What Does it Take?

What does it take to be good at something?  What does it take to be great in an area of your life?  What is the difference between being really talented at something and plain hard work?  What does it take to be the Albert Einstein of photography?  What does it take to be a Martha Stewart of one's own home?  The last one is probably the question that haunts me the most.

Anyone who knows me knows that cleaning house is not my strong suit.  It is, in fact, probably my weakest area of all times.  That does not give me the excuse to sit around and just let the dirt pile up; it does, rather, give me a greater responsibility to learn how to keep a clean house.  I want my daughter to be able to invite her friends home from school.  I want my husband to be able to bring a co-worker home without having to call to see if the house is presentable or not.  I want my house to be transformed from a mere house to a home.  Does anyone out there understand what I'm talking about?

I didn't grow up learning how to keep a clean house.  My mom was busy working, trying to help support the family, so she wasn't able to really teach me.  We're both natural pack rats, so I never learned how to throw things away.  Plus, when I married, my husband and I were both over 30, and we both brought our separate apartments' worth of items to the house.  So here we were in the first few months of marriage with double almost everything already and we had to try to condense into a molded family.  Oh, and did I forget to mention that I got pregnant within the first couple of months?  And I had morning sickness.  Strike that, I had sickness from morning until night until I was 6 months along.

Once our bundle of joy came along, I was placed on bed confinement for 2 weeks.  The doctor was livid that I had gotten out of bed to go to my daughter's first check up.  When he said bed rest, he meant I was NOT to get up!  It was slow moving for a while there, then before I knew it I was pregnant with Nathaniel, then Benjamin, then....As you can see, life just kind of took over and suddenly, here we were with a house full of stuff.  Some stuff we needed, and some stuff we just needed to get rid of.

Here we are, 7 years later, and our house is stuffed to the gills with stuff.  And I would love to be a natural born organizer who can say, "of course, this is where all the sheets go, and this is where all the plastic containers go," etc.  But I just look at the rooms and wonder where in the world I am supposed to begin!  This clutter started to prove to be too much for me, yet I didn't know what to do.  I've tried all these websites and cleaning books and all that jazz and was getting more and more hopelessly lost.

Then, a dear friend gave me a book.  This book absolutely changed my life as far as the cleaning aspect is concerned.  It gave me a realistic view on cleaning.  It made me evaluate what I know from what I need to know in order to have a house in good working order.  I cringed when I scored a 5 on a scale from 1 to 30 on housekeeping know-how.  But it also explained why I have always struggled.

I never knew I would say this, though always hoped I could one day, but I am actually starting to get a foothold in the clutter in my house.  It's been so time consuming, worrisome, and chalked full of self-degrading thoughts, and yet it is starting to come together.  Now, mind you, I don't expect to have a dinner party in a month or anything like that.  I was warned, as the old adage goes, "You didn't get yourself in this mess overnight; you won't get yourself out of this mess overnight."  But it won't take seven years!  In fact, I've put a time limit on it.  Next May, the High School National Academic Quizbowl Tournament Championship is going to be held in Atlanta, and I am planning on having some people over then.  That gives me eight more months to get this place together.  The joy of it is that I was able to have some friends over a couple weekends ago.  There was still some clutter in those rooms, but it was nothing like it's been the last few years.

I'm by no means a natural at  keeping house, and I have a very long way to go.  But I am determined to get there.  I will have a clean house.  I will have a house to which my daughters and my sons can bring their friends over to hang out and maybe spend the night.  I will have a place where I can have my girlfriends over for tea.  Sometimes it's not about the talent, the natural abilities.  Sometimes those are deficiencies that have to be overcome.  Sometimes it's all about sheer hard work, the right tools, determination, and time.  Martha Stewart I'm not, but a good housekeeper and home maker I will be!