(Photo Credit: P. Furniss)
One could argue that as a mostly SAHM with a part-time job that I wear scrubs for, my personal style doesn’t matter. And really, it doesn’t.
I leave my house to go grocery shopping and take my kids to activities or to the library. I go out on dates with my husband or leave the house by myself about twice a month. And when I say go out by myself, I usually mean, solo grocery shopping. I go to church on Sunday. Otherwise, I’m almost never Out In Public.
A lot of life feels like a struggle right now. Home school burnout has been bubbling up for a couple of years now. There are a lot of littles in our house. I get overstimulated. I’m struggling internally because I have everything I need and almost everything I want, and I’m still anxious and depressed.
Life feels hard, and no matter what I wear.
A few days ago, my oldest daughter was at a church event with kids her age all day. Not long after, she mentioned to me quietly that she found out that day that she was the only kid there with only one pair of shoes.
I asked her a few questions, and more information came out about what had happened over the next day or so.
I felt really sad that it was at a church function where my kid began to feel insecure about Stuff. I had to think about it for a while before I came back to her about it.
I have what they call a Large Family. In fact, as one of my sister-in-law’s friends put it, “That squad is deep.” I don’t know if it was meant as a compliment, but I like it. We have a Deep Squad.
Sometimes we get a super warm welcome.
Our kids are generally well behaved. They are smart, and interesting. Yep, they totally have their bad days, and when they are excited and confined to a small space, even I don’t want to be with them.
The summer of 2015, I bought and read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, along with everyone else on the internet.
I have lost count of the number of garbage bags of stuff that went out the door as a result of reading it, but I would guess not less than twenty. I have never thought of myself as too sentimental about stuff. Yet I was storing craft supplies that I “might need” someday, excessive amounts of hand-me-downs for the kids, and a number of items in my own closet I was holding on to for the wrong reasons.
I hate feeling tied down. I thought about what would happen if we ever moved. I wouldn’t have time to deal with all our stuff. I’d end up throwing it in boxes and bringing it along even though it wasn’t worth keeping. Keeping the toys picked up had become onerous. My kids’ drawers were overflowing. My kids weren’t capable of keeping up with their own stuff themselves, and I couldn’t live with the disorder.
When my house is trashed, my anxiety goes through the roof and I can’t think straight.
Last January, my husband was just starting a demanding and stressful job, which came with a pay raise. One of the ways we hoped to offset his increased hours and responsibilities was to hire a housekeeper.
My increasing inability to keep the house up to my standards coincided with a sharp decrease in help from my big kids. I was pregnant with our seventh baby, and I lacked the energy to enforce the chore list. It was so frustrating. Recently, I said, “I don’t have enough people to help me!” and my six year old sagely observed, “Oh, you have enough people. Them just not helpin.’ “
