Impossible Standards?

(© Mary's Little Lamb)

I've been thinking about my homekeeping skills lately.

I really wish I was one of those uber-organized Mums who zoom through the house righting all that is cluttered and wrong, but I'm not. I struggle. I have routines, sure, but the fact of the matter is, they're only as good as the person doing them and, well, plenty of time I skip right over them.

I've been a Flybaby in the past. It took me two years to discover that a woman shouldn't need multiple daily email reminders to keep house! Flylady is great for the community aspect - I was part of a great Yahoo Group for Aussie Flybabies for at least a couple of years - but for the last several months of that I was not even subscribed to the Flylady site itself, just hanging on to the group because of the friends I made there. And to be honest, three-quarters of what we discussed wasn't in any way connected to keeping the home! People have asked why I left that group and I've been telling them that it really stopped serving my needs, that's really all it was. I still have friends I 'met' there who email me and that's okay! I will say one thing about Flylady though - she's a motivation powerhouse, LOL. Her enthusiam is kind of catching, but at some point I believe one of the coolest aspects to learning how to declutter by her system is to learn how to declutter HER. There's no shame in unsubscribing girls!

Of course, I took other things away from my Flylady experience. I learned how to make daily routines and even though - ahem - I'm not all that great at executing them sometimes, I do recognise the value in having them. And I picked up a weird attraction to acronyms and started making my own, LOL.

Fast forward a year or so, and I discovered blogging - the writing and the reading. I fell upon blog after Christian homemaking blog and while I enjoyed reading them, I couldn't help but wonder why I wasn't blessed with the gene which would naturally steer me toward the kitchen sink, or the mop bucket or - gasp! - the toilet bowl. I've always been interested in organization, decluttering and just making things pretty, but I don' t seem to have that bit of DNA which connects the 'wanting to do' to the 'doing the do'. It's so frustrating! I want to make bread by hand! And I want to line-dry my clothes each and every single day and if it's raining, I want to WANT to use a string underneath the verandah instead of my natural inclination to load up the dryer. I want to love ironing! I want to be consistent and fabulously good at menu planning and cooking. I want to go to bed each night knowing there's not a single dish left on the sink. I want to wash windows (well okay, not that much, but...) I want to get up 'while it is still dark' and get the appliances humming before the rest of the family wakes. I want to have time to do all these things, the motivation to do them, the energy - oh gosh, the ENERGY - to do them. And I want to do it all with a smile on my face and cookies in the oven.

Oh good grief - I think I just hit on my problem right there. I want to do it all. Because 'some' women do. Why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we set ourselves up for what usually pans out to be failure? There's nothing wrong with standards - and sure, mine are probably lower than most, I'm the first to admit that - but why are we in constant competition with our mothers, our mother-in-laws, fake TV mums, ourselves - or even Miss Suzie Blogging Homemaker? Why do we do it?

I had a whole set of resolutions set up for 2008. I also tend to micro-manage, in case you haven't yet picked that up, LOL. This morning, I'm throwing them in the bin.

The only people I need to please is my own family.

There's a great quote I bring up from time to time - gleaned from an article called "A Practical and Money-Saving Approach to Grocery Shopping" by Mrs Mabyn Clark, which I originally saw on the LAF website.

"What are the cornerstones to running an efficient household? I
would have to say they are clean laundry, a clean kitchen (especially clean dishes), and three square meals a day. Without a vigilant attitude towards these things, we can hinder any other efforts we make in our homes."

I always loved this quote because when I first read it, I'd taken a break from organizing some peripheral closet or some such thing, and was having a cup of tea and catching up on my favourite sites on the Net. I looked up from my seat to see dishes littering multiple surfaces in the kitchen, two or three full (and dirty!) laundry baskets and (at 4 or 5 o'clock) nothing organized for dinner. It hit me like a brick. And not one of those itty bitty ones either - we're talking the big ones they use to make retaining walls, LOL. Perhaps part of my problem is that I look for homemaking tasks that give me the biggest visual 'payoff'. A cleared-out shelf or cupboard is obvious. Menu-planning, not so obvious. You would think that a clean kitchen and full bellies would give you the same kickback, and it does, but because you're doing it everyday, there's a tendency to forget that the mundane things can often give the biggest rewards. I know I have :)

Lady Lydia wrote a blog post almost three years ago called Organizing For Success which I've permanently linked to here on Lizzie's Home for a long time. In it she describes an attitude of just doing 'one thing' at a time if you're feeling overwhelmed. I'd go a step further and say that Mrs Clark's example above - The Golden Rule of Three, if you like - is the absolute bare minimum one should aim for in any given day. I know that I myself have to pare back to basics in order to build back up to the level I know I need to be at. Just three things - meals, a clean kitchen and clean laundry.

Seems easy, doesn't it? So now, I'm off to put on a load of laundry...(LOL)

Cheers,
Lizzie