I was zipping along so smoothly, and then it all started to slide. The house is cluttered again, and I'm not sure what happened. Was it because I stopped graphing and tracking my progress? Was it because I tried to do too much too fast? Was it because deep down I just don't see the point of it all--I was cleaning all the time in order to keep up with the kids. Am I just fated to have a messy house? No, I don't believe that at all.

I feel like so much is going on, and I'm not sure how to keep up with everything that I want to achieve for myself and my family.

Hmmm.

I need to become more efficient. Do you have any suggestions for good websites, books, or systems? I could even take business-oriented efficiency systems and adapt to homemaking, if necessary.

Thanks in advance for your help. My children will appreciate it as I stop tearing my hair out.

I've been busy, busy, busy lately. A good busy. A satisfying busy. The kind of busy that I enjoy, but that always makes me think, "Boy, I hope that I'm really fulfilling my life's purpose with this stuff. I hope that I'm not wasting my future, and missing my destiny."

You know, the whole "Time is the fire in which we burn," (Star Trek: Generations) and "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity" (Thoreau) type of thing. Both great philosophical treatises, of course.

But on I press, hoping that with the help of the divine, some common sense, and a little bit of dumb luck, I'll somehow complete whatever it is I was put on this earth to do.

I don't have that much going on. I only want to plan a family reunion, sell enough things on Craigslist to be able to afford the gas to go to the reunion, keep the house clean, play with BabyMoney (3 yrs.), hold LittleGuy (1 yr.), who's going through that phase where he cries all the time unless he's being held, write blog posts for PYP, keep up with my church obligations, make sure my husband feels like he's getting enough TLC, get a tutoring and writing business going well enough that I can hit it hard in the fall when my potential clients come back to school, prepare the lessons for my day-job well in advance so that while I'm marketing and moonlighting as a tutor and writer, my teaching prep has already been taken care of, catch up on digital scrapbooking pages, and write for this blog and MoneyDummy.net. And I really want to get that next draft of my novel written. Oh, and at some point the editors of the lit magazine that accepted my story are going to get in touch with me for the revisions, which need to be done by the end of July, I think. Oh, and my husband's grandma is lonely and I promised that I'd e-mail her sometimes. And I just got a tutoring client, which is very awesome.

I'm feeling the burn, and I need to make sure that I don't fizzle and die and crash. So, since this blog is the place where I focus on getting and keeping it together, I'm working out my plan of attack here.

1. Do the basics. The basics. The things that are really, really important. I need to make sure I take time for prayer and meditation. And by time I mean about ten minutes a day. I need to take the kids to the park every morning. Children need to be outside during the summer. And yes, that's more important than any old part-time business. I need to keep the house functional and clean. Unless I do this, I can kiss everything else good-bye because when the house spins out of control, nothing else works really well. And the huge sense of success I get from continuing household improvement is keeping me going right now, and I need to keep going. So that tells me how I should spend my mornings, at least. Now I don't have to wonder anymore.
2. Some things are worth doing only medium-well. Whoever coined the phrase, "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well," did the world a huge disservice. Some things are worth doing only medium-well, just to get them done. I would love to spend fifteen minutes choosing, editing, and cropping photos and then putting them on richly detailed digital scrapbooking pages, but it ain't gonna happen. What's really essential is that I preserve the memories somehow, even if only by opening a Scrapbook Factory template and pounding words out for a few minutes. I can go back and add pictures in later, even years later if I need to.
3. Handle the immediate priorities. Yes, I would love to write a novel. Really, really, really. But the immediate priority right now is to earn enough money to put a downpayment on a house and bankroll Mr. MoneyDummy's grad school program, so that needs to be where my focus is. I'd love to do more, to be more, to "pursue my passion," but sometimes you just have to grind.
4. Let the rest go. For three years, I've had this fantasy that someday I'll have time to really make www.moneydummy.net a "real blog." To do the networking and the guest posting and stats analysis and the template development that makes blogs "big." Ain't gonna happen. It hurts to let go of that idea, but seriously, it's time to let it go. There are plenty of huge, wonderful personal finance blogs out there, but mint ewill not be one of them. And I shall be fine with that.

Woo hoo! I know it's absurd that I'm this excited about my house getting cleaner, but you've got to understand that my house has never been this consistently clean, and getting cleaner, since three years ago when I was a brand new mother and all I had to do all day was clean while my three-week-old baby slept. And even then it wasn't consistent, it was just frequent.

But things really seem to be changing in a permanent way right now! My living room is clean. And I mean really clean. Nothing is under or behind the couch. The bookshelves look great and actually have empty space on them. The coat closet opens and closes easily, and nothing falls out when I open it. It's amazing!

 And what's even better is that because I'm taking it slowly and thoroughly, I'm not only cleaning the house, I'm actually taking care of things that I run across as I clean. I'm faxing in medical paperwork and putting things on Craigslist and getting rid of things that have just been sitting there gathering dust for years! I've found my glasses and some books I was looking for and my cell phone is actually charged and I know where it is! When I get ready to go somewhere, all I have to do is open the coat closet and grab my purse and the diaper bag off the top shelf and they're both there and easy to reach without having to plow through piles of out of season jackets. And it's been this way for almost ten days now!

So here's the graph for the first week of the living room. You can see that I hit my goal, and if you could see the next few days, you'd see that it's lasted beyond the chart.

Things in the living room got so great, in fact, that I decided I just couldn't wait until the end of the week to start in on the kitchen, so I made a chart for that and started tracking my progress in there as well. Already the progress is amazing! The counters are clean and absolutely free of clutter; the dishes are no longer heaped up in the dish drainer waiting to cascade down onto the floor at the slightest bump. Instead, not only are they all put away, the dish drainer itself is dried off and underneath the sink, leaving me a spot on the counter to cook and mix. It's wonderful! And again, I've started addressing the things that have been haunting me in there too. I finally moved four boxes of dishes that have been in the corner for almost a year, and I used two TV tables (which I was able to reach easily because I had already cleaned the coat closet) to create a space for the computer and move it off of the kitchen table. I'm telling you, this is awesome! I don't know why it didn't occur to me to track my progress sooner, but I'm doing it now and it's working wonderfully. 

So ta ta for now! I've got the urge to go hit the laundry area and add another dot to this graph.

I've realized that I use housecleaning as a way to avoid challenging myself in other areas. Think about it (this is more to myself than to anyone else): the house gets messy and then I have something urgent to accomplish. It's okay for me not to write, not to strive for personal goals, not to exercise or challenge myself in some other way because I'm cleaning, and cleanliness comes first.

And the most alluring part of it is that I can achieve a sense of gratification and accomplishment so easily. After a cleaning spree, Hubs compliments me on how great the house looks, and I feel so pleased and happy every time I walk into my newly clean house. Of course, neither of these states lasts very long, so the only way for me to get that same sense of accomplishment and the same gratitude from my husband is to let the house get messy again so that I can rescue it once more.

Of course, masking my desire for real accomplishment with house cleaning makes me accomplish less, and it means that my house is messy a lot of the time.

It's an interesting realization, the way that psychology is affecting my cleaning habits. I wonder what I can do about it.

I enjoy reading business management books, and I've begun to realize that many of them are surprisingly relevant to being a Stay-At-Home mother. Most recently I read The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for mangers (and their employees). I was surprised by how much the content applied to the burnout that many mothers report; maybe this is because mothers are both their managers and their employees. In other words, mothers both create the environment in which they will perform their tasks (making them managers), and then they perform their tasks in it (making them employees).

One of the signs of a miserable job is anonymity. The idea is that when employees lose their sense of identity and instead feel like mere phone-callers, cashiers, salesmen, data-crunchers, or servers they become miserable and, correspondingly, less productive.

 That sound familiar to anyone? Anyone ever feel like they're merely washers, cleaners, cookers, diaper changers, and nursers? When you and your spouse have a moment to talk together, do you suddenly find that you have no idea what to talk about besides the children? When people ask you what your hobbies and interests are, do you have a hard time remembering? I know I do. I know lots of other parents worry about the same thing.

The book suggests that managers find out what their employees are interested in and talk to them about it, to know about their families and their talents, to find out what makes their employees people, not just workers. So how can mothers implement this idea in their own lives?

I've noticed a few things that have helped me combat the SAHM anonymity syndrome:

• Read, watch, or listen to something that enriches you and gives you something to talk about. Listen to a great podcast, read an educational book, watch . . . something interesting and informative. I listen to the Dave Ramsey podcast and just about any podcast by LearnOutLoud.com. I try to read at least a little non-fiction every day. After I finish my current book, I'm going to start in on my husband's economics textbook. The point is that in order to remain vital, alive, and interesting, we need to continuously take in things that challenge and interest us. Too many mothers neglect this.
• Do something creative and uniquely yours. Remember those old hobbies you used to have? Remember how you used to write or paint or garden or take photos? Start doing a little, tiny bit of that. For me, this is blogging and noveling. I do the blogging mostly to discipline my thinking and to get social contact, but the noveling is just to keep my creative muscle alive. I only write for about fifteen minutes a day. Do I think I'm going to write and publish a novel in fifteen minutes a day? Not a chance. But I'm keeping my creative muscles alive so that I remain strong, vital, and interesting to myself and others.
• Pick something non-kid related to talk about with your spouse. Many stay-at-home-parents report feeling like they're no longer interesting to their spouses because their spouses are in the workplace growing and being challenged while the stay-at-home parent is doing the same stagnating things over and over again every day. Even worse, some working parents begin to treat the stay-at-home parent as though they really are becoming less interesting. In order to combat this, pick something non kid-related to talk to your spouse about when he or she comes home. Form an opinion on an MSN article; find out about a news issue; tell about a project you're working on.

If anonymity makes people miserable in a place in which they spend eight hours a day, it's no wonder that mothers who begin to feel anonymous in their own homes report huge incidences of depression, hopelessness, and sadness. It's vital for SAHMs to combat this, and the three ideas above are a good place to start.

What about you? Have you struggled with feeling "anonymous" in your home, and how have you successfully combated it?