Cleaning

This is probably what this place is gonna look like.  Random posts with no schedule and who knows how long in between.  I'm okay with that.  :)

 So, today I want to ramble on about why I don't make my boys clean up after themselves.

My personal experience is that being made to clean things up doesn't teach a person how to be a clean person.  My parents had fairly typical expectations, we did chores, washing dishes and being responsible for our own rooms.  Our house was never one from the pages of a magazine but Mom made sure the kitchen stayed clean and the rest of the house was lived in and more or less picked up.  As an adult it has taken me years of feeling pretty crappy about my lack of housekeeping skills to begin to accept that I will never be able to keep house like my mom did.  What works for her doesn't work for me, she did her best, but it wasn't something I could be "taught."

What it did lead to was evenings spent avoiding my family because it was my turn for the dishes and I didn't want to do them (and if no one specifically told me to do them I could pretend I "forgot" it was my turn right?).  Afternoons spent "cleaning" my room because I was told to but it was so overwhelming I never knew where to even start.  I've just never been a tidy person.  Now I have a family to care for and I'm still trying to figure out how to keep things together, it's hard.  But making me do chores didn't make it easier so I can at least save my boys the negative memories I have associated with them.

They're learning the skills anyway because it's really pretty impossible not to.  But they're learning them without the addition of outside pressure that leads to avoidance.  They have both now gone through periods of helping and even doing the vacuuming, not too thoroughly of course, but with joy, it was FUN and something they wanted to help with.  P, at 6 years old, will initiate and ask for help cleaning up his room and other messes.

Last week the boys destroyed a roll of toilet paper together and picked it up together without any outside pushing.  And when A, 2 years old, tried to flush most of it down the toilet in one go they unclogged it together without asking for help.  Being able to really see the ways that they are learning and having the confidence to try things out really really helps me feel like I'm giving them a chance to develop a different relationship to cleaning than I have.

Time will tell, but I'm giving them a chance to clean because it feels good to have a clean space and it feels good to make  things more pleasant for those around us instead of cleaning because they'll get in trouble or disappoint me if they don't.  The more I practice cleaning with those positive feelings the easier it gets and the better I feel when I'm done but I still have a lot of "I'm not good enough" feelings wrapped up with my housecleaning challenges and that doesn't make things better in any way.

Even if it turns out I'm wrong and they'll need to learn to clean house later in life in a more structured way I figure having more joy and peace now can't possibly make that harder and will let us have the peace and joy now and a stronger relationship between us and more confidence in themselves.