In addition to the dirt, my house is cluttered. Part of this is not my fault; my husband has a bunch of bins of old stuff that he has no time to go through, including reams of paper, and he tends to leave his clothes in a heap but wants to do his own laundry. Part of the clutter is due to the fact that I was in graduate school and working for a while, and the paper just piled up. I can make a bunch of excuses for it, but there is just clutter all over.
Part of the problem is that I kind of, sort of, maybe hate my house. I'm thankful for it, of course. Shelter is good, and we're fortunate to have a house in a crazy market. However, I hate my house because it's a constant reminder of what should have been. It was to be our forever home, with three bedrooms, so we could fill them with kiddos. Instead, I fill those rooms with stuff so that I don't have to think about the what ifs.
The worst part about my nasty house is that it shames me. Or rather, it adds to the shame that I already feel, and that becomes a cycle. My mind tells me all the time that I'm a failure. I'm a terrible wife and a terrible woman. I can't have a baby and I'm not a great cook, so what kind of wife am I? The logical part of my brain says that it isn't true, that my husband loves me for who I am and doesn't think less of me for my struggles, but it's hard to believe that. That same logical brain tells me to cut myself slack, that I've been dealing with depression and acing school and volunteering as well as working, and it's okay to focus on surviving some days. Then I look at my messy house and the words just ring through my head: "Failure. Failure. Failure." And instead of cleaning and decluttering, my instinct is to hide under the blankets and cry, because I can't face the reality that once I clear it all out, I'll have to come to grips with the emptiness of those empty rooms that will never belong to a child.
On January 1, I woke up as a woman on a mission. I wanted to clean out this house from top to bottom. I wanted to sweep out all the things that had built up and that were overwhelming me, to stop being embarrassed to have someone drop in. Maybe it was getting past the difficult holiday season or hitting roughly six months since our last set of infertility treatments failed, but suddenly I needed change. Since that day, I've been taking it one day at a time. I bought a filing cabinet to attempt to fix the paper problem. I went through boxes of old paper and tossed most of the sheets that I no longer need for school. I scrubbed floors and I dusted. It's a long-term project, and I may never have that pristine house from the magazine, but I'm getting a little bit proud of my progress. Maybe one day I will graduate to being a real adult with a proper home.
Why am I sharing this story? It's embarrassing, right? I don't want people to know how messy I am. I guess I'm sharing it because maybe there are other people who are stuck in shame and loss and grief and need to know that they aren't the only ones who haven't scrubbed the kitchen floor in a long time. I needed you all to know that this grief I'm in is real and painful and nasty and all-encompassing, but I'm ready to be very real about it and not live in shame. I also want to advocate for us hurting people. It's easy to watch an episode of Hoarders and feel sorry for those poor people in their mess. It's not as easy to walk across the street and hug the hurting person who is in front of you. People like me are everywhere. We are in your Bible studies and in your book groups and at your workplace. We are embarrassed and ashamed of the mess inside our homes and inside our minds. I've had people - even my own mother - chastize me for the messy state of my house, and it didn't help. Instead it just told me, "Keep hiding." What I needed was love. I needed to be told that despite the mess, I was worth loving. So readers, if you aren't in the mess right now, keep your eyes open, because it might be your turn to tell someone that they are enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment