laugh.)

I've just put Abigail up on the dining table bench that sits under the window. I knew she'd like to look out, and I thought it might buy me a few more minutes here. I pulled up the blinds for a better view and noticed that the window is covered with patches of that lovely combination of  dirt and mould that happens over winter. That's chaos. So is the filing waiting to be done in the study. Ditto the bills waiting to be paid. Our tax return, quite rightly, should come in about here, but it's not even on my radar. That's chaos.

Chaos was reigning this morning in the girls' bedroom while I was sitting on the couch reading because I was just too tired to do anything else. I could hear Abigail pulling down the boxes of toys off the shelf and tipping out their contents over the floor. A sickening sound of hundreds of blocks cascading like a waterfall onto the floor. Meanwhile, at the same time as Abigail was busy tipping, Isobella and Greer were busy playing with everything else in the bedroom not already tipped out by Abigail. By the time they ventured out (believe me, I was not going in there!) Abigail had been dressed in Isobella's skirt and t-shirt, and she looked just like a walking doll.

That was the moment you would have seen a photo of, if I hadn't lost the camera charger. You would have seen Abigail, all sixteen months of herself, toddling around in an over-sized t-shirt and skirt looking hilarious. I wouldn't have taken a picture of the floor of their bedroom, which was literally covered, because the floor was not the point. Yes, I did get a bit grumpy in the tidying up process, and yes it was a team effort, which I could have done without, but it got done eventually, and we were none the worse off for it. Well actually, to the contrary, we were better off because of it. That half hour of chaos in the bedroom gave me a blissful few moments alone, and the end product was a sixteen month old in six year old's clothing, which had us laughing all day.

You see, I've come to a few conclusions about this chaos of mine. One is that it is fairly inevitable. It seems to come in regular cycles, no matter how hard I try to stave it off. Maybe it's the stage of life I am in, or the kind of person I am. Whatever the reason, it comes, and I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. But more than that, I've realised that this chaos of mine is not all bad. Crazy, unexpected and wild things come out of chaos. Think of Genesis, our most important beginning story. Chaos was that formless yet pregnant state, just before the most incredible act of creation.

Right now the girls are playing with string behind me in the lounge. At first they had it tied up and were doing the limbo. Then they turned it into a washing line and got the pegs and dolls clothes and strung them up. So now the dolls' clothes (which we laboured over in the bedroom this morning,) are strewn across the lounge. There is string from one side of the room to the other, stretched over the two bar stools and held down with precarious-looking piles of books. But those two girls are happy, satisfied with their playing, and I'm happy too. I'm sitting writing.

The thing about chaos is that it is often made up of millions of "should do's." I should have clean windows. I should put the washing away. I should have done that filing by now. I should be doing the tax return. I should be able to keep the house cleaner. But "should do's" are the biggest time wasters. Not only do they rarely get done, but all the energy they take up in "not getting done" is energy robbed from the things that really matter.

So I'm doing my best to kick out the "should do's". I haven't got time for them anymore. I'm going to try and get on with my "want to's" and "can do's." Regardless of the chaos. Of course there will always be "must do's", but they seem to get done, eventually. No, it's the "want to's" and "can do's" I'm giving my heart to.

So I'm following my own advice. I'm sitting here writing at quarter to five, ignoring the mess and the dishes and barely sparing a thought for dinner. Those three girls are back in the bedroom, door shut, with a bowl of frozen peas. And I'm smiling, the happiest I've been all week. True story!