Tidy House, Tidy Mind.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I'm not the tidiest of people. When I had my last house, I brought a man back one night and he actually gasped; he thought someone had broken in. My general rule was that the washing up didn't need to be done until I'd run out of plates... and paper napkins. Tidying was what you did the day before your landlord came round for a house inspection.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I'm a mother to an almost-mobile baby who is also very inquisitive and a bit of a sneaky ninja... and all of a sudden, I'm cleaning everything, all the time. Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but I've suddenly become a bit thingie about things being clean and tidy.

When I was cooking Christmas dinner, I actually felt a little uptight about the fact the gravy had splattered over the stove, and had to get a cloth and wipe up around the pan. As soon as we'd finished eating, I was in the kitchen wanting to clear everything up and get the washing up done. Within an hour, the kitchen was clean, and the hob was sparkling. I have no idea what has happened to me.

I get a weird sense of satisfaction from having S's toys all put back in place on her play mats once she's gone to bed, from folding the high chair away and sweeping up the crumbs from beneath it, from having a shiny white hob and clear kitchen sides.  Since my living room floor was laid, I've been very particular about making sure the living room is clean and tidy, and the rest of the house looks good. 

I've always seen clutter-clearing and general cleaning as linked to what is going on in my head. I tend to clean and tidy when I'm re-ordering my thoughts, and throw things out when I'm mentally discarding things I want to let go of. I'm a great believer that a person's living space reflects their mental state: at the old house, when it was so messy and untidy you could barely see the floor in my living room, that was right before I had a nervous breakdown and nearly killed myself.

Since moving in here, the place has been fairly messy for large chunks of time, and I wasn't always particularly bothered by it. I guess you could say I had bigger fish to fry, finding my feet as a single mother. For the last couple of months though, and more noticeably since I met HYM, I'm quite particular about the place being clean and tidy. I'm not some sort of weirdo who has to put everything away just-so with no trace of life in the house, but I like for everything to have its place. I'm slowly making my way around the house, moving furniture, putting pictures up, throwing out things I don't use, making the place easier to keep clean. I think at the same time, I'm letting go of a lot of the junk I've been storing in my head, and moving on with my life. Slowly but surely, both my house and my mind are starting to become more organised and less cluttered with junk and rubbish. Everything has its place and can be put back where it belongs when it's finished with. And everything can be clean, and look clean and tidy when I'm finished.

Perhaps, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, I'm finally dealing with my issues too. Slowly, but surely.

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