Back to decluttering

So I see it is almost a year since I began this blog and then school started, I was back at work (school secretary) and my schedule again became attend to the emergencies first and do the rest later.

There were only emergencies. My 15-year-old daughter's trick knee finally just popped out and would NOT go back in. Her dance troup called 911 and off to Children's Hospital she went to get the knee put back in place. While at the hospital and finally knee back in place and a kind nurse brought us some sandwiches she sat up in bed and the knee just went out again just like that.

That was November 12th and with that incident other things came crashing down. My finances got much worse as she was not insured at the time although to tell you the truth now that everything is all said and done the amount I owed ended up being less than the last time this happened (although at that time the knee went right back in and she started physical therapy) when she was insured. Only insurance I could afford for her was $2,500 deductible and we sure hit that pretty quick not to mention how expensive the insurance was every month. Now both girls are insured under Healthy Families and thank God as now with all the additional medical issues this has brought out for her I could never afford the treatment she is getting even with insurance.

Turns out she has OCD. How's that for one of life's ironies? An OCD daughter with a clutterer mother?

But more about that later in another blog if I ever start another blog. Part of my plan is to not have too many projects and so this blog will be it for me right now until we have reached success.

I am on Disability for the rest of the summer from Berkeley Unified School District. BUSD makes even the most dysfunctional family unit look like Leave it to Beaver. I didn't know how bad it was or how badly I was being harassed until I took my leave on May 25th -- partly to deal with my 15-year-old's issues and partly to save my sanity and health. And more about that later, too, as that's a book in itself and it's not over yet. I'm still contemplating a lawsuit as anyone who has heard my story has almost driven me to the attorney's office themselves. I absolutely loved the job but a few people who have connections and power can do some pretty vicious things which is all I'll say about it right now.

The good news is, I am actually making progress on this decluttering. I thought everything was at a standstill on the decluttering because it really was hopeless but in fact it was the stress from my job that immobilized me.

Not to say that I am still every good at this and not to say that anyone else looking at my house right now would think I had made enough progress but the fact that I am making progress at all is giving my whole family hope. Since OCD is an anxiety disorder and since the state of our house has heightened all of our anxiety, I can see the change in both of my daughters with every space I clear out.

And that one word I've found is the entire clue to organizing one's house -- OUT. Old clothes must go OUT. Toys that are not played with anymore must go OUT. Broken ANYTHING that I will never repair must go OUT -- out of the room, and OUT of the house -- NOT in yet another box or bin where they somehow find their way back in piles around the house or the cat sleeps on the clothes I was going to give away and I find I need to wash them once again, and sort them out of the clothes we are still wearing once again.

My main goal these next days is to clear out the dining room so I can turn it into a bedroom for my younger daughter. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet but I will deal with that once I have finished getting the extra stuff OUT. Right now it is almost in good enough shape to post a "before" picture.

Right now I have NO kids in the house, neighbor took the 9-year-old and the 15-year-old is at a movie with a friend. Now to set the 15-minute timer and begin again.

Where to start?

What I hate the most about this decluttering business -- at least when the house is fully cluttered -- is there is not always a clear starting point. Almost worse is that there is no ending point. I recently came across some pictures taken around my house about four years ago where I must have decided (I don't remember taking the pictures) that it would be fun to see what the house looked like before I decluttered and compare it to the well-organized and feng shui end result.


Two thoughts came to me immediately.

1. My house has been in a cluttered state for longer than I remembered.
   
2. My house's present state is worse than it was when I took the original "before" pictures. I took the pictures when I thought my house couldn't possibly get any worse.
   

Last summer my friend and former rommate of six years, Les, was in town and dropped by and was completely horrified at the state of the house. He offered to help me but said the only way he would help was if we got a dumpster and we just threw out everything in the whole house -- the "baby with the bathwater" as it were. I said no thanks. He clearly hadn't watched any of those Hoarder shows and didn't know what a truly out of control house was. Our house was certainly NOT out of control. There was no trash in my house, garbage, cat or dog excrement anywhere. No dead bodies. Just stuff. Everywhere. At the time I had been without a car for six months and when I saw things piling up -- mainly bags of clothes but also outdated and defunct electronics, computers, my old stereo system -- items I would normally recycle or take to the Goodwill, I told myself I would have to deal with them later, after I got a car. There were also toys scattered around my kids no longer played but once I got them out, the 9-year-old played with them and of course left them out because where to put it? These were expensive toys that I planned to sell at our yard sale. They were all around the house now but would be gone as soon as I got the car. And that would be of course -- later.

I should explain that I DO have a very small one-bedroom house. My two kids have the one bedroom and I have had my transcribing business in my living room which is the first room (and a large one) that you come into through the front door of my house. I also now had my bed there and since I no longer had a closet I had the proverbial bins stacked up where I kept my clothes. I also had different bins for my different transcribers and foot pedals. Oh, and then some of the clothes might have been put in the transcriber bins and vice versa.

I did feel hopeless after Les left. I was working full time, my kids were back in school and had various afterschool activities. With no car and all of us taking the bus everywhere, I really DID NOT have time to make any kind of dent in any of this. Besides, we weren't here that much anyway and didn't really have to look at it.

I comforted myself with the fact that "later" was coming soon though. My younger brother offered me our late father's old station wagon which was unused back in Ohio. Gas monger, 1982 Buick station wagon but a FREE car with only 60,000 miles on it and I could fly out over Thanksgiving when I had some time off and drive it back. So we went on with our lives ignoring the stuff, walked around it, through it, over it. I made the one-way reservations to Ohio for Thanksgiving. I e-mailed my brother right before we were to leave stating that I had gotten a few days off work and was going to get the car and drive it back. He emailed just a short, terse note, "Oh, you should have let me know earlier, the car is no longer available."

He was being an asshole but I wasn't going to go there and get into whatever it was in our 40+ years ago past he was now pissed at me for. It ended up being a good thing though because we were able to spend Thanksgiving with my friends we have had Thanksgiving with the last 16 years. At their house. That night I watched "Hoarders". I watched it religiously because all of those houses were much worse than mine. But this time I was struck by a comment one of the hoarding people made. She said, "I didn't realize it had gotten this bad. I guess we just had gotten used to it." Their kids had been taken away, it clearly was that bad. How could they have POSSIBLY gotten used to it?

The words were an epiphany for me. Worse than the clutter was the fact that I had allowed myself to get used to it. But I could make this sudden setback an opportunity. Yes, there would be no car, but now I had been given four says in a row with no plans or obligations. I had been given TIME. Armed with only my 15-minute timer (more about that later) the kids and I started on the kitchen. We made enough progress by that Sunday that we had a clean kitchen floor and a clear table in the breakfast nook. I could cook dinner for us again -- no fast food out of bags -- and we could all sit together again for dinner. My girls played cards and board games there. We talked and my older daughter chatted brightly as how we should fix up the rest of the house, how once we converted a bedroom out of the dining room for her sister, she would fix up her own room, the room I had promised her she would have when she started high school. She now had hope this would happen even though she had already started high school and was still sharing the bedroom with her 8-year-old sister. But now she had hope. I had hope. There could be no starting point without it.

The worst part of all of this clutter, worse than the clutter itself, was that feeling of hopelessness and the stress that came along with it. Not only had I gotten used to the state of our house, I had gotten used to the STRESS it caused us. Now we only had one tiny area of our house as a respite, but there came an immediate lifting of our spirits with the lowering of our clutter.

My mom told me that she hoped for me after my children were grown I would not have the ghosts she had. There are no "do-overs" with children. My oldest daughter was only three and Mom died the next year. I wasn't sure what she meant, I didn't have any ghosts haunting me. Now I have collected a few ghosts but the clutter ghost is the worst one so far. It ends now.

Okay, taking the time to write here was worth it. Now I know where to start today. The breakfast nook. Before I start on any of the other rooms in this house, I need to get the one room I had in order BACK in order.

Roommates

I really didn't want to start a blog until I was certain I could post regularly but sometimes life moves faster than I have time to write about it. But much better than when my life WAS the internet.

At any rate, this will be short. I made very little progress with my decluttering as I had planned to spend all day today doing a huge purge of the items I have designated donate/get rid of. Tomorrow was supposed to be my first day back to school so today would have been my last free day. I am a school secretary and the kids come back September 1st but the principal and I start earlier. Teachers who don't have to be back were already showing up and the principal didn't know where their keys were.

So it turned out TODAY was supposed to be secretary's first day back. They couldn't find many of us to tell us that. Communication isn't the greatest in my public school district. Some of the secretaries think Thursday is their first day back. And as coincidences would have it the last two roommates I ever had are both in town. I'll post a picture of us tomorrow but right now I am only home briefly to feed our guinea pigs and hamsters and then go back to the motel. It's just down the street and I had already planned for M to stay here. I made the kids help me with moving some furniture around last night and purging more items. Set the timer for one hour and we worked non stop. After we were done the 9-year-old said, "Mommy, it looks a lot worse now."

Yes it does but that is not why we are all staying at the motel down the street.

Let me clarify that. That is not the ONLY reason we are staying at the motel down the street.

So more later. We haven't seen each other in a LONG time and decided to just do it with a power visit but she is the one who drove the two hours and she is the one with my kids now.

So, it's been a while...

It's been over three years since I have posted much on my yahoo adoption groups. I literally went from posting and reading a minimum of three hours a day to a maximum of once a month and that's on a good month. My original reason was I needed to give myself a time out. There was someone on my favorite list who was able to push my buttons and ruin an otherwise perfectly good day. To this day I am thankful for my good friend Barb who reminded me of the movie "War Games" and the line from the movie that has now become one of my top coping mantras in dealing with difficult people: "The only way to win is not to play."

So I quit playing. Just for a few days I thought, and then I'll jump back in. That was the original reason. But I didn't jump back in and there were many reasons for that. This blog deals with one of them. When I finally pulled away from the computer I realized I could barely walk through my house anymore. Besides bordering on obesity from too much sitting at the computer, my entire house was a disaster. Clothes scattered everywhere. Papers. Coffee mugs. Toys. Every table surface covered with JUNK! I figured I should do one of two things; either clean it up or buy a pole vault.

Too fat for the pole vault I decided to FIX IT, organize, discard, and go back to my beloved yahoo lists when I was done. How long could it take? A week? Two weeks? I had no money but with no job except for trickles of transcription for my business, I had plenty of time.

Now it is over three years later and I'm far from done. Some of it is not my fault, I got a real job with real benefits. I have two kids, two cats, one dog, 7 hamsters and I have lost count of the guinea pigs we have taken in. Needless to say, there were a lot of interruptions. I kept waiting until the latest interruption was over but then I finally realized, Life IS interruptions. So last Thanksgiving when my trip to Ohio to visit my brother and help him with my late father's house was abruptly canceled, I used those five free days to start the process.

But I miss my groups. I miss writing. I miss writing A LOT. It is cathartic for me, eases my stress and most importantly -- writing enhances my life. Sifting through my clutter I have ironically discovered some books buried in the piles that deal with clutter. Probably sent to me by my mom, who died 11 years ago. So yes, clutter is not a new problem for me, although it had never gotten to this level before. The first book I found, "Clutter's Last Stand" advised when trying to determine whether to keep an item to ask yourself, "How does this enhance my life?"

As I waded through the piles it was easy to see that most of my things did NOT enhance my life. Just the opposite. So many of my possessions needed to move on. My yahoo groups enhanced my life but not at the expense of keeping me from dealing with my real life, my real job, my family and friends in real time. I have to keep moving forward with this so can't go back to my groups yet.

That said I am AT LEAST far enough along to take the time to let my friends know where I am in the process and when I really will be back. Man, I MISS THEM.

This blog is also for anyone else out there in blog-land who can share my misery, my failures, my triumphs or offer advice. This whole decluttering process would be SO MUCH easier if I had some company and since my house is not yet up to standards of having real life company, I am at least far enough along to welcome people in cyberly.

For one thing, I no longer need a pole vault.

The Mad Typist