Living With Messy People

When I say messy, I mean literally messy.  We are all emotionally messy in one way or another and we have to live with that, but that's the subject of another post.

I am not a neat freak but I am fairly organized and tidy.  And like many people, I have idiosyncrasies.  One is that I REALLY like having a clean floor.

Now with 10 people in the house, many of them young, the floors get messy fast. We've got Lincoln Logs and marble toys and a big dollhouse and Tinker Toys (2 sets!) and boxes of miscellaneous toys. The building toys aren't all out, all the time, but STILL, the young ones seem to specialize in cheerfully dumping the building toy of the day on the floor.  Either that, or worse -- they cart a few Lincoln Logs into every room of the house and abandon them so that we have pieces spewed everywhere.

So much of the day, the floors have something on them. But every night, we have a mass cleanup of the main living areas.  So when the kids are in bed, the floors are mostly clean.  I get a real emotional high from mostly gleaming, CLEAR floors.  (The bedrooms are usually not amazing, except ours.  Our bedroom floor is usually clear.)

I'm reading a book on ADHD/ADD right now. I don't think anyone in our family is ADD/ADHD, but just getting into the mind of an ADHD/ADD person is truly fascinating.  I realize its a broad spectrum disorder and I'm not trying to label anyone, it is just that some ADD/ADHD people are quite messy. They like piles, they struggle to stay on task, etc.  I guess that's part of the definition (the struggling to stay on task thing.)

I also follow the blog of Nony (short for aNONYmous) :

http://www.aslobcomesclean.com/

This lady is funny and smart and creative and her blog is great.

She is WAY different from me.  I am not particularly creative, and I'm an organized engineering type.

Nony has written several ebooks and I've bought 2 of them. They aren't really for people "like me" but I still got something from them.

Maybe the biggest thing I got is...not everyone THINKS like me.

I mean, I knew that.  But it helps to get behind the eyes of this loving, sweet, hilarious mom whose house used to be close to Hoarders bad and who still struggles mightily to keep things in order.  She has more than one post where she writes what is rushing through her brain at 100 miles per hour.  It is very funny stuff but just...different.

So, not all our kids THINK like me either.  We've got at least one confirmed messy person.  We have more than one pack rat.

I get exasperated, I admit it.  Especially with the floor thing.  We have clutter on almost every surface on the house, especially the high surfaces where we can put something up away from grasping baby hands.

But the floors!  WHY would anyone want a messy floor?  How can anyone tolerate a messy floor?  How can anyone stand to step over piles day in and day out and not clean them up?

Answer...the kids don't think exactly like I do.  Light bulb moment, Laraba, light bulb moment!

It really just does not bother them like it bothers me.  And you know, some people would walk through our house and cringe at all the stuff on surfaces.  Usually the stuff is one layer deep (no piles), there is clutter.  I don't really like it, but I can handle it. I can overlook it. But piles on the floor drive me nuts.

I am doing better with being patient with other people though maybe the hardest people to be patient with are those in my house, since I have to live with them and their mess.

And I think everyone does need to learn to be orderly.  Messy floors really aren't great in the long run, and I'm working on training our children to clean things up, to put things away, to GET RID OF THINGS when they are broken or useless or there are just too many things.

But I hope I'm more understanding these days.

One last little tidbit...Kevin tells me his floor was a mess when he was growing up.  He is a tidy, engineering person too but apparently not when he was a child.  So it is something that many people "grow into" over time.