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Our shelf ad is up at http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/fuo/1770891974.html
The carpets will be cleaned probably in moments, and then we will haul stuff back into the apartment. I awoke thinking of how much opportunity for decluttering there is, and i need to try and shape my understanding so that i can be at peace and at ease, yet still be motivated to do a manageable amount of my own decluttering, and gently and compassionately coach Christine into decluttering.
It is, of course, her clutter and my hobbies. She hasn't used her X in over a year, thus it's clutter, but my Y is just waiting for a chance for me to get to it. I can recognize the bias in that framing, and become uncertain how accurate i am in my framing. In truth, is not the china cabinet my clutter?
I reflect on how, when growing up, it was obvious to me there was Mom's stuff: multiple sets of dishes, decoration and mementos, shelves of books. Mom did, on the whole, have things arranged as if the Souther Living photographer was arriving in moments. (I didn't keep it dusted to that standard, despite it being one of my chores.) But she never saw that stuff as her stuff, although as a child, it was clear to me that none of the rest of us participated in making the decisions for that stuff. She was the family: everyone else had individual things.
When Christine and i moved in together, i knew we had to blend, negotiate, and share decisions. I think we have with minimal resentment, and that is the structure that is most important to me. I recognize how well i learned bullying from my mom, a bullying that for the first decade of our married life i had to unlearn. And Christine's mother had a sort of passivity, i think, as i listen to Christine and her sister sift through their family life. Christine and i could have built a very different relationship: we had the tools at hand.
So maybe when we load all of our things back into the apartment, i can drop the sense of guilty extravagance ("For shame, look at all of this that we've bought and barely use"), the guilty sense of poor house and health management ("Look at these piles of dust catchers, can't you get this filed and dealt with?"), and recognize the love with which Christine has set days this week aside to make sure the carpet is cleaned for my health (dust mites) and my aesthetic awareness of the cat stains and the high traffic areas. I can recognize that we did set out with a plan and followed through, and recognize the successful parts of that plan -- staging it out over enough time that we kept from triggering our overwhelm shutdown reaction. (The shutdown can be literal -- which is how i think we react in overwhelm we can ignore/postpone/let pile up around us -- or internal -- which is how i think we react to the otherwise unavoidable.)
Now to gently wake Christine, dissemble the bed, and find a place that i can carry on a conference call from 8:30 to later while the great suck occurs in the apartment.
The carpets will be cleaned probably in moments, and then we will haul stuff back into the apartment. I awoke thinking of how much opportunity for decluttering there is, and i need to try and shape my understanding so that i can be at peace and at ease, yet still be motivated to do a manageable amount of my own decluttering, and gently and compassionately coach Christine into decluttering.
It is, of course, her clutter and my hobbies. She hasn't used her X in over a year, thus it's clutter, but my Y is just waiting for a chance for me to get to it. I can recognize the bias in that framing, and become uncertain how accurate i am in my framing. In truth, is not the china cabinet my clutter?
I reflect on how, when growing up, it was obvious to me there was Mom's stuff: multiple sets of dishes, decoration and mementos, shelves of books. Mom did, on the whole, have things arranged as if the Souther Living photographer was arriving in moments. (I didn't keep it dusted to that standard, despite it being one of my chores.) But she never saw that stuff as her stuff, although as a child, it was clear to me that none of the rest of us participated in making the decisions for that stuff. She was the family: everyone else had individual things.
When Christine and i moved in together, i knew we had to blend, negotiate, and share decisions. I think we have with minimal resentment, and that is the structure that is most important to me. I recognize how well i learned bullying from my mom, a bullying that for the first decade of our married life i had to unlearn. And Christine's mother had a sort of passivity, i think, as i listen to Christine and her sister sift through their family life. Christine and i could have built a very different relationship: we had the tools at hand.
So maybe when we load all of our things back into the apartment, i can drop the sense of guilty extravagance ("For shame, look at all of this that we've bought and barely use"), the guilty sense of poor house and health management ("Look at these piles of dust catchers, can't you get this filed and dealt with?"), and recognize the love with which Christine has set days this week aside to make sure the carpet is cleaned for my health (dust mites) and my aesthetic awareness of the cat stains and the high traffic areas. I can recognize that we did set out with a plan and followed through, and recognize the successful parts of that plan -- staging it out over enough time that we kept from triggering our overwhelm shutdown reaction. (The shutdown can be literal -- which is how i think we react in overwhelm we can ignore/postpone/let pile up around us -- or internal -- which is how i think we react to the otherwise unavoidable.)
Now to gently wake Christine, dissemble the bed, and find a place that i can carry on a conference call from 8:30 to later while the great suck occurs in the apartment.
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