Underachieving

I'll admit it - I'm lazy.  Or at the very least, an underachiever.  I always have been.  I blame it on my Gen X status.  The slacker generation.  Capable of more, but uninterested in putting in the extra effort.  Distracted by the more interesting, entertaining elements of life.

In high school, I did not take Honors/AP classes in every subject, even though I could have; I graduated in the top 10, but not the top 5.  Same in college.  I graduated with a very good GPA, but not the best.

I don't like doing housework; it does not come naturally, the nesting instinct.  I do pretty good once I get started, but getting started is a challenge.  God bless my mother - who from when I entered school worked outside of the home full-time, came home on the weekdays, cooked dinner (and not just warmed up a pizza, I'm talking a meat, a starch, and a vegetable), cleaned up the kitchen, put on a load of laundry, got me and my sister to bed, and went to bed much later than she wanted (especially in the late summer when she would stay up canning produce from the garden); on the weekends, she'd clean house from top to bottom, every weekend.  I don't know how she did it.  She tried to get us to help.  I know I kept my room picked up fairly well and didn't mind running the vacuum cleaner for her, but I remember usually being asked several times to finish up the dishes for her - and almost never doing it.  After the third or fourth time of asking, she'd just give up and just do it herself.

Dishes have been one of my biggest struggles, in fact.  In college, I had two roommates who were johnny-on-the-spot when it came to dishes, so they always ended up doing them, immediately after eating; we ultimately had to make a calendar of dish duty, alternating weekly between the four of us.  In the last few years, I've gotten better.  I do get the dishes done immediately after dinner - but it's often my least favorite time of day, when the cooking (which I enjoy) is over, the boys are in bed, but the dishes still sit in the sink and I have to push through before I can plop down on the couch next to Jeremy.  And honestly, more times than not, there's one pot or pan or bowl left to "soak" overnight, because I just cannot do one more dish.

Other housework gets done in a fairly regular, if slightly relaxed, schedule.  Vacuuming, mopping, sheet-changing occurs every other week.  I sweep the kitchen and dining room daily, just to keep the crumbs from migrating so quickly through the rest of the house.  Laundry gets done frequently enough that no one ever runs out of underwear (but I will confess we all do have an ample undergarment supply), but we do occasionally have to dig in the dirty clothes hamper to find the least dirty pair of jeans to wear for the day.  I cannot stand dusting and manage it maybe three times a year.

But our house always looks very lived in - and I wouldn't even begin to know how to "fix" that.  Even when it's "cleaned up" for guests, there are still several piles of paper - albeit it neat ones - on the desk.  The kitchen counters are lined with cooking oils, knife racks, small appliances, cookbooks.  A coat or two hangs on the banister, or the doorknob of the coat closet.  The dining room table has a pencil box at one end, where homework is done and often the deck of Skip-Bo cards sits as it was left in the morning, when Gideon and I squeezed in one game before catching the bus.

At the end of the day, despite feeling grateful and blessed to be able to stay at home with my children, I do look around the house and think, How does it look like this still?  I was here all day.  Why didn't I get more done?  Even though I know I was not as disciplined as I should have, could have been.

The house we live in now is a solid, sturdy, plain house.  We bought it from the original owners who had it built in 1999.  We knew when we moved in, we would eventually upgrade some parts of it - the kitchen appliances (all original) and countertop, the carpet (especially on the stairs).  The downstairs had all been repainted a pretty cool white, but the upstairs was wild with color - peach in the master bedroom, yellow and fuchsia stripes in what we use as the guest bedroom.  The paint has long been taken care of upstairs, but the other elements would take more time, more money, so we've been slow to begin.  But begun we have, starting with the laundry room, which we repainted and reorganized over the last couple of weekends.  And it feels like such a huge accomplishment.  It is a huge accomplishment.  We've crossed that biggest hump - just getting started.

As I shared with my neighbor across the street, Ms. Joan, recently, as we discussed our proposed renovations to the house, it takes Jeremy and I both awhile to get going on projects, but once we do we're all in.  Neither one of us are high-activity folks.  As I mentioned recently, our weekends feel full when we have just one or two things a day to do.   We both like time at home, just to be.  And just having a nice breakfast at home on Saturday morning (and cleaning up from it) seems to fill half the day.

Ms. Joan came over earlier this week to see our re-done laundry room, and as we gazed at the gray paint swatches taped to the kitchen cabinets, she told me that after we'd had that discussion about mine and Jeremy's laidback approach to housekeeping and home improvement, she had told her husband that she likes the warmth and lived-in quality of our home; she said, "It always just feels so welcoming."  They are grandparents of four, retiree age, looking to downsize their home and move to some wonderfully relaxing venue like the Outer Banks of NC; her house is always neat and tidy, classic, but updated.  Very pretty.  But she told me that afternoon that it feels cold to her and she wants the warmth and welcome our home has.  She said she looks at our home and she knows we are spending our days enjoying our children - and then she laughingly said, "This is really supposed to be a compliment, but I'm not sure it's coming across that way."  But it did come across that way, and I felt humbled and happy that our home - in all of its constant disarray and imperfection and immutable lived-in-ness - seems warm, welcoming, loving.  That it's actually, in some odd way, enviable - to some people, anyway.

So, to all my fellow underachieving mom friends out there - those who may not be the best housekeepers or cooks, those who are not crafty or cutesy, whose homes are not fit for the pages of a magazine, who don't run a successful online business or widely-read blog along with juggling the duties of mother and housewife, who don't homeschool or have their kids perfectly matched, who, at the end of the day, look around and think, "How did I not get more done today?" despite the fact that you moved from laundry room to kitchen to dining room to the kids' rooms to the floor of the TV room over and over again:  There are people out there who are envious of you and your messy life.  And they are people who have the 20/20 vision of hindsight - they know what's really important.  And it's not having tidy counter tops.  It's being in the moment, even when the moment is messy and tiring and not what you'd imagined.  Embrace the messiness and know that - every single day - you are, in fact, doing enough.