Chapter Five-- page 6

Two weeks after our son was born Dan lost his job. The company for which he had worked moved their operation to another state. A month later the baby got very, very sick and ended up in Pediatric ICU for a week. In my quest for Mr. Bubble perfection, I had put no money into savings. We were left with no regular income and no health insurance. One of our friends hired Dan as a laborer for his construction company, but the work was sporadic. I babysat several neighbor children, and I continued to sell needlecraft kits at in-home parties. Try as I might, we could never seem to catch up. Too much of our meager income was floating away with my floating checks. The bank which held the loan on our doublewide, the mobile home park which rented us our space, and numerous collection agencies which represented the medical community came knocking on our door. For two full years I held them all at bay by paying what I could whenever I absolutely had to.

I gave birth to our fourth baby, a girl, at home. She was born fine and healthy, but I ended up in the hospital with complications. We accrued more medical debt, and I despaired under the weight of it. I felt like a failure, but nobody, not even Dan, knew. As much a failure as I was in regards to my relationship with possessions and money, as my family and friends would attest, I was a big success as a wife and mother. I worked very hard to create a secure environment filled with peace, patient discipline and kindness. Dan maintains to this day that I was "the best mother he has ever known." On our wedding day years before I had promised Dan that I would make our home a sanctuary. I held true to my vows, but I did it at great emotional cost. I bore the full weight of our financial burdens on my own soul. I worked hard to keep Dan ignorant about our troubles. I fielded all the collection calls, and kept him in the dark about our bank account. I felt like I was paddling upstream against a raging current. Worst of all, I chose to do it all alone. I was ashamed. I knew that I wasn’t the Pledge commercial mom that I wanted to be, and I hated myself. I could only imagine how my husband and my friends would feel about me, if they knew the truth. Something had to change.

Chapter Five-- page 5

I believed that having more perfect stuff would create a more perfect me. I started spending money in a passionate, but albeit unconscious, effort to fill the gap between who I was and who I believed I needed to be. I wanted my pantry to look exactly like the ones I had seen in the Tupperware catalog. I spent hundreds of dollars on perfect plastic containers that fit into perfect modular shapes for my obviously imperfect doublewide trailer. Heaven forbid that I should use inexpensive, possibly mismatched plasticware, or that my flour should sit naked in its original bag on the pantry shelf! In my kids' rooms every set of toys was organized in perfectly labeled plastic baskets from the dollar store. From both an organizationally and fiscally responsible point of view, this was a very good thing. My problem was that, as a homeschooling parent, I was inundated with dozens of educational supply catalogs which featured more brightly colored, aesthetically pleasing organizational systems for children. They also sold intellectually stimulating toys which were obviously essential for enhancing my children's development. My poor kids were stuck playing with uninspiring stuff like Barbie dolls and Happy Meal prizes. I habitually put myself down for not having the best. I bought every organizational book that I could lay my hands on, and I filled my bookshelves not only with them, but also with classic children’s literature, encyclopedias, and how-to’s. I joined two or three different book of the month clubs. Even if I never got around to reading them all, an extensive library made me feel empowered. I also spent thousands of dollars on home décor items to cover the shame of my cheap trailer-house faux wood paneling. I faithfully subscribed to stacks of women’s magazines, each one promising that I could “walk my way fit,” “find out what he really wants in bed,” and make the “best chocolate cake ever” all at the same time. I filled the empty space in my character with possessions, and I did it with amazing skill. No one looking at me from the outside would have guessed how addicted I was to stuff.

I bought all these things with money that I did not have to spend. My priorities were badly messed up. We were always behind on our house payment and medical bills. Collection agencies were ringing our phone off the hook while I buried my head in the latest catalogs and yearned to buy my children everything I thought that they should want. I got into the insane habit of “floating” checks. I would go to the grocery store and request money over the amount of purchase. Then I would run to the bank and deposit that cash to cover another check that I had written the day before. Time and again, it never really worked, and I never really learned. When one bank grew tired of my shenanigans, I opened a new account at another.

Chapter Five-- page 4

I can’t speak for Joyce, but for my part, I believed that a 1976 trailer in a rented lot was just a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I told myself that this was the way life was supposed to be: A young couple starts small, and then they, to borrow a phrase from the immortal Dr. Seuss, “keep biggering and biggering.”

I wanted more. I wanted newer. I wanted nicer. I wanted better. The same longing that had filled my heart since childhood grew from innocent hope to something so twisted that it is hard for even me to explain.

On the one hand, I loved my life; I truly did. My children and my marriage were, without any doubt, more wonderful and fulfilling than I had ever imagined. My home was clean, well-ordered, and peaceful. Dan built me a beautiful tiered vegetable garden in the back yard, and he even put a door on the shed. Deep down, I was still the leftover hippie chick that I had always been: I grew, canned and cooked my own organic food. I gave birth to my last two babies at home and breastfed them with absolute devotion. I continued to diaper them in real cotton. I sewed most all of the family’s clothes myself. I started attending homeschooling support groups and reading books about homeschooling when our first baby was only five weeks old. Throughout their childhoods, I taught all my kids at home until they went to college. I worked outside my home, and attended college myself, only when my hours did not affect the children’s schooling. I was a fiercely devoted mother, homemaker and wife. That was who I truly was with every fiber of my being.

On the other hand, I was miserable because my lifestyle did not fit into my Brady-Bunch-Pledge-commercial-Mr. Bubble imagination. I could not reconcile my real values with my imagined ones. Dan was an ordinary low income blue collar worker without any real prospects of advancement, and I was a refugee from the Le Leche League. Joyce eventually put her kids in public school, got a job and moved out of the trailer park. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that. I was once again the only housewife in the not-so-happy neighborhood, and I was filled with self loathing, even in the midst of genuine happiness.

Chapter Five-- page 3

I soon found out that Joyce was a year and a half older than me. Unfortunately, she was cursed with extraordinary youthful looks. A youthful appearance is great after the age of thirty-five, but looking eternally fifteen when she was in her late twenties was sometimes a little embarrassing. Joyce was a wife, mother, and business owner, but she had trouble getting waited on in the grocery store. The clerks often thought she was the daughter of the customer in front of her, and would pass her over for the next adult in line.

The two of us became closer than sisters over the next few years, and our kids regarded one another as cousins. We did almost everything together, and helped one another through those early years with young children and small bank accounts.

I remember once when my second daughter, Beverley, was about eighteen months old, and I was about eight and a half months pregnant with my son, I was exhausted, so I put Beverley to bed and locked myself in my room for a good cry and possibly a nap. By the time she was old enough to stand up; there wasn’t a crib on earth that could hold her. She could scale over the side of her bed faster than a Marine at boot camp. Beverley hoisted herself over the crib rails, toddled to my bedroom door, threw herself on the floor, stuck her cherub little face under the crack and screamed bloody murder. I was so overwrought; I did not want to open the door and possibly hurt my precious little one out of frustration. I covered my head with a pillow and just let both of us cry. Joyce heard the baby howling all the way over at her house and came over to see what was wrong. She knocked at my door, but when I did not answer, she came in, analyzed the situation, picked up Beverley, and took her back to her house. She did not judge me, or scold me, or call the nice men in the little white coats. She just loved me, and I don’t know who I would have been without her living next door.

Both of us struggled financially. I can’t count the number of times that the two of us combined our resources just to get through dinner. She would have noodles and canned tomatoes in the cupboard, and I would have a little hamburger and a couple of cans of green beans. Between the two of us we had enough to feed both of our families.

We not only shared our food, but we also sometimes split the housework. I hated to fold clothes. To this day, the very thought of fifteen thousand different little piles of baby socks, training pants, tiny milk-stained t-shirts, lacy ruffled tights, and sleepers with a dozen little snaps that only the most skilled engineer can figure out makes my stomach hurt. Seriously, the same washer that fits only five pair of adult jeans can hold seventy five thousand teeny tiny baby socks, of which it eats at least fifteen per load. Joyce liked folding clothes, but she hated to clean the bathroom. I enjoyed cleaning bathrooms, so sometimes we swapped toilets for laundry. We also got into reading to one another. She came over and read aloud to me while I did my housework, and I read to her while she did hers.

We had so many things in common: She had four kids. I eventually had four kids. Both of us were stay-home mommies. Both of us had a hard time making ends meet. We were genuinely happy, but at the same time, secretly discontent. Both of us had big imaginations and we dreamed of life beyond a doublewide trailer.

Chapter Five-- page 2

The mobile home park into which we moved could have had Mr. Bubble potential. The place was teeming with kids. They were everywhere: playing with Matchbox cars in the middle of the street, stealing one another’s bikes, beating up weaklings, and darting mindlessly across the busy state highway that bordered the park. Soon after we moved in, strange kids (and I mean in all senses of the word) started knocking on my door and asking if they could come in to play.

“No, sweetheart,” I would tell them, “you can’t come in unless I talk to your mommy. I don’t know where you live. You don’t know me. Your parents will worry.”

Time and again they tried to assure me that their mom wouldn’t care. She wasn’t home. They were being watched by a big sister, mom’s boyfriend or nobody at all. I was probably the only stay-home mother within a quarter mile radius. For the first six months in our new home I was pretty lonely.

The mobile home lot next door to us had been empty when we moved in, but one day, two big trucks pulled up and delivered a brand new doublewide. The following day a passenger van was parked beside it. On the back of it were two bumper stickers. One said, “Get back to basics: Read the Bible.” The other proudly proclaimed, “I love my kids: We all buckle up.” A Christian family with kids! I was so excited.

Right away I baked a loaf of banana bread and trotted it over to their front door as fast as my pregnant little body with two toddlers in tow could take me. I knocked on the door, and when it opened, my heart sunk. There stood a teenage girl surrounded by four children, two elementary school aged girls and a pair of twin two-year-old boys. Bummer. Just another big sister babysitter.

“I live next door, and I baked some banana bread,” I said weakly. I was just about to ask if her mother was at home, but I sensed from the way the boys were clinging to her and rubbing their graham cracker snot on her legs that she was the mother. The girl looked like she could be no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Biologically, it seemed unlikely, but clearly, these were her children.

“Come on in,” she smiled. “I’m Joyce. I’m so glad you didn’t ask me if my mother was home. Everybody asks me if my mother is home, and I always say, ‘Why don’t you call her and find out.’”

Chapter Five-- page 1

I was right, of course. A 1976 model double-wide mobile home on a rented lot could never match a shining, freshly waxed dream home. While I was honestly happy with our home, I was not content. Part of my discontentment came from the same longing that had filled my soul since I was a little girl. Other people lived differently than me. They had professional husbands who wore ties to work, and they lived in real neighborhoods with pretty flowers lining their picket fences, and they had swing sets in the back yard. Other ladies, I thought, had lovely neighbors with whom they could gossip over the back fence while their children held a Mr. Bubble Backyard Pool Party.

During my stint as a Saturday morning couch potato, I used to watch a commercial for Mr. Bubble in which a beautiful, slender, Dippity-Doo-coiffed mother relaxed on her chaise while a screeching group of small children jumped around in a wading pool filled with Mr. Bubble. The suburban yard was neatly manicured. The children even had a little cabana boy who dispensed towels from what looked like a lemonade stand on which was scrawled “Mr. Bubble Pool Party” in TV-kid lettering. The children were all obviously happy neighbors from a happy neighborhood. That was the life I wanted!

Growing up on the ranch, I did not have a neighborhood. My nearest neighbors were my cousins who lived across the alfalfa field and down the length of a drainage ditch on the other side of the highway. They were the kind of kids who pushed one another off the top bunk just for fun and never blew their noses: not really Mr. Bubble Pool Party material.

Chapter Four-- page 6

When it came to dealing with our possessions, the two of us were operating under opposite paradigms: I wanted my new home to look like a Pledge commercial, and he could have lived happily in the back room of the local Salvation Army Thrift Store. As long as everything was put away and out of sight, I was happy. As long as everything was out in the open where he left it, he was happy. We got into a lot of fights about it.

During one argument Dan said, “Who cares? It’s my dresser, and if I want my stuff left out, who does it bother?”

“Everyone in the whole world!” I responded, “Everyone except you thinks your dresser is a disaster, an eyesore and a health hazard.”

“Okay,” he sneered, “if you can get just ten people to sign written affidavits that my dresser bothers them, I will clean it up myself.”

I had yet to meet a spousal challenge that I could not handle.

“You’re on!”

I called all my friends and requested written statements regarding their feelings about Dan’s bedroom blight. Here are some of the excerpts from the responses:

“Dear Dan,
I am afraid your wife is reaching a critical stage of a disease commonly known as ‘heapaphobia.’ It is the extreme inordinate fear of growing piles of paper and pocket trinkets. Sufferers have been known to charge these growing heaps of garbage with flaming blow torches. This could be very hazardous for you, Dan, as you would lose not only your trivial belongings, but also your dresser and, perhaps your half of the bed…”

“Dearest Dan,
I think that your pile of stuff next to your bed is not only unsightly and disgusting, but might well be considered a fire hazard. If this is to go on much longer, Marianne may have to leave you to come live with me and stay up late into the night, drinking sparkling cider and eating bon bons…”

He even received a solicitation from a dubious nonprofit organization:

“Dear Mr. Liggett,
You have been recommended to us as some one who might have an interest in our growing organization. We believe that we, with your help, can eradicate a very serious problem that is sweeping our great and beloved nation.

“Our Get-Objects-Off-Bureaus-in Every-Room Society (commonly known as G.O.O.B.E.R.S) is made up of American citizens who, like you, believe in making our nation a better place to live. Please do not confuse us with B.O.O.G.E.R.S (Bureaus-Of-Overflowing-Garbage-Excessively-Rank Society), our arch rivals. Our goal is simply the preservation and promotion of neat and organized Bureaus and Dressers. We believe if we can get just 30% of the population to maintain organizationally correct bureaus, we could vastly improve the quality of life in America…” The letter went on to ask for a sizable monetary contribution.

Unfortunately, Dan also received a few letters of support:

“Dear Dan,
With respect to your wife’s disdain for your arrangement of highly important documents and items, I feel that it is not only a man’s right, but indeed his duty, to hold fast to those principles that he holds most dear. In short, bully for you!”

One legal eagle wrote:
“Dear Dan,
After much research and investigation within the hallowed halls of our constitutional interpretive rights, I see no other course of action but that you stand firm and withstand the pressure to give up your rights. We gave up tyranny with the Constitution and the establishment of the People’s Bill of Rights.

“The First Amendment states: ‘No law may be passed abridging the freedom of speech.’ This has recently been expanded by the Supreme Court to include personal actions and expressions of one’s personality quirks. This also includes the right of people to peaceably assemble. I would take this, in your case, to mean to assemble your personal belongings in the place of your choosing…” The writer went on to explain that “the right to bare arms” meant that he was free to take off his watch wherever he wanted to.

I failed to get all ten affidavits, so the battle of the dresser continued. Even though nothing changed, at least we got a bit of comic relief for our situation. I thought about Mrs. Chism, Mrs. Parks and Jill’s mom with her white shag carpet. Surely, they didn’t fight with their husbands about piles of junk, did they? No matter how I kept house, I believed that mine could never measure up.

Chapter Four-- page 5

I think Dan lacked Object Permanence. That is the developmental stage during which babies learn that, if Mommy steps out of the room, she is not gone forever. Most children gain object permanence when they are six or seven months old. Usually, by the time a baby is crawling, he knows that the red polka-dotted ball that he threw behind the couch five minutes ago is still there. Not my husband. If his stuff was not out in plain sight right where he can see it, it was thrown away, lost, or stolen! Why would I want to steal his 2 mm drill bit? Or his spark plug gapping tool? Or his half-eaten Mars bar? Okay, maybe that one was a bad example.

Unlike my husband, I liked stuff to be just that: stuffed. Nowhere was the struggle more evident than in our bedroom. Every day I would send Dan off to work with clean clothes and empty pockets. Every evening he would come home with his pockets full of junk to dump onto the dresser. Small tools, receipts, gum wrappers, phone numbers, phone numbers written on receipts and gum wrappers, trinkets, whatnots, and goo-gaws were unloaded routinely every night. This would not have been a problem, if he would put everything back in his pocket the next day. Every morning he went away with his pockets empty. Every night he added to the pile.

I started sliding his pocket junk into a little box which I placed in the top drawer of the dresser. That way, I was moving his stuff only about six inches, but it would be out of sight. He didn’t like it, but he put up with it temporarily. When the little box was full, I emptied it into a shoe box, which I stored neatly underneath the dresser. When the shoe box filled up, I moved it over and started another. The space under the dresser could hold three shoe boxes. When those were filled, I taped them closed, labeled each one with the date and stored them out in the shed with the old box of Reader’s Digests and, no kidding, that original box of ironing.

Dan could see that my system worked well, but he was never really happy about it. Cognitively he could grasp that, if he ever needed any of his pocket trinkets, he could find them. If he tried to argue with me about it, he always ended up agreeing with me rationally. Emotionally, though, he felt violated. It was his stuff. He liked his stuff. He wanted his stuff, and most of all, he wanted his stuff left out where he could see it.

Whether from conscious rebellion or from unconscious passive aggression, Dan began leaving bigger and sometimes more disgusting things on his dresser for me to deal with. He piled everything from masonry tools and magazines to Halloween costumes and already chewed gum. While he was at work, I would daily squirrel his stuff out of sight.

Chapter Four-- page 4

I loved that dishwasher. For the first time in my life, dirty dishes could be out of sight somewhere other than under my brother George’s bed.

Shortly after moving into the new house, I got pregnant with our third child, and I started babysitting Holly’s baby. Nonetheless, our home stayed tidy, peaceful and clean most of the time. I had mad skills in housekeeping. My goal was to have myself and the house looking good by 7:00 every morning before Holly arrived. Apart from the occasional untamed diaper explosion, or unexpected yogurt finger paint on the furniture, I was able to do it.

I loved being a housewife, and I worked hard at honing my skills to do a better and better job. I bought and read every organizational book I could find. I was focused, but not obsessive. Anyone walking in at almost any moment would have seen peace and order. That was because I had a dishwasher where dirty dishes could hide… and a shed with a door where storage could hide….and closets for everything else.

I didn’t like messes to be out in the open, but as long as I could keep the door closed so nobody else could see, our closets, pantry, cupboards and dressers were a shambles. As long as everything looked good on the surface, I was happy. My husband, on the other hand, liked to leave stuff out where he could see it.

Chapter Four-- page 3

Mrs. Belcher had every intention of making good on her threats, but we sold the trailer and bought a doublewide mobile home on a nicer rented lot in another park before she actually got the chance to take us to court. The odd thing was that we cleaned up the yard, planted a lawn, put a fresh coat of paint on the outside, and installed skirting to get our home ready for sale. The new buyers reaped the benefits of our efforts. Somehow, we were able to do for someone else what we had not done for ourselves.

Our new doublewide was beautiful, at least as beautiful as a mobile home that was built in 1976 could be. The walls were all covered in dark wood paneling and the shag carpeting was brown, orange and gold. The kitchen linoleum had a funky print looked like the top of a pizza. I mean it: I could have dropped an entire pepperoni pizza on the kitchen floor, and it would have been camouflaged. Ugly, yes, but it was very handy for the mother of toddlers. It didn’t matter how many spit-soaked graham crackers got stuck to the floor; they disappeared into the landscape.

I loved my new home. It was over twice the size of our first trailer, and it had a washing machine. A washing machine!! I had been praying for a washing machine. I dreamed of how wonderful life could be if I didn’t have to tote dirty diapers and laundry on the back of a double stroller any more. Oh, the leisurely hours I could spend, and the pockets full of quarters I could save! The double-wide had not only a washing machine, but also a dryer and a dishwasher. I was really moving up in the world.

Chapter Four-- page 2

The park manager, Mrs. Belcher, was a really scary lady. She was big, tough, and a little bit twisted. She lived in the double-wide behind the park office with her quiet skinny husband and their thirty-five year old son, who served as minion in her trailer court kingdom. Rules were her religion. She observed them and enforced them with absolute devotion. Nobody liked her, except for maybe the landlord, who reaped the benefits of her tireless efforts from his vacation home in Florida.

She was harsh, persistent, unpleasant and effective. The mobile home park which had previously teemed with life from feral cats and unlicensed dogs became a totally pet-free zone. Gone were the pesky motorcycles and unsightly broken down vehicles. Everyone’s yard had lawn, and everyone had skirting around the bottom his trailer: Everyone except us.

I felt desperate, angry and trapped. I was scared of Mrs. Belcher, but Dan found her laughable. He said she looked like an English bulldog in a dress. He told me not to take her so seriously. He was right about the bulldog thing, of course, but I did not think he was very funny. When we were going together, I loved Dan’s sense of humor and his laid-back attitude. Now as his wife and the mother of his children, I found him infuriating.

I had gotten on the cleaning and de-cluttering bandwagon, but Dan had not. The day after Bulldog Belcher photographed my yard, I took action. I called a friend of ours who had a big pickup and had him back it over our pathetic brick planter, right up the shed door opening. He and I heaved Aunt Doll’s pink taffeta dresser, all the couponing and refunding junk, the spaghetti pan, the extra ratty towels and box after box of God-only-knows. I pulled up as many bricks from the planter as I could and tossed those in, too. I kept the box of ironing and the two-years-worth of Reader’s Digest because I knew that Dan would remember that they were there. When Dan came home from work that night, I had never seen him so angry. I challenged him to think of even one thing that I had thrown out. He could not.

I felt victorious, but I had begun a war which raged privately between my husband and I for decades afterward.

Chapter Four-- page 1

Chapter Four

Wouldn’t it be spiffy if I could end my story right there? I lived my life in a Pledge commercial happily ever after. The end.

I had learned some really great skills, tips and techniques for keeping house, many of which I will share later in this book, but I still held on to some wrong thinking that did not work well for me. First was my idea of what work was, or was not, my responsibility. I believed that all work within the four walls of our home was within my jurisdiction. Cooking, cleaning, decorating, and diaper dunking were my jobs. Beyond these, I graciously tended the garden because, for one thing, it was intrinsically part of my job as hippie/cook; and, for another, I enjoyed it. Everything else belonged to Dan. A fair division of labor seemed a righteous cause.

I believed that my job was to clean the house, to keep the children bathed and potty-trained, and to assure that the two pound chub of liverwurst I bought on sale last week got used before turning green in the refrigerator. I had my job. Dan had his. He was supposed to finish the brick planter and to put a door on the shed. I also expected to be entirely free of any consequences from his failure to do so. I shoved things into the shed haphazardly, and left boxes and debris flowing out into the yard without any sense of personal responsibility. It wasn’t my job. Why should I care?

Our yard looked like a poorly run flea market. Strangers would randomly stop by and ask if I were having a yard sale. For a short time I worked at home as the bookkeeper for the Christian school that was housed in my church. Once, when my boss stopped by to drop off some receipts, she got upset because I had not told her I was moving.

“What gave you the idea that I was moving?” I asked.

“You clearly have things boxed up and stacked in the yard!”

“Oh, no,” I responded, “my husband just isn’t as organized as I am.”

She looked at me like I was the stupidest woman on earth. Maybe I was.

That day she took the ledgers away from me and told me that I would have to do all my work at the office. The main reason I had taken the job was that I had been able to work from home. I don’t really remember whether I quit shortly after that, or I was fired, but I felt I had been treated very unfairly.

The worst thing about having a messy yard was the trailer park manager. She banged on my door at least once a week. Sometimes I answered. Sometimes I hid. Most times she left threatening notices on my door. One time while I was hiding and peeking out the front window, she walked through the yard and snapped pictures. I assumed that she intended to use them in court. I was angry at my husband. Why didn’t he just clean things up out there? Why should this be my problem? I was doing my job: Why wasn’t he doing his?

Chapter Three-- page 9

I had been in a sort of Catch-22: My eyes were not attuned to my surroundings because everything was a mess, and everything was a mess because my eyes were not attuned to my surroundings. I had been blind to my own messes because each one by itself had served a purpose. In my mind, the soggy newspapers on the floor of the utility closet were intended for cleaning windows. The stacks of Reader’s Digest were there to be read. The dusty monogrammed towels were supposed to look pretty. I was not completely blind; I knew that my house was a mess, but somehow, I had been missing the big picture.

I had been trudging through a mental list of tasks every day, instead of pursuing the goal of a beautiful, clean, welcoming home. Instead of vacuuming out of obligation, I began vacuuming for the sake of beauty. Instead of dusting because I was lost in the imagery of an old commercial, I dusted because I wanted my house to look nice. Even though washing the dishes all at once when all of them were dirty seemed logical, it did not serve for a beautiful kitchen. My goal changed from simply doing dishes to having an empty sink and cleared countertops. When I was stuck in job-orientation, I took all day to get nothing done. Instead doing housework for the sake of housework, I started cleaning my home with the goal of having a clean home. The difference may have been subtle, but it is all the difference in the world.

When I felt like I had all day to get my work done, I took all day to do it. Once I began to realize that keeping a clean house was the means to an end, I hurried as quickly as I could to tidy up things. Keeping the house tidy freed me for more important activities. I could go to Bible Study without guilt or fear. I could visit my elderly widowed neighbor without the doom of a messy house awaiting me when I returned. I could invite friends over on a moment’s notice. I could pop the girls in their stroller and walk down to the library for story time, or I could zip through my housework and give myself a full day to sew and suck down coffee just like Aunt Doll, if that is what I wanted to do.

Becoming goal-oriented saved me a lot of work, too. If the carpet looked good, I had no need to vacuum it. If I had only a couple of breakfast dishes in the sink, it took only a few seconds to give them a quick swipe and put them away in the cupboard. There was no need to pull out the Pledge and a handful of rags, if a quick little swish of a feather duster would do. My goal was to create a lovely home, and to do it in short order every day, so I could live the abundant, joy-filled life that God had intended for me from the beginning.

Chapter Three-- page 8

My life was changing right before our eyes. My two baby girls were still in cloth diapers which still needed to be taken to the Laundromat three or four times a week. I had the same garden that needed to be tended. I continued to live in a four-hundred-seventy square foot trailer in a rented mobile home space. My soul was still that of a leftover hippy. Neither I personally, nor my circumstances, had changed one bit. Two things had changed, however: my basic knowledge of housekeeping and my fundamental thinking concerning it.

I was not lazy. I had not been lazy since the Saturday morning Scooby-Doo days of my youth. I was not stupid, or blind, or uncaring about my home. Before reading that first organizational book, I simply lacked skill.

No one had ever taught me how to keep house before. Growing up I had been taught how to dress myself and to tie my own shoes, how to wash my hair, how to sew, and how to write a term paper. I had even learned how to pluck a chicken when the occasion arose. I had been given all the equipment, knowledge and resources needed to complete those and hundreds of other tasks. I had taken three years of Home Ec in high school. There I learned personal hygiene from an outdated textbook, how to wrap a Christmas package, and the importance of keeping my muffins from having “peaks and tunnels.” Somehow, the practical how-to’s of housework, time management and organization were never on the curriculum.

Knowledge by itself is not what made the difference. The biggest change came in my thinking. I was a housewife. Housewives do housework, so everyday that is what I had been doing. To me, housework had been a chore, a drudgery or, at best, an obligation. I vacuumed because that is what housewives were supposed to do. I dusted because that is what I saw the pretty flitty moms do on television. I did dishes when there were none left clean. My eyes were not attuned to the big picture, only to the tasks at hand. The biggest difference Holly’s book had made was how I perceived my job as homemaker. It changed my thinking from job-orientation to goal-orientation.

Chapter Three-- page 7

I made a courageous decision: I took the dusty monogrammed towels off the rack and put them in the dirty clothes hamper, sorted through the excess towels, kept only the few that we could use, and gave away the rest. After they were washed, we actually used those fancy towels to dry our bodies. Shocking! I felt like a Bohemian. I had never actually seen beautiful towels in use before, and I was sure that it simply was not done in polite company. I also felt a little bit naughty: When I was a teenager, a psycho lady once screamed at me for drying my hands on her show towels. It felt good to break the rules a little, and in some small way, get my revenge. As it turned out, those beautiful fluffy white monogrammed towels felt as good as they had looked on the rack. They felt better, in fact, than my Pledge-commercial-house ideals.

Each decision that I made expanded my mind and opened my eyes a little more every day. Rethinking the way I had been living, and putting it all aright, was like doing a Chinese puzzle. You know the little plastic kind with a tray full of numbered square tiles in random order with one tile missing? I used to get them as favors at birthday parties when I was a kid. To put the numbers in order I had to slide one tile at a time into the empty space. In the process of solving the puzzle, the numbers would become jumbled and unjumbled multiple times before they were set in order. That is how my thoughts were as I worked my way through the clutter. Over and over I had to ask myself, “What should I keep? Where should I put it? What should I throw out? What should I store? What if I need it again? How much is enough?”

Sometimes, like with the monogrammed towel decision, I had to give up my dreams for a better reality. Many times, however, I was not ready yet to let go, so I boxed things up and put them out in the still-doorless shed. The inside of our home, the part over which I had jurisdiction, was looking better and better.

The next time Holly came over again, about five days after giving me the book, she was stunned. As she came through the front door, she had to catch herself from falling off the stairs. The house was clean; the girls were napping, dinner was simmering in the crockpot and I was relaxing on the sofa reading.

Chapter Three-- page 6

I found it harder to make decisions about our clutter in the bathroom. Our bathroom was so tiny; it seemed like an afterthought in the design of our mobile home. It was so small; we practically had to pull down our pants in the hallway and back in to use the toilet. It had a small corner sink surrounded by a few of inches of counter space, just big enough to hold a couple of toothbrushes and a set of electric rollers to quaff my already out-of-date Farrah Fawcet hairdo. Underneath it was a little cupboard for storage, and beside it built into the wall was a small triangular closet which held a five gallon hot water heater on the bottom and two storage shelves above. Next to the toilet was a full sized bathtub with shower. It was ridiculous use of the limited space because, with only a five gallon hot water heater, we had to boil water in the three gallon spaghetti pot a couple of times if we ever wanted to take a bath. The toilet was squeezed in between the generous bathtub and the wall. I had often thought how lucky we were that we were both very thin when we were young. If we had been any bigger we would have needed to call the fire department with the Jaws of Life to get us off the toilet. How was our family of four supposed to function in such limited space?



We needed all the stuff we had in the bathroom, but how much was enough? We had two babies. We really needed only two hooded baby towels, not the six that I had crammed into the shelves above the water heater. For the two of us we had multiple mismatched towels packed tightly into the closet shelves. My favorite ones, however, were the ones I never used: a beautiful set of fluffy white towels with gold monograms that we had received as a gift from Dan’s brother for our wedding. They hung on the towel bar literally collecting dust.



When I was growing up I had visited homes that had pretty towels hanging in the bathroom just for show. I believed them to be an essential part of a proper Pledge commercial house. I had only one towel bar, and so it seemed only fitting to grace it with the best and most beautiful that I had to offer. I loved my monogrammed towels, but keeping them hanging on the only towel bar meant that I had nowhere to hang the ratty old towels with which we always dried ourselves. We needed our closet full of crummy towels because we used them all: Since we had nowhere to hang used towels, we threw them into the dirty clothes hamper after just one use. I had to rethink my priorities. How could I free up space in the towel cupboard without sacrificing my pretty towel dream?

Chapter Three-- page 5

Throughout that first week my reality was changing. I felt as though I was walking out of a dense fog and into the sunshine. I was seeing things I had never seen before, and unfortunately smelling stinks that I had never smelled before! The good news was that I was thinking thoughts that had never crossed my mind before. As I continued to move from room to room, surface to surface, and drawer to drawer, I had to ask myself, “How much is enough?” The silverware organizer in the top kitchen drawer was so full that the teaspoons were overflowing into the forks. How many teaspoons did I really need? We had been given four different sets of drinking glasses for our wedding. Our kitchen was tiny, and shelf space was limited. How many drinking glasses could we really use, especially if I were actually to wash the dishes more than once a day? Under the kitchen sink I had stored a dozen bottles of cleaning products, each of which had promised me happiness and a sparkling clean home. Most of them were liars. How many could I use? What about the good money I had spent on those half-full bottles of empty promises? Sometimes answering those questions was really difficult. I had to force myself not to over think.

Sometimes the answers to my questions were so stunningly easy and clear; I was shocked at my own former dulled wit. In the hallway between the kitchen and bathroom was a little utility closet, just the right size for a mop, broom and dust pan. It was filled from the floor to about knee height with old newspapers. Back in high school, Holly’s mom had taught me that newspaper was excellent for cleaning glass surfaces, so I saved as many newspapers as I could. Crammed on top of them I kept my mop, which I had always put away wet. The pile had become soggy, smelly and moldy, but I had never noticed before. For the first time I asked myself why I had kept so many. If I had had the common sense that God gave a turnip, I would never have saved any of them because we had a daily subscription to the paper. I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. Could that have been me who had hung on to all this awful garbage? As I mucked the rotted mess out of the utility closet, I fought back my shame and forged on.

Chapter Three-- page 4

Before I had even finished the first chapter, I set myself to doing everything in the book. I got three boxes which I marked “Give Away,” “Put Away,” and “Throw Away.” Starting at the first piece of furniture by the front door, which was the sofa, I picked up one item at a time and sorted it into its appropriate box. Some things were easy to classify: Popsicle wrappers were throw-aways; puppets from the church puppet ministry were put-aways.

Other things were harder: Like, what was to be done with two years worth of Reader’s Digest magazines on the coffee table? Don’t magazines belong on coffee tables? How many magazines? What if we needed some of the information they contained? Besides, the collection belonged to Dan, not me. My husband loved Reader’s Digest. I, on the other hand, found it to be a source of humiliation, as he beat me at “Word Power” month after month. I found another box and marked it, “Ask Dan.” I was on a crusade to save my house, and I could not let a few magazines slow me down. Besides, unlike Joan of Arc, I did not want to get burned at the stake.

I moved from one piece of furniture to the next, sorting and tossing. By the end of the first day, I had decluttered my entire living room and most of the kitchen. Whenever the throw away box got filled, I walked it out to community dumpster at the end of my street. I filled garbage sacks with give-away stuff and put them in the trunk of my car to take to the thrift store. I did my best to find homes for all the items that needed to be put away, but sometimes, I didn’t know where things belonged. I still had to take care of a nursing baby, a toddler and all their cloth diapers, but I was making genuine progress. When Dan came home that evening, he was a little dubious about my new crusade. He was afraid that I would blithely toss out his stuff. I showed him the “Ask Dan” box, crossed my fingers behind my back, and promised to be respectful of his possessions.

He wanted to hang on to the Reader’s Digests because he thought it might be nice to have a complete collection, but he agreed that I only needed to keep the two most current issues on the coffee table. I boxed up the rest, labeled them and stuffed them in the shed with his box of ironing.

The next day, after a successful decluttering session, I loaded up the girls in their double stroller, propped the diaper pail on the back of it, and headed over to the Laundromat on the other side of the mobile home park with my fabulous new book in hand. It was a beautiful summer day, and my house looked cleaner than it ever had under my watch. I left both the front and back doors of the trailer open to air out. . It was the first time I had ever felt the freedom to fling my doors open wide for God and all of humanity to see.

When Dan drove into our street that afternoon, he was met with two unmarked police cars and FBI agents pointing guns at the trailer across the street from ours. They yelled at him to stay back, but he rushed past them, frantic to get into the house. The place looked stripped clean; his wife and children were missing, and FBI agents were holding some criminal at bay across the street. He could only assume the worst!

“Where are my wife and daughters?” he called out to the police.
“Stay back, sir,” they barked.

After the worst five minutes of Dan’s life, a strange man emerged from the mobile home across the street with his hands over his head. The excitement was over.

“Where’s my wife?” Dan yelled at the officers. They did not answer, but only escorted the suspect into their vehicle and drove away.

He ran across the street to find out what happened. The neighbors had let a casual friend from out of town flop on their couch for a few days, and it turned out that the guy had been robbing banks all over the state. Dan was relieved, but that still did not explain why his family, and what looked like most of his worldly goods, were missing from his home. Meanwhile, I was peacefully unaware of the hullabaloo, reading my great new organizational book and hanging diapers on the clothesline beside the Laundromat. By the time I returned home to cook his dinner, I was happy and relaxed, and he was totally freaked out.

I was not missing, and neither was any of our stuff. The house just looked clean, that was all! My small amount of effort was already accomplishing great things.

Chapter Three-- page 3

God was speaking to me in small and significant ways. First it was through the ladies who cleaned my house. Next it was the frame-dusting lady. Finally, though, it was through a book. It just so happened that Holly went into a bookstore, and there right in front was a big display rack of the newest bestseller which just so happened to be a book that was about to change my life. I am a strong believer in the idea that nothing “just so happens.” God loves me too much, and is wildly too amused by me, to let anything good that He has planned for me randomly slip through His fingers. The book should have had my picture on the front: It was about one woman’s struggle with overcoming clutter and her journey to a life of peace and order. Holly bought two copies, one for her and one for me. It was one of the best gifts I have ever received in my life.

Until then, I believed that I was alone in my squalor. Sure, Holly’s apartment was less than ideal, but her problems were not as bad as mine. I thought nobody’s problems were as bad as mine! Have you ever seen those commercials on TV where a kid sits cross-legged on the floor, opens a book and a great beam of light shines forth, carrying on it great heroic figures of history and literature? That is exactly how I felt when I started to read this book. The author had been just like me. She had overflowing clutter just like me. Her utensil drawer was filled with toast crumbs; her bathroom had a dull yellow film in all the wrong places, and her shed was crammed piles of regrets, just like mine. Hallelujah! Her words were a beacon, and she was my Joan of Arc, charging forward to reclaim her homeland. Not only did everything the author said inspire me, but also her methods and techniques made total sense in my clutter-filled world.

Chapter Three-- page 2

A day or two after Glynis and her Kamikaze Cleaning Crew had stripped the scales from my eyes Holly came to see my house. She was as astonished as I was at the difference. While Holly never suffered from the same Pledge-commercial-Brady-Bunch-Barbie-plastic-turkey delusions that I did, she struggled with a messy apartment. Holly had been raised in a clean home, but she had not learned how to do housework when she was a kid. As a full time working single mother, Holly found herself battling messes and clutter just like I did. She marveled with me at the deep-down-cleanness of everything. Who knew that a drain board could be scrubbed with Ajax? We both thought that brown gooey stains on the dish drainer were inevitable. Like me, she never thought about whether or not toaster crumbs could actually be cleaned out of a utensil drawer. Both of us were smart enough to know that our homes did not look like others we had seen, but neither of us understood what needed to be done to gap the difference.

Somehow, in my mind, things looked good when they were new, and then, over time, they got dirty. I possessed some very rudimentary cleaning skills: I knew that a vacuum cleaner should be plugged into a wall, turned on and moved back and forth across a carpet. I knew that I was supposed to spray Pledge on furniture and wipe off the dust. I understood that, when all the drinking glasses were dirty, and I found myself getting a drink of water out of a wide mouth Mason jar, it was time to do the dishes. I did not understand, however, how to have a clean house.

My eyes were gradually opening to the possibility of a different way of life. When my girls were babies, I taught needlecraft classes and sold needlecraft kits and accessories at in-home parties. Once as I was passing around a beautifully framed needlepoint picture, a customer casually commented that she preferred to make her stitcheries into pillows because then she would not need to dust the frame on her wall. Dust the frame? Dust the frame? People dust frames on their walls? What a fascinating concept! I told Holly about it, and she said that she had never gotten the frame-dusting memo, either.