Messy Family Your Problem?
Many hard working and basically organized women (and sometimes men) find that their chief hindrance in keeping a neat house is their messy family. Maybe our neighbor who also has a family doesn’t seem to have a problem. One of the reasons our neat neighbor can keep a consistently neat house is because they have found solutions to the messy family problem. How do they do it? They do it by loving the subtle order of a beautiful dance.
The relationships in every household work like a dance in which there are unwritten rules by which everybody moves. Each person has a habitual and predictable response to the actions of others. In the organized neighbor’s house, the dance has a graceful look about it with each member moving in conjunction with the other to produce, in the case in point, an orderly and harmoniously run house.
As in the case of dancing, though it may not be obvious, someone is choosing the music and leading the dance. In the case of housekeeping, nine times out of ten that somebody is Momma or “the lady of the house.”
In other households the dance is pretty chaotic. Imagine a Jane Austin type movie in which those dancing the quadrille prance around in disorder stepping on feet and bumping into each other as they go. The dancers don’t know the pattern and there is no leader. In the end, nobody enjoys the dance or wants to do it again. When the housekeeping dance works like this, the house is chronically in a mess. Often the members, who may be dancing vigorously, can’t figure out why their house is cluttered and the neighbor’s is consistently neat.
If your fam is a big part of your housekeeping problem, concentrate on teaching them the dance steps and your messy house will clear up like magic. To learn more, read the book, ORGANIZING YOUR HOUSE AND FAMILY, by Sandra Felton available on www.messies.com)
(Taken from an upcoming book by Sandra Felton, “Why Is Her House So Neat and My House Is a Mess?”)