My House Could Always Be Cleaner

2024-12-04

I have a lot of mundane tasks and cleaning is one of them. There are always more things in my house that could be clean, I am kind of OCD but not that OCD about cleaning. Clothes need to be picked up, washed, put away. Dishes can be washed, put away. Toys should be put away. There is always clutter on our table, right now I have the holiday cards out as I try to send them. The garage is a bit of a mess, I gotta break down some boxes and put them in the recycling. Toilets could be cleaned, we could do some deep cleaning in the bathrooms, etc. I do want to rearrange the snack drawer, it is a bit of a mess right now and hard to find snacks. Etc. etc. There is a never ending list that has grown mightily after having kids.

And so when I have a few hours of free time at night, what should do I do? I do the basic cleaning, make sure there is no food left out, dishes are cleaned, and make sure things are mostly put away. And that takes 30 minutes perhaps. And once a week I try to do something extra, cut up some boxes or cleaning a few toilets.

But I also want to watch TV, chat with Sneha, program on my side project, and do other things. I think in order to keep my sanity I need to not clean all of the time, because there is always more to clean. I will always notice things that need to be cleaned more or tidy up. There is no end game to cleaning, there is always more, so I gotta take small chunks and just be ‘good enough’ clean.

You gotta draw a line somewhere and then not worry about perfection. Sometimes perfection is the enemy of good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

I think this also relates to child rearing. There are always more things I could do for my kids. Research better toys, read more books about child rearing, talk to Sneha about our kids, talk to my friends about child rearing, research meals for kids, etc. I think in my mind it is a lot like cleaning, there is no end game to child rearing, you could always be a slightly better parent. But for me I want to be a ‘good enough’ parent, which I think means that I put in a lot of free time but not all of my free time. I will draw a line somewhere and not worry about perfection in parenting.

Also I took the phrase good enough parenting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_enough_parent I am not 100% sure I am using it right.