The Once Proud Slob

Image credit: Photo by alvi2047 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I used to love to watch The Odd Couple on TV growing up. I always hated Felix, so prissy and uptight, but I loved Oscar, unable to find his bed under piles of clothes and bits of old sandwiches. That, I thought, is me. And it's been true.

Mark and I had a friend come to visit once at an especially crazy point in our lives; Mark was finishing school and looking for a job while we simultaneously searched for a new apartment. We came home after an afternoon out apartment hunting to find that our friend (much to both our chagrin and delight) had done the dishes and made dinner. She asked how our day had been and we said it had been largely unsuccessful, as several of the places we saw did not come with dishwashers, and that was one of our primary requirements. Our friend wrinkled her nose and said, "It should be." Our dishes had been on the verge of growing enough life on them to become sentient and walk away.

After that, I did get a bit more fussy about cleaning before we had guests over. And I always inwardly roll my eyes when people who have never seen my house tell me not to fuss about cleaning so much. "People who love you won't mind if the house isn't perfect!" They say that, blissfully unaware that my aspirations have not generally been in the realm of a pearl-clad, white-gloved June Cleaver but more like "no overwhelmingly noxious odors."

Still, far from being ashamed of my slovenly ways, I've always had a deep pride in them. I was tickled that my kids had to learn from a book what an iron looks like and what it does or what a mop is for. "I'm no prissy, uptight Felix Unger," my home says to the world, "I'm casual and lovable Oscar Madison. And I have more time for fun since I'm not fiddling with all that silly cleaning."

Still since I've had kids, I have to admit, overall it's been less fun to be a slob than it used to be. I started worrying about what was around that they might shove in their mouths as babies. I started losing things and spending hours searching for them in piles of junk. I started impaling my feet on toys. And I started cleaning up my act, just a little: trying to have places for things rather than throwing them wherever they might land, doing the dishes at least every other day, occasionally sorting the laundry rather than dumping whites and colors all in together.

Yet I found myself taking offense the other day when I told a friend I needed to cut our chat short so that I could clean up the house in preparation for a guest and she told me not to sweat the cleaning stuff so much. I wanted to scream "I'm a slob! I have dead ants on my kitchen wall that are a year old! I am not some uptight, controlling perfectionist!" And that's when it hit me. This whole slob thing isn't about what I am, it's about manipulating other people's perceptions of me.

Being a slob, like its evil twin of being fastidious, is an extreme. I didn't want to be perceived as one extreme, so I swung to the other. And it's not serving my needs anymore. I don't like not being able to find things. I don't like smelly dishes. I don't like once white shirts that look rumpled and pinkish grey. I don't like looking at dead ants on my wall. But there's one thing I do like about being a slob, one thing that has always served me, the reason I still cling to my squalor: it allows me to say what I'm not. It lets me hold up my moldy dishes as proof that I am not an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent.

Guess what? I am an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent. And it's time to recognize that and work on balance rather than continue to leave unwanted crumbs on the floor to refute it.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road on August 25, 2009.