What does tidiness say about worth?
Moving into someone else's house temporarily and disconnecting from clutter
After living in a 6.3m converted bus with my son and dog for 8 months, we moved back into a house over Easter. It was an unexpected move. I had anticipated living in the bus for much longer, but my brother’s father died and so my brother inherited a house. I asked to move in with him for two reasons: the first was that I was afraid of getting covid in the bus. All the tales I’ve heard of zero energy and other symptoms made me worry about how we would cope if I got covid. How could I carry a heavy cassette toilet up a slope from the bus to my car, and empty it at the local waste station if I was sick and isolating? How would I deal with vomit? What if I didn’t have the energy to boil the kettle and stand at the sink to hand wash dishes? Every aspect of bus life required effort and I knew I wouldn’t cope well if I got covid. When the omicron outbreak began and the government loosened covid restrictions, I suddenly felt vulnerable living without another adult and without a proper bathroom and other facilities.
I have plenty of bad days as it is, being chronically ill, so I’m familiar with what it’s like to be physically incapable of doing what I want or need to do, but there are also good-enough days that allow me to get by. (I never have proper good days. That’s not how it works when you’re chronically ill and also an overstretched working single mother. But I’ve learned to maximise the good-enough ones.) What if they were all bad days?
The second reason was that I had to take on debt to buy the bus and to convert it into our lovely tiny home. I hadn’t planned to borrow quite so much, but I didn’t have the luxury of time to spread out the spending. I needed more money than I had to get it done as soon as possible, otherwise we could have ended up homeless with a half finished bus when my lease ended. Part of the purpose for moving into the bus was to save money for a house deposit, but I wasn’t able to save much at all. Between servicing the debt, the extra insurance, the small amount of land rent I was paying, storage unit rent, and extra costs like paying for the laundromat, I was financially not much better off than when I was renting with flatmates. I did have a bit of extra money which went on things like art therapy or maths tutoring for my son. I was able to comfortably pay the bills instead of stressing about it and juggling which one was most urgent and which could wait, but I didn’t have much left over.
So I asked (pleaded with) my brother to let us move in with him, rent free. (I pay the bills, so it works for him too.) The plan is that I’ll sell the bus to pay off the debt, and I’ll be able to save at last.
It’s not a big house. My brother also inherited two dogs when his dad died, so there are now three humans and three dogs in a small-ish house. It has 3 bedrooms but it is cramped with all of us and all our belongings. He tells me I have too much stuff and I argue that I don’t have much at all, it’s just that we moved into a house that already had everything.
Of course it seems like a lot when you move a fridge, washing machine, and dryer into a house that already has all those things. My couches are much nicer than his dad’s, but he doesn’t want to get rid of his dad’s, so we have 4 couches. There was a spare bed for me so my bed is being stored in the garage. My whiteware is in the shed. All my books and household items are in the attic, except for the boxes that are stacked in the dining room because we don’t want to overfill the attic and have the ceiling cave in. My bedroom has only a small path around the bed because I have two sets of drawers, a stand-alone wardrobe, a desk, and a small ladder shelf for some books that I have kept out of boxes to read, because there’s nowhere else for those items to go. It’s lucky I got rid of so much when we moved into the bus, because I don’t know what we’d do if I still had a table or my piano or bookshelves.
The clutter has been overwhelming, and I’ve responded by shutting down and ignoring it, which is uncharacteristic of me, and I’ve been thinking about how tidiness relates to self-identity.
I was raised by a hoarder and I loathe mess in my home. I think of myself as a mostly tidy person. I’m far from a minimalist: I like having interesting things to look at, I like colour, and creation, and I especially like books. But I don’t collect stuff and I hate shopping. I’m very good at clearing things out regularly and donating them to opshops or listing them on Facebook or TradeMe. The stuff that I have I like to keep orderly and coordinated and functional. I didn’t want to end up carting around banana boxes full of broken but “potentially useful” items, or to keep multiples of things “just in case” like my mother. For me, if something breaks I either fix it or bin it. If I have two of the same kitchen utensil, I get rid of the spare. I can’t deal with mismatched dining sets and cutlery.
(The exception to this is my car. My car is always full of crap because I don’t usually have the energy to deal with it and I don’t have to live in it, so I’m able to ignore it. Tidy house, messy car, that’s my standard MO. The other exception is that time when I was severely depressed and barely functioning - although even then I mostly kept things tidy. If you see my home in a messy state it’s a definite sign I’m not doing well, mentally.)
Usually when I move into a house, it is a clean slate, and I can arrange things as I please. This time, not only am I trying to be respectful of my brother grieving, and doing what he needs to do in terms of his dad’s stuff, but we are also only living there temporarily. There’s no point in unpacking all my books only to pack them up again in a year’s time. I’m deliberately trying not to get too comfortable, because that will just make it harder to leave. Even though we haven’t had a long term, secure home yet, this is the first time we’ve moved into a place planning to leave soon. The deal was we’d stay for a year, (although I’m sure my brother won’t kick us to the curb if I don’t have a home ready for us to move into next Easter precisely).
The interesting effect of this disconnection and temporariness is that I don’t feel like where we are living reflects us in any way, and therefore I’m able to separate myself from the mess. Previously, I took clutter in my home personally. I enjoyed tidiness and I was ashamed of any mess. I don’t enjoy the clutter now, but I am able to ignore it in a way that I couldn’t before. I accept that I can’t empty the lounge room of all my brother’s dad’s stuff because it’s not mine and I’m not the one who is processing grief. So I overlook it, and I dream of what my future home will be like, when it’s all mine.
It’s my brother’s house, and that means he can arrange the appliances on the kitchen counter tops how he’d like. He can keep the owl and motorbike ornaments that I find ugly in the lounge. He gets to keep half a dozen grotty dog beds around the house and on the front steps that we have to step over to get into the house (I’m sure one day I’m going to trip on them and dive through the front door). Because none of this is my choice, and because it’s all temporary I’m somehow able to switch off. I’m no longer grossed out by the dog beds or annoyed at having to step around the empty drawers in the living room, or bored by all the blank walls.
What does this say about previous-me? (And, likely, future me.) What does it mean when we say that our homes are an extension of ourselves? And that I hated to have a messy home, and especially hated for anyone to see any mess? Do I genuinely like things to be tidy or is it that I feel ashamed about mess? Is it because we glorify beautiful, tidy homes, and the effort that it takes to create and keep them, and having a messy home communicates something slovenly and inadequate about ourselves? Is it a throwback to the 1950s housewife attitude? Do I put effort into keeping things orderly so I can feel like I’m good enough? Other people’s mess doesn’t bother me (except when it is extreme and dirty); it is only my mess that I’m uncomfortable with. Is this because I accept when I have control over something and when I don’t, or is it because I feel that being messy would make me unacceptable and unworthy even though I don’t think that about others?
I’m curious to know what others think. How do you feel about tidiness, and how do you deal with mess?