[MaryPoppinsIAin't]

I'm one of Flylady's dreaded perfectionists. I heard "If you don't have time to do it right, then you don't have time to do it at all" pretty much daily as a kid. So I constantly feel overwhelmed and like there's no point in starting because I don't have time to finish. My mom's house was always SPOTLESS, and she also did the vast majority of the cleaning while my brother and I were either sleeping, at school, or otherwise not there to see her do it, so I grew up with very little concept of how much work it was to keep that huge house clean.

Now that I have a kid and have had it forcibly brought home that no, there aren't magical elves that appear at night and clean the house, I've figured out how she did it. One, she was compulsively organized. I mean the woman had a card-file system that was color-coded for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannual, and once a year tasks. I kid you not, I found it after she died, and thought "OH, so that's how she did it!". But the flip side of that is that the only way she had time to DO all of that was by taking time away from her kids and her sleep. She loved us... but I always had the impression that we were bothering her, and the extremely rare time that we were all awake and home and she wasn't cleaning or cooking and had managed to pick up a book... well, let's say I only interrupted her once or twice before learning to not do that. She was always tired, and I think it was only her sweet "nature" that kept her from screaming at us constantly. (Yes, I used the word "sweet" on purpose, my grandmother would very much have approved of the associated parenting methods.)

I basically refused to ever be like that. I don't want to be so tired that I look at my children and say "Leave me alone!!!" when "Hey, let's walk down to the park" (where I can read my book while they exhaust themselves!) would do just as well. And I decided years ago that it really didn't matter if the house never looks like a magazine, a little clutter makes things look lived in, right?

The issue is that it never stops at "a little clutter". Things pile up and collect and drift until one day (yesterday, for example), I look at our bedroom, shriek "I CAN'T STAND IT ANYMORE" and cancel any plans I had for the day, and clean. And I'm a horrible nag when I'm in that mode, my innate sense of justice RAGES at the sight of my husband sitting on the couch mindlessly watch television while I clean up the mess he helped to create. So there's nagging and guilting and shaming and it generally ends up with sparkling clean rooms and very irritated John & Laura.

THe only good thing about our current house (besides the fenced yard) is the floors. We have hardwood throughout the house, and I will NEVER go back to carpets. Sweeping is SOOO much faster than a vacuum!!!