Cleaning, Anxiety, and Magical Thinking

I feel things moving and changing in good ways. I've giving -- sometimes unintentionally -- developments a few days to marinate before I write about them. But I want to be sure to write, to grasp well the good things.

I had a revelation the other day about cleaning and housework. I know I'm not alone in having some odd emotional connections (or disconnections) where housekeeping is concerned. I've realized that as I am praying the Seven Sorrows rosary and handing over my anxieties and developing new practices, my emotional relationship with housekeeping is one of the moving pieces.

I have distinct childhood memories of cleaning out of anxiety. One memory is of knowing my mom was expecting some kind of business man coming for an appointment (insurance salesman, maybe a contractor, I don't remember) one certain late afternoon or early evening. Being the Gen-X kid that I was, I was home by myself after school on a regular basis for a couple of hours before my mom returned home from work in my elementary school years. So on this day, I knew that this appointment was coming, and I looked around the living room and saw it was a total wreck. I was anxious over the fact that the time was getting really close and my mom wasn't home yet. I couldn't let someone come into our house and see it be such a wreck, so I quickly got to work and cleaned everything. My mom came home at almost the same time that the man came for the appointment. When he left, she thanked me for cleaning up.

I also witnessed my mom stress-cleaning on occasion. I suppose the stress was induced by my dad's drinking and calling our house when he was drunk, because that was usually the thing. I know it left me in distress, too, but watching my mom stress-clean stressed me out all the more, and without knowing it I believe I drank in that the way to deal with emotional threats was to try to fix unrelated problems, such as our dirty sink. Magical thinking gets cemented this way, and carried over beyond the age of reason, I think, when there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the step that belongs between threat and response, i.e. coping strategy.

Ultimately, in my example, I was stressed because of my mom's absence and my sense that I, as a child, had to take on responsibility, rather than accept direction from my family's leadership team. Because there wasn't one. The way I understand it, my mom's stress led her to scour dirt, because it was something she had control over, unlike the relational mess of her former marriage. 

Fast forward to my adult life. Dirt is an objective reality of living in a house, regardless of what my emotional baggage contains. For many years I have noticed that whenever I go through a time where I feel emotionally strengthened, I clean and get rid of old junk with a good degree of joy. It's a feeling of liberation. But I've noticed as well periods of time where I avoid, avoid, avoid certain tasks. "I'm not a visual person," I say, and that is true. I don't get as easily bothered by clutter or grime as some people do. Plenty of times I have grumbled that other people could be helping me, even while feeling like asking someone to take on certain tasks wouldn't be quite right or good of me. I'm really the one who *should* do things, but if others spontaneously just knew and did, they would be higher quality human beings. So goes the endless ping pong game. Hiding inside, like cobwebs and giant dustbunnies, were a lot of unexamined and unresolved emotional issues that were fueling the endless back and forth between two losing options.

At holidays, I willingly welcomed the panicked stress-clean. We're having visitors, so, CLEAN! I treated this like a treasured childhood recipe, a necessary part of the celebration. Other times, I felt like the put-upon maid, the servant of my family, whose job it was to do everything because everyone else was lame (or a child). (Cue subsequent guilt and shame for these feelings.) There was also a good dose of, No, I'm not the maid, and I don't have to stress. And guess what? The house became a wreck. And I don't like that, either. So I plod along, just clean it, with mind turned off and tuned out.

So the revelation that has hit me is that there is another way to live with this. There is a way to find actual joy. I can approach housekeeping as caring -- in the first place, for my own self. I can tidy the kitchen because a tidy kitchen makes me happy. It frees me feel at home, to want to be there, and to do whatever I'm doing with a little note of the joy of being alive. (Ooh, the glory of God is man fully alive. There we go.) And then, if there is something else that really needs to take priority at the moment, I can peacefully realize that the task at hand just needs to wait; it doesn't become a threat. And I can say to the person next to me: "Could you do xyz?" I don't have to do everything. My family can learn to be a team, especially if I figure out how to lead the team that way.

I suppose I've gotten very close to working this way most of the time over the years, but having this as a conscious operating system is stunningly new. 

And you know what else? I can even engage in stress-cleaning effectively, if I acknowledge to myself that doing something physical would really feel good right about now, and it would help me release some of the pent-up anxiety or stress I have going on. 

I have found that emotional baggage is an enormous energy drain. The subconscious avoiding of messes because they represent my lack of being God, or at least not a magic fairy who makes all things bright, glittery, and happy -- yeah, it numbs a big swath of my heart, mind, soul, and strength. I need those for other purposes. Time for the anesthesia to come off. 

But everybody suffers. And the Seven Sorrows rosary is teaching me how to face my own pain and to live in virtue instead. Thanks be to God.

Real-time photo of my "office"