Is your House Keeping YOU? Cleaning Challenges/Solutions Basics: Standards and Team Building

I'm going to provide ideas here as both a person who has had chronic illness/weakness for much of my adult life and provide some education from the occupational therapist in me.  It was a silver lining that my patients appreciated that I could relate to their reality.  I could 'empathize' not 'sympathize', as I'd been there!

I'll come back and provide separate topics for the practical tips that are what people are typically seeking on this topic, but I want to start with the basics.  Occupational therapy grew out of the theory of 'engage the mind and the body will follow' -- we're experts in looking at 'volition' - what motivates a person.  And people are VERY different in many regards, and incredibly similar in a few regards.  Some people LOVE doing housework and having a 'tidy' house, and others really aren't that concerned about it, and everyone's somewhere in between.  Typically, the people who are seeking information are those who value having a clean house and those fall into two categories: Those who like to clean and those who feel they HAVE to clean, and that's a discussion in and of itself.  But within the category of people who want their houses to be clean, there can be problems with the person responsible for cleaning related to their health that can affect their ability to clean.  That can be an 'energy crisis' or a mechanical problem with the joints or bones and muscles (such as injury or surgery) or neurological problems such as impaired balance or mental processing/cognition.  

Over the years I've worked with such a variety of patients/clients/consumers/customers, and one of the 'universal challenges of living' was housekeeping and yardwork.  Whether a person had a stroke, a knee surgery, carpel tunnel, cancer, chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia, or were simply OLDER, with 'this, that and the other' adding up to make it difficult or impossible to do the harder activities of daily living, we frequently had to address housekeeping and yardkeeping.

I use the term 'compensatory strategies' a lot; it's just a fancy way insurance-companies have taught us to say 'doing things differently'.  I'm going to suggest something very simple but it is simultaneously difficult for most: change your standards.  Keeping things safe so that a person doesn't trip, slip, fall or catch a disease is perhaps the base level that I'd really recommend people stay at or above.  

Many medical conditions OR the TREATMENTS lead to cognitive impairment.  One of the biggest problems with much of the concepts that can really help people are simply OVERWHELMING to people when they're not feeling well.  I was reminded of this earlier this week when I woke up with my body finally not being able to deal with the fall pollens in the air.  I happened to have a scheduled osteopath appointment at 11 and it was everything I could do to get in the shower, get dressed and be there by 11.  Thankfully, she had a couple of product suggestions that were available as supplements and a sinus spray at the health store, and I was back in business.  But I laughingly say 'someone could yell 'There's George Clooney'', and I'd not get off the couch! 

 I found it REALLY interesting to watch Suzie Orman (sp?) working with people and she said you can tell the state of a person's finances by looking in the bathroom drawers.  I had noticed in my lifetime the correlation, as I went from being a 'minimalist' and very organized in my youth and young adulthood, to quite the opposite when I had become quite debilitated from chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia.  This is where I want to bring in the subject of 'teamwork'.  

Consider who you can team up with - through my middle 30s, I had husbands or equivalents living in the same house, and they were very different; one was basically dependent on his mother for everything before 'I got him' so he was just treating me like I was his mom, meaning I did all the money making, spending, cooking, and 'ran the show'. Perfectly nice guy, just hadn't grown up yet and had a few other things to work out that weren't congruent with my lifestyle as I went into real adulthood. As a child I'd always been very responsible, so that was carrying over in my mid 20s, and I'd also either taken on or been expected to do a great deal of the work around the house and property growing up, so this wasn't all that strange to me when I was out on my own and went to college, got a job, and established my first 'home'.  

When I was 25, a new man came into my life who was older and more mature related to going about life. I finally had a real 'partner' and we truly went 50/50 on everything, even after his daughter came to live with us, I paid for half of everything. However, the work got divided into thirds, it was great! He was a super organized and efficient guy, 'always going', and nothing was ever needing to be done longer than a day. My father had chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia with the malingering migraine problem that I later would develop as well, which is some of the reason I'd worked so hard as a child around the property.  My mother expected me to help with the house and cooking too, so I find it interesting to now understand chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia symptoms related to adrenal fatigue and realize I was 'in it'/adrenal fatigue way back into childhood. I'm very glad I had the experience of being part of a household/family where everyone was doing their fair share and there wasn't a long list of things to do; life had a balance to it that allowed me to put my attention on mySELF for the first time, and I figured a lot of things out from the dysfunctional home and childhood and change things, returning to college and eventually becoming an occupational therapist.  

However, I exhausted myself doing it! Being paired with someone who was also high energy and had the same tendencies for perfectionism brought out that side of me and it wasn't a 'complement', but more of a 'catalyst'. I had one of those houses that was always perfect!  His truck and my car were washed by hand every week, waxed by hand every month and we were outdoors making the yard beautiful or enjoying our motorcycle and trailer (also washed and waxed, naturally).  One summer we stayed home over July 4 weekend because we'd be gone 13 straight weekends otherwise! We were camping across the United States and Canada, on top of having huge jobs, friends, and our families.  My mother suddenly and unexpectedly died and my father became very 'needy' -- like my first husband he'd basically looked to women to take care of him and, while he was completely capable of taking care of himself, he didn't want to learn to cook, he wanted to keep people showing him how they loved him through feeding him dinner.  Just dinner, he had always made his own breakfast and lunch.  He also didn't clean his house, that's what I'd done for 20 years (and then some, it took me to about 25 to 'realize' that my mother was perfectly capable of cleaning their house and I had my own home and life to be focusing on and let my parents work out their 'differences' and the first step was to stop DOING for them the things that were going undone by them in their dysfunctions.)

When I was 29, one day I struggled to get out of bed to go to work.  I was exhausted by the time I walked to the building and half way up the stairs to my office, I had to stop and rest. That was the beginning of very frightening and significant 'change of status' which today is called 'chronic fatigue syndrome'.  My husband had chronic illness that at the time we met, had required a surgery.  He unfortunately had gotten MRSA inside his brain, which was very difficult to treat.  But since I'd 'given into the system' years before, I felt like I could 'receive' -- you see, in my family of origin everything was 'conditional', even as a child I couldn't just 'receive', I was to be the one 'putting forth' in order to be accepted or 'loved'.  So in my "summer of love" when I was 29, where I was simply too exhausted to even stand and stir something on the stove most nights, I allowed myself to have others do the harder things.  I then took on doing some of the 'easier things' -- essentially a 'trade'.  

So that is why I say that another compensatory strategy to consider when you're dis- or dif-abled is to team up with someone and trade.  And I include my story so that people understand that I have lived it, and I also have dug deep to look at all the different reasons a person goes from chronic wellness to chronic illness, and it's necessary to work on your 'today' concern, which is 'how do I get my house clean', as well as start looking at the longer-term 'why did this happen' and 'what can I do about it?'  

Please click on the upper right link to look at the list of other topics in this Forum and I'll continue to past about house keeping strategies and equipment that can make things be the way YOU want them to be.  

Please click on the link to go 'up' a level and look at the list of Topics in this forum related to individual concepts (above the area you're reading in, on the right -- as you look from there to the left you'll see it's the chain of things in the Forums, then home is clear at the left).  Since most people's biggest concern is floors, I started with that one, and the link is: www.lumigrate.com/forum/floors-mardyrella-style