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Is it Neat or is it a Mess?

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By Dr. Deb - FJN Family Columnist

Is there any question? In the war about a neat versus clean house, it should be obvious that clean wins without a struggle. After all, even the Torah praises "seder v’ nikayon" (order and neatness). For all the years of my children’s growing up, I encouraged, prodded, coaxed, and, at times, I’m sorry to say, went, well, beyond, to get my children to clean their rooms. I enjoyed it when my house was pretty and everything was in its place, which happened on the rare occasions when those who occupied the same space under my roof would deign to humor me with some half-hearted efforts at tidying up their stuff.

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I went for years thinking with a self-satisfied smugness that I was right and I encouraged all my messy clients to comply with their fastidious partners to "just do it" and get their place uncluttered. That is until Sandy walked into my office.

Sandy had the eyes of a poet: soft, tearful. He had been battling with depression for more years than he could remember. He was doing something for a living that was completely out of character, selling cars or something like that, I forget what. He should have been painting canvasses. In fact, that was a good deal of where his depression came from: He had spent his whole life forcing his round-peg self into the square hole that everyone seemed to want him to go in.

It was while we were spending one session, out of several weeks, talking about rethinking his line of work that Sandy almost casually dropped in the statement: "You know, I don’t have a space of my own anywhere except my car." My ears perked up, and he went on, "I love to ride with the windows down and the music on, but the best part of all is that I can drop a leftover food wrapper anywhere. It doesn’t matter where because I don’t notice things like that anyway and since it’s my car, I don’t have to notice. I don’t have to! There’s a freedom in that, don’t you think?" He looked at me with the first twinkle I’d seen in his eyes since we’d begun.

As I listened, I found myself grinning. (I always did enjoy taking the side of the underdog.) And that surprised me, too, because I noticed that I did not have the usual visceral reaction of "ugh" about the dirty wrapper. After all, it wasn’t my car; it was his, and that precisely was his point: He got to express who he was by not worrying where the wrapper fell. Now you’re going to tell me, "What kind of self-expression is that, to be able to be a slob and get away with it?"

It’s a good question, but I discovered, as I got to know Sandy, that there was a good answer. Sandy heard poetry that we didn’t hear. We could be talking about the most mundane matters, and he would come up with some kind of colorful metaphor that absolutely clinched the idea so well that it stood on its own without further need of clarification. Sandy lived in a rich internal world of philosophy and concept that most of the rest of us wouldn’t find the door to enter let alone know what to do when we got there. Mess? Stuff? How could a man whose mind was so full of the richness of ideas be aware of food wrappers—or anything in the realm of the physical?

"Oh, come on, Deb," I can hear you saying, "I’m artistic myself and yet I’m very aware of the world of the physical. Why, if you don’t mind my saying, you write fairly well but you just got through telling us that you like things pretty. So you’re sort of artistic and yet you live in the world that the rest of us do."

You may be right, but Sandy didn’t. And you know what? There are a lot of Sandys out there. A lot of people who just don’t see the physical. It’s not important to them; it doesn’t stack up when you compare it to their opulent interior life. And they don’t want their precious time stolen away from thinking their thoughts in order to straighten out their stacks of papers or their socks. Why, it’s more than stealing time, because the minute we insist that they live by our rules, we’re robbing the Sandys of this world of their very personalities; we’re forcing them to be who we are, not who they are.

Sandy’s wife has to do some serious thinking about wanting her pretty house in proper order. But I asked her, "Do you love him?"

"Of course I do," she replied, "He’s a wonderful person."

"Then," I said, "embrace the mess, because it’s part of the package."

Debby Schwartz Hirschorn, PhD. Is a Marriage & Family Therapist in Hollywood. Visit: DrDeb.com.

Posted by Dr. Deb - FJN Family Columnist on 08/10 at 05:24 PM • Hits: 141



Reader Comments

  1. Your column is always sensitively written with insightful depth.  Please do one on nightmares in teenagers. My 16 year old daughter is leaving for Israel soon and has complained about them.  She feels that her room is haunted and sleeps with the light on.  Other nightmares are about being pursued, even though I am not nagging her to clean up.


    Posted by Esther  on  08/26  at  08:37 AM

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