Confessions of a Slob
By Holly Beal

Editor's note: This article is a companion article to "Confessions of a Neat-Freak." The articles were written by two sisters, raised in the same household, who turned out very different.

aaaaaello, my name is Holly and I am a slob. I've been a slob for a while now, though the exact date is hard to pinpoint. I know I haven't always been this way. I have my own blame factors, but I'll tell you the story and you can decide what is true and what isn't. aaaaaTo begin with, I would like to say that in college I was one of the "clean" roommates. My room was always tidy, I always did my dishes immediately after eating, and I never left unsightly clumps of hair in the shower drain. I was using the skills my mother had been pounding into me since I was old enough to hold a sponge, and I was using them well. I even went so far as to organize my closet by color. Yes, I was a tidy person. Not a neat-freak, but definitely tidy. So what changed? aaaaaPerhaps it was moving in with my sister that first spurred my slovenliness. You see, my sister is the type of person that can't stand having a single piece of lint on a sweater, and will even pull pieces of lint off of strangers' sweaters. She has a place for everything, and everything is in its place. She is semi-neurotic about cleaning. I didn't think I was going to mind this, but when I moved in with her, I realized that I wasn't quite as clean as I thought I was. After a long day, I would throw my clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up or putting them in the laundry basket. If I was in a hurry, I would leave the crumbs on the counter. Little things, but to her they were not acceptable. aaaaaI think this may have spurred a little slobbish rebelliousness. When she was out of town, I would leave doing the dishes for a whole day. I wouldn't pick up my clothes or rinse out the sink after brushing my teeth. But invariably, when she was coming home, I would clean up. Maybe not to her standards, but I would clean up. Yet I harbored a certain degree of annoyance at the fact that I had to be so perfectly clean all the time. It's not natural.
	a	aaaaaNow let me give my sister a little credit and say that she was very patient and really tried not to be demanding. We didn't have fights about these things, per se, but she did remind me about them when they happened. And, being the younger sister, I generally hauled my tired body out of whatever prone position I was in and cleaned up. I'll admit it: I enjoy living in a clean house. And as long as someone is there to gently prod me, I'll clean up without too much fuss. aaaaaSo here is where the problem lies: I moved out of my sister's house and got married to someone who rarely encouraged me to clean. In fact, I suddenly found myself appreciating my sister's patience with me, as I was now in her position. My husband is not completely unruly and disgusting, but he can quite happily avoid cleaning a bathroom for a month, and in fact will genuinely not even notice that it needs cleaning. Additionally, he tends to leave things in piles all over the house, and when he
"tidies up" it means that he stacks the piles on top of each other, then takes the miscellaneous things lying around and puts them in new piles. aaaaaAt first I fought bravely against this undertow of stuff that was dragging our house into a slob-like state. I organized, I cleaned, I threw out a lot of items that my husband previously could not live without. But as time passed I found myself stacking things into piles too. I felt guilty about it for awhile, and then I gave in and let it overtake me. I would have moments where I would look around my house and see all the stuff that had crept into my life, and would suddenly go into a fit of cleaning, culling, and organizing. Still, as time went on, these fits came less frequently, until they were one of those goals that you only get around to doing once a month or so. aaaaaThen the final factor kicked in: We moved overseas and got a maid. Now, some people might think that having a maid would make your house cleaner. Not so with us. In fact, having a maid has completely taken away any desire to do any sort of cleaning at all, because if I do it, she won't have anything to do, and I'm paying her to clean, so she might as well have something to clean. Every morning she spends two hours washing the dirty dishes that have accumulated from the previous day, picking up the discarded clothing on my bedroom floor, and vacuuming up the food that invariably lies underneath my son's highchair. She also cleans the bathrooms, mops the floors, does the laundry, and dusts the bookshelves. With her around, there is no need for me to do anything. aaaaaUnfortunately, this means that, while our house is clean after she leaves each morning, within an hour we are messing it up again, and for the remaining 20 hours of every day, our house is a disaster. At the end of each evening, as I am locking the doors and turning off the lights, I wonder what happened to me. Why is it that I can live in a house that is continually flooded with the random detritus of my life and not even feel guilty? aaaaaThe answer is simple: I am a slob. I've come to terms with it, and no longer feel a very strong compulsion to be neat. After all, why fight the inevitable? aaaaaThe inevitable notwithstanding, I hope to not always be this way. I hope that when we move back to the States, those lessons about cleaning that my mother taught me will kick back in. The truth is, I would like to have the perfect Pottery Barn home, with lots of organized shelves and little canvas-lined baskets holding all of my things. In fact, when I picture my dream house, that's what it looks like. I have good intentions to change my habits, and my husband's too. But while I have hope, I also have reality. I know I will never be as clean as my mother or my neat-freak sister. I may learn to surf my riptide of clutter, but I will never completely get rid of the mess. And that's okay. After all, I've gotten quite used to those piles. I think I might miss them if they were gone.