At those young ages, the age before public school would begin, a large portion of my social interactions were within the church. This is an area where my "difference" started becoming more apparent. The other children seemed all too eager to believe the stories they were told in Sunday school, where I remained skeptical. This, mind you, did not stop me from wanting to believe. I sought some indication of a higher power before most of them understood what a "higher power" actually was. This made me different, and the others treated me as such. I was often cut off from groups because it was well known that I had a propensity to be the star of a group, academically speaking.
These things translated rather directly when I entered the public school system. However, it wasn't until my third grade year that a teacher recognized that the difference was something special--this teacher saw my intelligence. She proposed, to my parents, that I be given a proper IQ test, to determine if I needed to have some advanced schooling.
It would be boastful of me to post the actual score. To say that now, nearly thirty years later, I can still recall the parts I struggled with in that test should give you a basic understanding, especially of things to come. The highlight of the failures was in spelling the word "awnry". Of course, that's not a word. That's simply how the people around me pronounced that word. The word, of course, was "ornery", and despite misspelling it I was quite capable of defining it.
Home life was, let's say it was challenging. My parents were not advanced thinkers. Keeping up with me was difficult for them at times, and they resented those times that I could work a logical circle around them. They, like many people, formed a sort of distrust of me. I was different. Yet this wasn't the actual challenge of home life at all.
My mother, if she had a philosophy or a phrase to describe her beliefs about life, would be the person to say "Cleanliness is next to Godliness." My grandparents were not filthy people, and did not live in a filthy home, but there were parts that were often is disarray. I can recall that their bedroom and my grandmother's sewing room were areas that particularly offended my mother. I cannot say why my mother was what many people call a "neat freak", but there it is. "Neat", in her world, simply means that the environment needs to be immaculately clean. Interestingly enough, this does not mean organized. Yes, her cabinets looked neat, but they didn't make sense. Dozens of canned goods would simply have a shelf, despite their various categories and uses. It would take us so very long to find a can of condensed milk among cans of green beans, creamed corn, tomato paste, and chicken soup. My mother, however, could spot it instantly, and would quickly rise to frustration when we would fail to do the same.
That same frustration occurred frequently, yet for different reasons. Cleaning the house was a chore we often witnessed but rarely got involved in, as children. Make no mistake; my sister and I wanted to help. We wanted to be a part of the process. If we were offered a chance to help with the dishes, eventually we would end up dropping a heavy glass item that would shatter on the counter and floor. This enraged my mother to the point of terrifying us, therefore ensuring that we would never again try to help with that particular task.
This happened with almost all the chores of housekeeping. If there was a danger of breaking a "valuable" while dusting the piano, then we were forbidden to do it. "Valuables" were usually cheap picture frames or cheaper candle cups. My mother sold, much in the vein of Tupperware parties, a line of things by "Home Interiors", which were little more than cheap knockoffs of higher quality decor. The word "tacky" comes to mind in hindsight. Our home was riddled with their products, and some of them are still to be found in her home to this day.
My sister and I had learned, at a young age, that housekeeping was nerve-wracking, dangerous, and generally forbidden to us. We also learned some other things, though, that weren't of much help for our futures. We learned that cleaning our rooms fell into that same category. We tried, to the best of our abilities, to clean things up when
Getting older did not teach us anything new about cleaning up. As we entered our teens, something magical was meant to occur--somehow, some way, we were meant to understand the rules of cleaning, without training or first-hand knowledge. There were great fights about getting the dishes done, especially after I learned how to cook. Argument over the condition of our bedrooms never ceased, and after weeks of bickering mother would come in and take care of it for us. She had certainly taught us something about housekeeping--that it was someone else's job.
Of course, this didn't bode well for me once I was out on my own. I lived, for a time, in "cyclical clutter". Basically, things would accumulate over a period of a week or two, and then I would surge through and get it cleaned up. Without training, I found myself making many rookie mistakes. It was easy for me to get distracted by something I found while picking up. Prior to a cleanup, I would spend hours writing up a plan to organize everything, but often found that I lacked tools and storage capacity for the grouped items. Grouping was also difficult, as I had never had any real structure there, and so it was easy to over-generalize the groups. Saying "tools" sounds fine on paper, until you realize that there are screwdrivers, wrenches, bits, screws, hammers, box cutters, scissors, tape--all things that can easily fall into that category. Ultimately, there would be a bin with all of those things tossed into it, and hours would be lost sifting through it looking for a 10mm socket.
Eventually, I made the system work for me, and mostly stayed on top of things. There would be lapses, however, that were often the result (not the cause!) of depressive states that had never been properly treated. This would lead to more severe cases of clutter, at least from my point of view, but never really filth or disgust. The depression was often the result of feeling overwhelmed, usually from a lack of tools for dealing with things many people take for granted. For example, I entered my adult life without any real concept of how to maintain a checking account and to use it to pay bills. Again, my mother did the whole "balance the checkbook" thing on her own, and even to this day it is well known among the family that if she is sitting at the table with the checkbook and a calculator, that is a good time to leave the house. She was incredibly secretive about that process, and used yelling and anger to keep us away while she did the math. Now we understand why, at least a little bit--she didn't want us to know where she was spending her money that she was claiming to never have. Truth be told, she couldn't afford to buy us an occasional video game or toy because she had spent that money on hair styling, nail fills, personal clothes, or shopping sprees for more home decor. Priceless. Still, we love our mother, but not her faults...
I stumbled through life without a mentor.
My first child was born when I was only 18, and so many things were learned the hard way. I wasn't always a great role model when it came to housekeeping, but I instilled the knowledge nonetheless. It has been good to see that she has done far better than I ever did with it at young ages, but then it was an imperative of mine to make sure she knew how and why things were done. There were certainly times where I would slip back into the old way, and she was a voice to remind me to motivate and get the job done.
So, for many years, I managed not to fall. There was the occasional stumble, but never a fall into squalor, despite a solid framework built into my past to facilitate a full-on failure.
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