Molly's Musings is for the random thoughts in life--some really deep, others very. . . Molly's Musings are meant to get you thinking, laughing or, preferably, both. If you leave this page feeling offended. . .well, you need to open up your mind a little and work on your sense of humor now, don't you? :-)

I've always hated cleaning my house. Supposedly it's an every other generation thing in my family--you love to cook, hate to clean or love to clean, hate to cook. My grandma loved to cook and even though her house was always neat, cleaning wasn't her favorite thing of the two. My mom loves to clean and hates to cook. With my sister and me, we both love to cook but hate to clean. My mom would make jokes when my sister and I still lived at home--"The girls think rooms are round"--meaning that we didn't clean in the corners.

When I moved out on my own, I seldom cleaned--we're talking once a month or longer (no longer than 2 months). I didn't have trash laying all over or anything like that but things would get dusty. And when I did clean, it would take me 2 or 3 days--no kidding. I'd break it up into chunks--do the dusting on one day, the bathroom and the floors over the next 2 to 3 days. Of course it wasn't like I'd get it done fast either--dusting would take a couple of hours (over the last 19 years, I've lived in a 3-bedroom house and several 1-2 bedroom apartments, with the apartment I lived in while in college being the smallest at probably 550 square feet). The bathroom and the floors--I could stretch it into a 4 hour or longer job. Like I said, I hate cleaning.

I've been living in my current apartment for about 5 1/2 years now and I've maintained a regular cleaning schedule--every other week. I don't have pets other than my horny fish and I live by myself so it doesn't need it to be cleaned anymore frequently. For a few years, I got it all finished in 2 days but during the last 6 months, I've been getting it finished in one evening--gasp! And the other night, I realized that I've been getting it finished faster during the course of one evening.

It dawned on me the other night that the time I take to clean my physical house has correlated with the cleaning out of my emotional house. The more baggage I've dealt with, the faster I've been cleaning my phyiscal house. I realize that I'm not going to ever get rid of all of my baggage, we all have baggage but now mine definitely fits in the overhead compartment, so to speak. And while cleaning my physical house may not ever be on my top 10 list of favorite things to do, it's not the chore that it once was--just like digging into my emotional house isn't as painful as it once was.

Until next time.