Today has been a hard day for me. I've been doing a pretty good job of keeping my spirits up lately, but today has been rough. My daughter and her new husband are coming for Christmas, which makes me very happy. It also means we are having company, which means the house needs to be cleaned. I have an immense amount of emotion connected with the messiness of my house. I have some deep-seated beliefs about the importance of tidiness, which may or may not be founded in truth. Here's the problem (which most of you already know)--I am not a tidy person. So basically, I go through every day with a cloud hanging over me telling me I am no good because my house is messy. In the past, I have ignored these feelings, or eaten something yummy to make me feel better. I have been working on changing those habits, and that leaves me to find other ways to cope. One of them is writing, which I am doing now :)
When I get in a situation like this, where I have to spend lots of time and energy trying to dig myself out of a pit, literally and figuratively, it can be challenging. So how can I do it? I am still figuring this out for myself. I have to take my own advice here. For one, I need to look at the situation and ask myself if I am looking at things from the bright side. Remember that post a while back? Are things really as bad as I feel like they are? Is the pit really as deep as I am making it out to be? I also need to ask myself if the beliefs I have about the tidiness of my house are true. If they aren't true, then I need to learn to let go of them. For example, on a bad day, I tell myself that I am a bad person because my house isn't clean. I tell myself that all other women have clean houses, and that I am the only woman who can't pull it off. I tell myself that my husband should not have to help around the house, and that I am an inadequate homemaker because he has to help me. I tell myself that I should be able to do all of this by myself. You can see how believing these things can make me feel overwhelmed, and why I try to ignore these feelings instead of dealing with them.
So what now? I think the best thing for me to do today is to tell myself some true things, and to think about everything that I am grateful for. So here goes. I know that I am not perfect, and that's okay, because I don't need to be. I am grateful that I have a loving husband who wants to help me around the house. I am grateful for opportunities to improve myself by doing hard things, which include cleaning the house as well as accepting my imperfection. I am grateful that I have a beautiful daughter and a wonderful new son-in-law who are coming to see me today. I am grateful that I have a warm home to live in, that is full of love. I am grateful that we have sufficient money to have lots of stuff to clutter up our lives. I am grateful for my five wonderful children who contribute to the mess around my house. We may not be very good at cleaning, but we have a great time together. My family loves me even though the house isn't perfectly clean. And although the house isn't completely clean, we have made immense amounts of progress.
And so, I'm going to go get in the car and go pick up my daughter and her hubby. And we're going to have a wonderful, happy, imperfect 10 days together. I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy and joy-filled new year.
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