Lessons I've Learned Along the Way

 

The other morning as I made my bed, I thought of a homemaker's account I follow on Instagram.  She is a young woman, with young children.  She has chosen to be a fulltime homemaker, a calling that I seem to see more and more young women answering rather than choosing a job outside the home.  I thought of what she posts of her daily routines and then I began to think of all the things I learned over the years that have eased my passage.  Some are tips and tricks, and some were life lessons.  I thought I'd share them with you in random order.

1.  Daily tasks make all the difference in how clean our home appears.  I have certain routines I generally follow.  Daily tasks are the backbone of how neat my home appears on the average day.  They are easy tasks, and I can usually accomplish them even if I am feeling ill or rundown from lack of sleep.  These are my daily five:

a.  Run one load of laundry.  Let's face it, laundry is hardly the all-day long job followed by a full day's ironing that it used to be.  I can't imagine how my grandmothers and great grandmothers did this over an open fire with an iron pot and water to haul to wash then rinse and then the whole process of wringing without benefit of a wringer, plus lifting heavy wet clothes onto clothes lines.  Laundry is not a big deal unless we choose to make it a big deal.  

I've said before that mostly we don't even bother to sort.  We don't do whites and colors separately.  We just put clothes in the machine, add soap and push the proper settings and leave the laundry to wash and rinse and spin itself.  

Ditto for drying.  While I love drying clothes on the line, in a pinch you can usually toss most things right into the dryer, set a button and walk away.

I didn't always do laundry this way.  I did separate clothes and I'd wait and do all the laundry on Saturday or Sunday and spend hours and hours loading, unloading, folding, etc.  I loathed doing laundry because it ate up a full day I'd liked to have spent doing other things and it kept me tied to the house when I could have been out running errands.

It was John who taught me that since our clothing was only lightly soiled at best, we could skip the separating process, and John who taught me that breaking laundry down to one or two loads daily, meant I could free up a whole day of time to do other things.  It was life changing, y'all.  

b. Rinse and stack dishes.  Load those that can go into the dishwasher right away.   A pile of dishes looks horrible and makes the kitchen feel cluttered and disorderly. This is especially true if you have little counterspace.  

I don't do dishes all day long as a general rule.  Instead, I rinse and load dishes into the dishwasher and those that need to be handwashed are stacked neatly into the dishpan and leave them until the end of the day.  It's surprising how much neater and nicer this looks.

Heloise used to urge her readers to fill the sink with soapy water and let those dishes soak while they were stacked.  Even if that water grows cold, the dishes are getting the benefit of the soap and are easier to clean later.

c. Empty the trash cans in each room.  It's surprising how an empty trash can will make a room feel neater.  And that includes the kitchen trash can, as well.  Bag up that trash and get it out of the main living areas.  We prefer to put ours behind a chair in the kitchen sitting area, unless it's stinky then it goes on the back porch.  I dislike it piled on the back porch as a rule because that is the entry most people opt to use and who wants to face bags of trash there?  I don't.  

And yes, I did have a big trash can there at one time, but it blew away in a storm and was replaced and then blew away and I decided that it was literally putting money into the wind and stopped buying them.

d. Make my bed.   I grew up in a day and time where an unmade bed was a sign of sloth of the worst sort.  One of the first tasks I was taught to do as a child was to make my bed.  I encouraged my own children to make their beds as well.  

I know a lot of people just now who do not make their beds.  They claim that they're just going to spoil it later when they lie down for a nap or when they go to bed again that evening.  They say that it's 'airing'.  We should all air our bed daily and that's truth, but generally it's considered sufficient to air for ten or twenty minutes after rising.   It is often a tangled mess of bedclothes and flat pillows and it looks messy and unkempt.  

Even if you don't got the full monty here and properly make the bed every morning, just to straighten the sheets and blankets, fluffing the pillows can go a long way towards making the bedrooms feel neat and ready for relaxation.  

And just for the record, there was a time in my adulthood when I rebelled against certain tasks, bedmaking being one of those.  I waited until I was already tired and ready to sleep to even consider putting the freshly washed sheets on my bed.  One night when I was particularly tired, I promised myself I'd never wait that long again to remake my bed.

The next time I did sheets, as I was stalling putting them on the bed, I decided to time myself.  From a fully bare bed to fully made it took me 5 minutes with no particular hurry on my part in getting the job done.  Five minutes.  

Pulling up sheets and blanket, fluffing pillows, takes way less than five minutes...Just consider that.

e. Clear surfaces and put things away.   The Flylady refers to them as hot spots and she's quite right.  Those places where we tend to drop things and let them stay until they topple are one of the worst offenses to a tidy room ever.  However, I think that any surface in the room needs to be fairly neat and tidy.  It takes seconds to pick up a stack of magazines and make them look orderly, or to remove dirty glasses, pick up a used newspaper and dispose of them where they ought to go.  I find that clearing surfaces is one of the easiest of household tasks.  

You might throw things in a basket if you have unexpected guests arriving shortly and shove that in a closet or behind a cupboard door.  You'll need to attend to that at some point, obviously, but the point is that putting things away doesn't mean that you have to put them immediately into their proper place, just remove them from where they don't belong.

Hang up bags and jackets, line up shoes at an entry if you must, but making it look tidy is the key thing.

2.  Normal is a relevant term.  I love routines and schedules and following them.  Some of the things I do, like the five-item tidying list above, have worked in all seasons of life, wherever I've lived be it a long stay in a rehab facility, a condo on vacation, a long-term stay in someone's home or living in a home of my own.  'Normal' is sometimes just keeping up little habits that make life bearable and gives one a sense of having some control over life, no matter how minor it might seem.

But what we often call normal is the season of life we last enjoyed or went through, however grudingly.  Normal is not a state of permanence.  It is NOW and what we must do on a daily basis, how we must live in this moment.  That's as good as normal gets.  

So let go of the idea that when things get back to 'normal' you will be a better parent/person/partner/employee/friend, etc.  If you can't be better right now, in your current life circumstances, you probably aren't going to be any better when the next new normal stage comes about.

3.  Seasonal rituals connect us to the natural life cycle.  Y'all know that I have always been a big proponent of enjoying certain foods only in their natural season.  I don't typically buy strawberries in winter (not by my own choice, though John will pick them up as a kindness to me), or peaches outside of summer.  I don't usually eat Asparagus except in the spring or corn on the cob except in summer.  I prefer apples most in the autumn when they are naturally ripe in my area.  Those are foods that I just prefer to follow the natural rhythm of the year with.

By the same token, there are certain life rituals I follow in each season:  I love best to walk in the autumn and winter when the air is cool and the wind blustering and roaring about.  I like to walk in puddles in the spring and early summer.  I love to take my morning coffee on the porches in the warmer months, especially if I can get outdoors extra early and watch the daybreak.  I love my summer morning walks about my garden, such as it is.  I like to cuddle under a blanket with a good book on a rainy winter day...They are seasonal things that I enjoy in that season.  

Those little things root me in the season of nature that I'm in at that moment.  And it helps me to connect to the season of life I'm in at the same time.  It's just minor little things, but they make me mindful that every season changes, and every season has it's own blessings to be enjoyed in their own time.

4.  Be as Prepared as You Can.   We are never going to be fully prepared for everything that will come along in life. But we can do little things to prepare ourselves for what we know is a good possibility.  If we've never done something we likely aren't going to go from 0 to perfect in a matter of a moment.  Skills, habits and routines are built slowly and we build on one success followed by another.  There are plenty of failures in between.

We'll start at the beginning: if you know you must be out of the door at a certain time in the morning, and you know that every single morning you can't find your keys...Learn to put them in one place and only one place.  Ditto for shoes, paperwork, etc.  If it needs to go with you the next day, put it in place the night before.  The amount of stress you will save yourself the next day will make spending that extra time more than worthwhile.

Know what you're going to have for the next meal.  I still struggle with this where breakfasts and lunches are concerned.  But the days I've taken the time to plan it out prior to the next morning, things have gone so much more smoothly for me.  Again, it's reduces stress.

If you have a deadline looming, then map out how you can take small steps every day to ease the final push.  I did this with emptying the kitchen in preparation for the upcoming renovation.  What might have been overwhelming and required a lot more energy than I had at my disposal towards the end, was accomplished in small bites daily.

Ditto for creating a pantry or building a stockpile.  You can blow your budget and fully stock a pantry, or you can do it in increments focusing on one area at a time and adding one or three things as you come across good sales.  

You can start a garden in a plot of ground or in a pot on a patio.  Focus on one thing, learn that particular skill well, move on to the next.  

5.  Be Organized.  I do realize that not everyone is a natural when it comes to being organized.  I have a mind that now thrives on creating order from chaos. But I assure you it was a long and painful process.  But it's truth, that some organization is necessary if we're to manage our lives with any finesse at all. Otherwise, we're just going to move from crisis to crisis, often of our own creation.

Start small.  I'll go back to the last section.  Just being organized about getting out of the door on a daily basis is a great place to start.  I cannot name the number of chaotic mornings we faced as a family when I was a working mom and had to get seven out of the door on a daily basis Monday through Friday.  Missing shoes, missing papers meant to be signed, missing keys, forgotten items not packed in a diaper bag that necessitated a trip home to start all over again...Learning to get that one area of my life organized and taking the time each evening prior to the next morning, to ensure that everyone had shoes, backpack, homework, signed papers, keys, a packed diaper bag made a HUGE difference in the way our day started.  Honestly once that chaos was eliminated the attitude of the whole household was set for a good day most every day.

Having all your bills and checkbook register and such in one spot will ensure that you never have excuse to forget a bill.  In my first marriage, every piece of mail was shoved on a desktop in the living room.  Not only did bills get lost but so did a 'Greetings from the United States Government' letter during the Gulf War.  Yes, my ex-husband got drafted and we very nearly didn't realize it.  It happened that I found the letter in a pile of junk mail, school papers and bills and such that I was sorting out one night and handed it over to him.  He had to be ready to report in TWO days.  And why was I digging?  Because I'd just realized that I hadn't seen the electric bill and I was pretty sure it was past due...

When I met John, he had a super simple system that we still use today.  It's just a child's shoebox and in that box goes every bill that comes in, along with checkbook, stamps, address labels, envelopes, etc.  Everything we need to attend to bills is right there in that little box which sits neatly in a drawer or on a desktop.  I sit down with it weekly and pay whatever needs to go out within the next 10 days.  Not only do we never miss a bill, but we know exactly where they are.  

And should a draft notice turn up we'd have dealt with it right away...

I have a big bin that contains a hanging file system and all necessary paperwork that we have to keep is stored within that.  There's a place for most things in our house.  Not everything.  Just now we're at sixes and sevens with some things because family moved in last November and necessitated undoing some systems we had in place in order to fit more stuff into our home.  But the important things we need to get to are organized and at hand. 

6.  Don't Sweat the Small Stuff.   When I was in psychology class one of the things, we learned about was Maslow's Pyramid.   Based on absolute necessity, Maslow created a pyramid of needs based on his analysis of what he found while studying human behavior.  

At the base of his pyramid were basic needs.  The first row having to do with immediate physical needs: breathing, water, food, rest, and warmth.  The next row pertained to shelter that provided a sense of security and safety.  

The third tier was relational: family, friendships, love.   The last two tiers dealt with the needs of self.

John has told me that many times in his career as a medic, when he had patients who were unable to breathe due to asthma or injury the most important thing in life became that next breath.  For anyone who has suffered from privation food and water are vitally important.  It is man's instinctual nature to create shelter of some sort in which they can be protected from the natural elements and in which they can hide if they feel threatened.  

Humans are created to be bound to one another in relationships of some sort.  As children we look to another to tend to our basic needs.  As adults we are bound to attend to the needs of others, those unable to provide for themselves.

It's worth noting that those first three rows are the broad base on which we build our image of self and our importance in the world that comprise the last two tiers.   

Honestly, everything is small stuff compared to the basic needs of our physical and emotional needs.  Keep that in mind at all times.  

John has a way of bringing me down to earth when I'm ranting and railing at life circumstances. "Did you go without a meal today?  Did anyone come and take away your home or furniture?  Did you lose your family?"  It's very centering to remember that indeed none of those things occurred.