Messy and Guilt-Free, Well Almost

I read an article recently that said that women, whether working outside the home or staying at home, felt universally guilty about the cleanliness of their homes.  This article appeared in the New York Times.  http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/neglected-children-messy-houses-and-guilt/  They asked working and SAH moms what they felt the most guilt about.  Stay at home moms answered as follows:

Stay-at-home mothers feel most judged about
1) My contribution to family income
2) How clean my house is
3) Not using my education

I would like to address (rant about) these issues one at a time.

1)  I got to thinking about the income thing.  I have at times thought that we might have a bigger house or nicer things if I brought in a second income.  I do have a small income, but it doesn't make much of a dent in our expenses.  Though I may not be bringing in income, what I am saving my family is profound.  Here is what we don't pay for because I don't work outside the home:

daycare
private school tuition
work clothes
dry cleaning
extra gasoline
maintenance and replacement of parts on the car
convenience items in packed lunches or restaurant/cafeteria lunches

All in all, I think I am saving a full time job's worth of expenses by staying home AND we get all the intangible benefits of me being at home with the kiddos. So, I'm not really feeling all that guilty about not bringing in a big income for the family because the cost of it in terms of what it takes from my family is far too great.

If I tried to tell you that I'm fully available to my children and am well rested and stress free from not having to work in an office, I'd be lying - big time.  I work from home and the number of jobs I have leaves me with too few hours in the day, not enough sleep, and plenty of stress.  But adding in all that other stuff just boggles my mind.

2)  Okay, yes, my house is often a mess.  Always a mess.  I've never been a neat freak.  When I did have an office job, I was a bit of a neat freak and would clean my work area every day before leaving.  At my last job, I shared an office with a messy person and it was torture.  I can't explain why I'd be neat at the office and so untidy at home other than my children didn't live in my office.  But I digress.  Both working outside the home moms and stay at home moms put the messy house thing in the top three.  No one seems to have time to clean their homes.  So, where is the guilt coming from?  Who has a clean house if we ALL feel guilty that our houses are messy?  Is there one really nasty woman out there with some perfect home (and a maid) running around to each of us making snide remarks about how awful it is that we can't keep a clean house?  Who is this woman and why haven't we strung her up already? 

The article went on to say that we might be holding ourselves up to that 50s standard of wearing pearls while vacuuming and presenting the hubby with a drink as he came through the door at 5pm after work.  Let's face it.  NO ONE in the fifties was doing that either.  That was TV shows and commercials and magazine ads designed to sell a lifestyle.  Didn't it look great?  Wouldn't you like to have a life like this?  Just buy XYZ vacuum cleaner and it can all be yours.  Mostly we just bought the guilt.  Why don't I look like June Cleaver? 

I've decided to let go of at least some of the guilt over my home.  I have good reason to have a messy house.  A)  We live in a house that is far too small for all of us.  We'd put things away if there was an away to put them in.  Or maybe we wouldn't.  B)  We have better things to do with our time.  My house is also our school.  School takes up a lot of space in our house.  We work all day and then it's time for dinner and the kids need to unwind and sometimes we just don't get to the cleaning up part.  C)  I have 5 jobs:  3 jobs that are Christian Ed. related and are for entities outside my home (although I am blessed to be able to work from home), 1 home-based business that at this point in my life receives very little of my attention, but takes up some space, and 1 full time teaching position as a homeschooling mom.  This in addition to raising 5 kids.  When people ask me, "how do you do it all?" my answer is "I don't clean my house."  I do actually occasionally clean my house.  It's not a health department issue kind of dirty, it's just extremely cluttered.  Well, okay, I have 4 boys and a husband, so the bathroom IS probably a health department issue, but we'll just keep that to ourselves, 'kay? 

I used to be so ashamed of my house that I never let anyone come over.  I had to break in a babysitter that got used to our mess and now I won't use anyone else because I don't want anyone else to know my "dirty" little secret.  However, life has come to meet us in our house.  The kids sometimes bring friends over unannounced.  We have been very blessed by friends who have brought over meals for us when we were experiencing incapacitation or crisis.  They never want to just hand it to you at the door.  And I've come to the realization that I want to have a house where people feel welcome, where my kids' friends want to come (easier to keep an eye on things here, right?)  I want to be able to be properly hospitable to those who drop something off for us rather than sending a long stick out the door and asking them to place their offerings on the hook.  Now I just make a funny remark about the condition of the house and move on.  People may be secretly horrified by what the house looks like, but they are nice enough to keep it to themselves.  I comfort myself by remembering that I am the single most busy person I know and if they want to get into a throw down about my house, I can always list what I accomplished in one day and see how that sits with them.  I would probably list these things in an email that went out at 4 in the morning while the critical person was sound asleep and I was up working.

It should be noted that my house is currently pretty clean because the in laws just visited.  I want proper credit for the house being clean for7 minutes.  I deserve that.  Come over now and see it before it's gone.  Wait, never mind, too late.  The senile dog and the toddler both wet their pants, someone played in the sandbox and didn't shake off before coming in the house, it rained and muddy footprints abound, I cooked, a fort was built out of dining room chairs and every blanket we own, the laundry mill is running again which means there are clean and dirty clothes everywhere, the preteen got "crafty" on the dining room table, no one can remember to flush a toilet, and we are still working on that seasonal shift with the wardrobe and what needs to go back into storage, not to mention that we have a teenage son from whence a wake of filth and disorder seems to issue forth in every room he enters.  It was fun while it lasted.

3)  The last thing on the list is one I find very interesting.  It says SAHMs feel guilty that they are not using their education.  See many of us are college grads.  My husband has a Masters in Aerospace Engineering.  He has not set foot in an aerospace company nor used a single thing he learned in those 8 years of college.  But because he has a good job in another field, nobody is busting his chops over that. 

Here's a funny thing.  Guess what my degree is in?  Psychology with an emphasis on child development from a major university.  I feel some pride in that as you might imagine.  Once during a conversation with a neighbor, I cited something about a child developmental issue and the neighbor asked if I had taken a little course at the local community college.  No, I have a degree in it.  I learned that particular factoid while doing 3 semesters of undergrad research at the University of Texas at Austin under a professor whose research is pretty famous.  In fact you may have seen us on 20/20 or perhaps read about us in any of the biggest newspapers and, of course, research journals.  It was at that moment that I deeply regretted having lost my college class ring.  It's not that I feel guilty that I'm not using my degree (because I kinda am), it's that I'm not getting credit for having a college degree.  People assume that if you are a SAHM that it's because you aren't qualified to do anything else. 

What if we turn that idea upside down?  Think about all the things that a SAHM does all day and how many degrees it would require to do these tasks "out in the real world."  You'd need:  psychology, nursing, economics, chemistry, art, event planning, cooking, engineering, law, basic home repair, hostage negotiation, and so much more.  And that's just what we do day to day.  Many of us do have some other occupation that we attend to in our homes.  We run our own businesses or help others with theirs.  We donate our time and talent to important causes.  We are plenty busy with kids and beyond.  Maybe we don't all have degrees in something, but frankly we're too busy doing the jobs to stop and get a degree in them. 

I'm sure that the decision to stay at home when you have devoted a lot of effort and money to getting an education and perhaps starting a brilliant career is a difficult one.  On the tough days with the kids, we've all thought about what life would be like if we got to do something else all day instead.  Would we feel more useful, appreciated, accomplished, put together, important, etc. if we drove to work every day?  But the decision to stay at home with your children should not be a discussion of what you are giving up or not using.  It's what you are gaining and learning.  Everything I've done as a mother has grown me as a human being.  I'm not stagnating.  And why is motherhood seen as something less than any 9 to 5 gig?  

Another thing that is inherently wrong about the "it's a shame you aren't using your education" statement is that it assumes your education has been completely abandoned while you engage in mothering.  Just because I may not be involved in the most obvious field related to my degree doesn't mean I'm not using it in an alternative and very creative way in my home.  The skills I learned in college have contributed to who I am as a mother.  I'm using those skills in different yet meaningful ways that my professors may not have anticipated.  Granted my degree sort of applies to mothering directly, but this still counts for all those ladies who got degrees in something that had nothing to do with children or mothering.  Beyond the obvious skills directly associated with my degree, I learned to stick it out during the tough times to finish things I didn't want to, to manage my time (sort of, I'm still not great at that), to work to achieve something that was solely my responsibility, to make my life fit into a very narrow budget that involved a lot of raman, and of course how to stay up all night to finish something in time for a deadline.  All of these are valuable life skills that I gained at college that I am still using.  Now that I'm homeschooling, the use of my previous degree related skills is limitless.  Just because I'm not getting PAID to use my degree, doesn't mean I'm not using it - and I think that's the truth of that guilt trip.  It's the not paid part that bothers everyone.

It should be noted that the headline on the article used the word "guilt," but the survey used the words "feel most judged about."  These are two different things - certainly intertwined, but different.  Feeling guilty is internal.  Feeling judged is external, unless you are feeling judged even when you are not being judged because that's how your internal guilt about something manifests.  I did mention I had that psych degree, right?  If we feel judged, who is doing the judging?  Has someone made a comment to us?  Are we buying into some marketing message we see on TV, movies, magazines?  Was it something our mothers said?  Is this all Martha Stewart's fault?  Or worse yet, was it something we said or an attitude we exhibited that has made some other mom feel guilty? 

When it comes down to it, we're all worried we aren't doing enough.  We look at someone else's life, at the things they seem to be accomplishing and we wish we were able to do that.  Sometimes I look at other mothers and really wish I could do something that they can do.  I am stunned sometimes to hear from someone else that they are envious of something I do.

And it's then that I realize that the useless mess I sometimes think my life is, looks like something amazing to someone else who wishes they could do what I do.  Because there are things I can do.  There are things that I am accomplishing both inside and outside my home.  There are countless things that I could say, "I wish I was able to do that."  There will never be a lack of things that I will beat myself up about not doing.  But the funny things is, someone is looking at me thinking the same thing.  We are all the envy of someone else in some way.  And maybe it's not that we can make something, but how we do even the simple things.  Maybe we are envious of someone's patience or gentleness.  Maybe we long to be better organized or less messy.  The point is we're all feeling less than perfect because we aren't perfect, but no one else is either.  Really, there isn't someone out there that can "do it all."  There may be women who have a lot of very visible skills, but there's something that they don't or can't do and they feel bad about even if they aren't letting anyone know it.

The big thing I am taking from that article is that I need to stop worrying about my house.  It's not like the neat fairy is going to show up and - poof - I'm suddenly tidy.  Why beat myself up over something that is not going to change, but is also something that not many people are keeping up with either.  I am hereby giving you permission to let the house go (or let yourself go about the house).  If we all agree to have messy houses without shame think what a beautiful world it would be.  Messy, but beautiful.