Cleaning Your House

Maybe just everyone in the whole family. We walk into the living room. There’s stuff everywhere. And we have one of two reactions. One reaction might be, they should pick that up. And the feeling is going to be something like anger. Now, remember I want a better feeling than anger. So try to find one a little bit more specific, but it’s going to be in the anger family where you’re just like this isn’t fair. Why is this happening? And we feel angry. Okay. And when we have that thought, they should pick this up and we feel angry. Then for a place of anger, we often snap at people. We’re not really good at being kind. We might act in a pouty wave for the rest of the day. We might take it out on someone. We might go eat food. Anger is a very strong emotion. And when we feel that way, looking at all of the messages, the piles of clothes or the dishes, it makes for a pretty unhappy recipe. But now we know that our thoughts control our feelings. And so it’s just the thought they should pick that up. That’s causing us to be so angry. You think it’s the clothes using the toys or the dishes like, Oh, but it’s, it’s actually that nobody’s cleaning. That’s what makes me so angry. I’m the only one who does it,

But it’s just a thought you have about that.

So another way that we react to people, not helping us and looking at the messages, okay, this is the second thought that people often have is, Oh, I’m the only one who cares or something like I will be stuck doing this forever. And the feeling behind those two feelings are going to be more like sadness and despair and hopelessness

Where you’re just like, I just cleaned that. I just put that away. Why do I have to put the toys in the basket 15 times a day, I’m in a toy in the basket phase. Some of you are in like teenagers, leaving their wrappers and socks and books everywhere. And some of your husbands do that.

But when you see the mess, you feel sad, some sort of sadness. And then from that sadness, you’ll do something else to make yourself feel better. Cause you don’t want to feel the sadness. So it’s going to be eating or Netflixing sometimes reading. We can do positive things to buffer. Buffering is what we choose to do when we don’t want to feel our feelings, maybe it’s drinking, which only makes us more sad. Hey, but right now you’re looking at messages and you’re feeling angry or sad. And this isn’t a personality type thing. You may be angry in the morning and sat in the evening, right? It’s anytime. But these are the two primary things that are happening for moms when they’re looking at the messages. Hey, but I want to offer to you

That it is your thoughts, not the mess that is creating your feelings. And here’s how I know because I’ve totally changed this about myself name. So I have lots of kids and I want to be a minimalist, but that is kind of challenging when you have eight people in a house. So I’ve accepted that and we have a pretty good balance, but they still have some toys. And part of my love of minimalism is really that I just love clean surfaces. And in my book about minimalism, I explained that those are two different things. Like some of us just really like things to be decluttered. You can declutter something and just shove everything in the closet, but still own all this stuff. So decluttering is actually different than minimalism. I like them both, but I like declutter decluttering more like I want to walk into a space and just see clear surfaces. My desk does not have very much stuff on it. And when it, I always, I just pause and I put things away, same as my dresser in my room. And then we have this long kitchen counter. We do have two tables. So we keep one table decluttered and then I’ve let the girls keep their art supplies out on their table. Although it’s true that every three days it gets to a level where I’m like, Nope, too much clean it off.

What’s I really, I really love clear surfaces and I want everyone in my family to love clear surfaces too. And they do not. Nobody else cares about that. Nobody and I walk into a room and I see that it’s cluttered the surface full of stuff. I used to get really upset. Doesn’t anyone see this? Am I the only one who’s going to take care of it. And now because of this work and really because of the work I did in weight loss, where I learned to love myself, I realized that for me, clearing surfaces is self-care clearing surfaces is self-care tidying up a space is like taking a bubble bath for me. And I have learned to do it just for myself because I can play the game all day long. They should want to do this, but they don’t, they don’t want to do it.

That’s like my husband really wanting me to be into hunting. He really wants me to want to go sit in the cold forest at four in the morning to watch for animals. That is just not what I want to do. And I’m okay with that. And that’s how they all feel about the tidying. They just don’t want to do it. So I have begun to tidy surfaces for myself as a form of self care. Did it this morning woke up this morning. I was the first one out in the living room and the boys had toppled over are tiny. It’s like a tiny basket, but there’s still like 20 toys in it. Legos, tiny cars and animals, things like that. And I was like, Oh yeah, I’m going to clear that up because that’ll make me happy. So I cleared it up, made some tea. And when I walked back into the living room, it made me feel so calm to see that there was nothing on the floor. That’s why it’s a bubble bath for me.

And I do that in all of the surfaces that are important to me. Now I just take a moment and I clean them and I do it just for me. It’s like painting my nails. I don’t really care about painting my nails, but I really like having clean surfaces. And sometimes I have to clean the same thing three times in a day, three times I’ll pick up the toys, but it feels like loving myself. And that is what I want for you. I want you to begin to repair your relationship with yourself and to love yourself. And for some of you, not all of you, but for some of you tidying things is actually going to be part of that. Now some of you were like, Oh, but children need to know how to

Do. Did you really know how to clean? Did you get to your first apartment and you were like, I know exactly how to clean. And I want to, I don’t think that’s many people’s experience. I think I cleaned before my friends came over. I think I stood in the cleaning aisle of target to figure it out.

Everyone figures out how to clean their house at some point. And that may or may not come from what they learned from their parents. They’re really not listening as much as we think they hear things we aren’t expecting them to hear and they take them in. But it’s rarely the, this is exactly how you clean a toilet stuff that sinks in now, my children still do chores. My oldest daughter does the dishes. My next daughter does the laundry. And my five-year-old is in charge of getting dishes off the table and food off the table and wiping it down. So we still have chores,

But it’s that in between tidying stuff that I think drives mom’s bananas. And we’re just like, Oh, somebody should help me with this. I just want to offer to you this idea. What if you just did it for yourself? Because you like looking at your house when the surfaces clean and maybe I’ll do another episode on how I get my children to do chores because moms love that topic. But the truth is I don’t expect them to do them with joy. So that is related to this, which is I’m like, of course they don’t want to do it, but they have to do it. So I switched. I get to it’s time to get that done, but I have zero expectation that they’re going to do it without me asking them or that they’re going to do it with cheeriness.

Yes.

So I want you to walk around your house today and I want you to just pay attention to the things that bug you. First, recognize they only bug you, not everyone else. That’s okay.

And that taking care of them doesn’t mean you’re a doormat tidying. The counter doesn’t mean you’re going to be a slave Cinderella for the rest of your life, because the truth is if you lived by yourself, you would still tidy the counter. It would be less frequent, but it would still make you happy. You would do it just for you. If I lived on an Island by myself in house, cause I’m not living outside in an abandoned house, I would still tidy it for myself. If no one else was around and no one was there to see it.

But that’s okay.

How I know that it’s about loving myself and taking care of myself. Now, do I feel that way about the laundry? Nope. If I live by myself, I would probably have a pile of clean laundry somewhere and she’d be like, it’s fine in the basket. I don’t really care about that. Now we have that as a chore for my seven year old, because we have a lot of people in their clothes need to get to their rooms. But really once they get to their rooms, I’m a lot less picky about what happens. Nobody folds anything in my house. Everyone just stuffs things in their drawers, including yours, truly none of the clothes I own wrinkles. So they can all be stuffed in a drawer.

So calm about that. Some of you are, your eyes are like twitching. You’re like, Oh no, you have to fold those clothes and hang them up in the closet. And that’s okay. But that’s how you know that doing that is self-care for you. We need to start speaking more kindly to ourselves in our brains and having the thought they should pick that up and being angry. Or I’m the only one who does anything around here and feeling hopeless or disrespected or taken for granted. Those are really painful things. And it’s just because we’re telling ourselves a story and listen, I did that for the last nine years. Did that for nine years until I thought, wait a minute. If my thoughts control my feelings, I don’t, I just have a different thought about tidying and I’m getting much better about that for things that bother me.

I’m just asking myself, wait, does this really bother me? Or do I just think it should? For example, we have some leaves in our front yard. We did several rounds of raking up leaves. We have lots of big, beautiful trees around our house and I love them. So I’m not upset about the leaves I was able to get there. But I really don’t like looking bad in front of the neighbors, which is a totally made up thing, but it’s in my mind. And so I’m like, we gotta, we gotta pick up our that’s what good neighbors do. Right. And I’m just saying that as an example. So you guys know that that’s just a thought I’m choosing to have, it’s not real, but I’m fine with it for the moment. So we did several rounds of that. And now there are like, I don’t know, a handful of leaves out front, not enough that I’m embarrassed by them.

And there are no more leaves coming. The trees are bare. And I remember it was weighing on me like, Oh, we should get out there and do it. But it keeps like it keeps getting frosty. So then they’re covered with water and they’re heavy. So then we’re like, Oh, let’s wait until they thought, but then they’re wet. So we keep not getting these last leaves is the punchline. And so I finally, after doing this work with sitting at the table, making my to-do list and I was thinking, Oh, the leaves. And then I went Sterling, do you care about the leaves? What does the leaves stay there until March?

It’s not happening. It’s not getting done. Nobody else is even thinking about it, except you like my husband and my kids. Weren’t walking outside going, Oh no, the leaves. It’s just me. And then I had to ask myself, is this important to you? Cause you get important things done. And I, I realized it wasn’t, wasn’t important to me, at least for the week. I didn’t have to decide that they would sit there until March. But at least right now was I was looking at my week and what was on my schedule leaves weren’t important. And I didn’t want to stick them in there. And that was okay with that. And now I don’t think about them because I chose a new thought. The leaves are there and that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me that they are there.

And so I want you to begin to explore the things that are making you feel kind of scrunchy face kind of grumpy, kind of, Oh, it just bugs me anything that just, Why don’t you to try to find the thoughts that you’re having that’s causing them.

That they shouldn’t, they shouldn’t leave those things out. Wow.

I can’t. They just pick up after themselves. Why does no one help me? I just cleaned that. I don’t think we’re actively thinking these next ones, but we do think, and I’m stuck here. This isn’t what I thought was going to happen with my life. Why is this happening? I don’t want to live like this. Those ones happen really quietly in the background, but they’re even more toxic.

So look around your house, see what bugs you find the thought that’s driving you nuts and then try to come up with another one. Right? My thought is I love a tidy living room. I love it. And so it makes me so happy when I clean it and walk back into the living room when it is tidy. And that may only last for 40 minutes. Like I try to pick strategic times to tidy it up where it will last, like before, right before the little boys go to sleep or at the end of the night. And I didn’t do that last night and I didn’t make it mean anything. I didn’t tidy up last night. So I tidy it up this morning. And then after I cleaned the living room and went in to get tea and came back that’s as small of a moment as it was, I came back into a clean living room and it was lovely. Alright, mamas, let’s explore our thoughts around cleaning our house. Cause it’s a big part of what we do. And I want us to have some peace around it. I want you to have peace about your role in your home and why you do things. I clean because I love it when things are tidy, not as just about me, it doesn’t have anything to do with the other people will live in this house. Alright, mommas, I’m wishing you a peaceful house cleaning times you got this and remember you were made for greatness.