House At The Crossroads

No, actually it's me at the crossroads concerning my house.

I've been a moderate neat freak over forty years. Even as a blue-eyed child I kept a prim and proper room. Slipped my books into neat rows. Stuffed my Barbies (neatly) into their homemade suitcase house before climbing under sheets at night. Kevin Lehman must have secretly studied me for his book on first-borns--I'm that classic of a case.

But lately I don't want my house to echo "a first-born-neatness-obsessive-type lives inside." Instead, I long to let go and leave dishes in the sink all day sometimes (bad example--I'm already pretty good at that). I want to feel like it's okay if my house isn't as organized or as elegant as my friends' homes. I want to blithely toss my wrinkled clothes on top of the hutch in our bedroom and let them stay there a couple days. Or not feel antsy that someone may come for coffee when Tom's guitars are sprawled across the living room. Or not assume the UPS man drives away thinking how sloppy my back entryway appeared with stuff awaiting to go downstairs.

But it's more. It's coming to the acceptance place that I prefer a decorating style somewhere between Ma and Pa Kettle Down At The Farm and Blondie and Dagwood's home of the 1940's films. And being truly ok (not just pretend ok) with the fact that no one else I know in the 'real world' would ever, ever decorate like that.

I want to let go and just be me. The new me I have evolved into these past ten years of changes. I'm not the same person I was 40 years ago and it's time to stop feeling so awkward, so tug-of-war-ish about wanting to live differently in my own house.

But the old me remembers the seminars she taught at church about keeping an orderly home. She recalls her essays about the Proverbs 31 Woman, too. And she remembers always straightening or picking something up. Not easy things to forget.

Yes, part of it is a control issue. I probably fear losing my grip and watching my house fade into those wild pictures on the Net. You know, the ones showing rooms four feet deep in grocery bags, clothes and garbage belonging to hoarders. But knowing my past record, I hardly think that could ever happen. The person I've become may be different, but she's not a total slob. She's more relaxed, very contented, but she's not slovenly.

Mainly, she just wants her house to reflect the new her. The more contented person God helped her to become. The one who is comfortable in her own skin and now wants to be comfortable in her own house. But she still wonders if people will misunderstand. And she's still living in the house of the old her. The old gal wasn't so bad, you understand, just one who wrongly based her self-worth upon the way her house appeared to others.

It's taking enormous amounts of letting go in order to walk past all that.

You don't change forty years' worth of being one way overnight. It takes time. All changes take time. All real changes, mine anyway, take acts of God, too. It's as though He changes me in layers (think onion). I'm glad, because it would be far too painful to make the biggest changes all at once.

But oh how wonderful to start moving beyond the crossroads, out across the golden prairie and into the open Freedom Land beyond.




P.S. It may be that only fellow first-borns understand my weird spin on this subject. Maybe I should have opened this post with that warning. Though perhaps there are other parallels to be made. I hope so.