This post was first written back in September 2023 shortly after Watson and I first moved in together, but was never posted. It has been tweaked and edited since then for your enjoyment now, after almost one year of us living together.
For as long as I've known him, Watson has had a surprising love of jars.
He has always kept his tea and coffee in jars that he has lovingly removed the labels from so that there is no trace of sticky residue. There's one for tea bags, one for decaf teabags and another for loose leaf tea. One for instant coffee, one for ground coffee and a third for decaf ground coffee. There's also a jar for white sugar and a jar for brown sugar (which my dad taught me when I was little, is because white sugar is better in tea and brown sugar is better in coffee).
I was so happy to finally get back to Watson and the dogs after the latest house-sit that the mess the flat was in didn't bother me. It was so bad that there was really no point in being bothered by it and besides, it's not as though we are two adults who choose to live like that all the time. It was a temporary part of the moving-in process and represented us combining our lives together. So for the first weekend that we spent reunited, we did nothing. We drank tea and played games just like we used to and we didn't attempt to tidy anything. It was a three day Bank Holiday weekend, so on the Monday that we weren't at work, we finally made a start on tidying and spent a very satisfying day creating our home office in the second bedroom. And that was all we did for that first week. We lived with the clutter until the following weekend before reclaiming our living room and kitchen and weirdly, that's when things started to go for wrong for me.
In the week that followed, the temperature soared so that I had to cancel my afternoon walks and found myself finishing work early everyday. With a sudden amount of free time on my hands, I decided to "make the most of it" by getting on with painting the kitchen and living room. By the time the week had ended, I had finished all the painting and restored our living room, but once again, I had managed to spend an entire week working on some project or other and hadn't recharged my batteries.
In the space of one week, I had gone from tolerating the messy flat, to feeling the need to organise it. This alone is no big deal or even that surprising, but it was the desperation with which I was suddenly constantly cleaning. I could no longer tolerate any washing up that needed to be done and was washing everything as soon as it had been used. I suspect that because so much of the flat still has a lot to do in the way of decorating and feels out of my control for now, this one small area that I could control was an attempt in finding calm.
But doing the washing up as a means to quiet a busy mind is futile, because the washing up is never "done". I was listening to the Mel Robbins podcast last week and there was a brilliant episode featuring KC Davis, author of How To Keep House While Drowning (from the 7th and 11th September 2023 if you're interested). She made the excellent point that laundry and dishes are never "done" because they are in a cycle. They're clean, they're used, they're dirty again. Once you accept this, you start to view washing up in a whole new light. I love my home to look like a magazine as much as the next person but when it comes to functional areas like the kitchen, a compromise has to be reached. Our kitchen looks at it's best when I have just finished the washing up, dried up and put everything away, wiped down the sides and straightened things up. And it stays that way for all of about twenty minutes because I will inevitably celebrate this small win by making a cup of tea and where does my mug go when I'm finished with it? Back on the side to be washed up again! During the past week, I have been washing up said mug immediately so that the kitchen stays tidy but endlessly chasing tidiness isn't calming, it's stressful.
I wasn't happy with my churning thoughts and this constant need to clean and tidy so I sat down to journal on it and whilst I was writing, had a realisation. Living with another person can be challenging because things don't stay as you leave them. For example, I will leave the kitchen beautifully clean and tidy when I leave for work in the morning and come home to more washing up on the side. While this can't reasonably be helped in the communal areas of the home, it is important that we both have one area that is entirely our own, that the other doesn't interfere with. I hate to admit it, but while I could see why I needed to carve out such a space for myself, being the tidier of the two of us, I had failed to see why this was important for Watson too.
But of course it is. What is equally frustrating as someone placing something in the middle of an area that you have tidied, is someone coming along and tidying away your things in a manner that makes sense to them, but leaves you wondering where things are. If I was constantly putting things away and cleaning, I was sending Watson the message that his way of living was wrong. Fortunately for me, Watson is incredibly laid back and doesn't take this sort of thing to heart, but I could see how my constant flitting from room to room, tidying things could quite easily go from bemusing to down right annoying. He loves to quote from Yes, Prime Minister: How can I find anything if you keep tidying up?!
Our first home together is just that, it's our home. Part his, part mine. We both need to be represented in it's décor and we both need space to be ourselves. For me, that looks like a tidy corner of the office with a cosy armchair and a pretty lamp. For him, it's a sprawling desk that while it gives me a headache, makes sense to him. And jars. He loves his jars.
I'm guilty of coveting that Instagram-worthy pantry lifestyle. You know, open shelves lined with jars featuring embossed labels? I just love it. So imagine my glee when it transpired that Watson's love of coffee jars was just the tip of the iceberg. The man also loves Kilner jars. His collection is steadily growing to encompass my ever-increasing collection of interesting grains and pastas and in that sense, we are a match made in heaven. I love owning every sort of pasta under the sun, he loves storing them in pretty jars. Win win.
We have a running joke that Watson can't shut cupboard doors. I first noticed it in the early days of our relationship, when one cupboard in particular in his old flat was always open. Since the cupboard was in the corner of the kitchen, I assumed maybe it was an access thing and that it was just easier to leave it open all the time until I saw him open it one day and not shut it again. After that I noticed it all the time, whether I was there in person or if I caught sight of it in a photo and found it very amusing. Considering what a neat-freak I am, you might think that him leaving cupboard doors open would be highly frustrating for me but in fact it's entirely the opposite. Every time I see an open door or drawer, it makes me smile because it reminds me of how laid back Watson is and it reminds me not to take life (or myself) so seriously. Because it doesn't matter if there's a cupboard open - the world doesn't stop turning.
Fast forward to 2024 and we have been living together for almost a year now and boy has that time flown. In recent weeks we've experimented with using the dishwasher that came with the flat more and in a very short space of time I went from being the kind of person who couldn't load a dishwasher to one of those who has a special system and likes things to be loaded a certain way. Having just read back what I had written 10 months ago, if I didn't already know that I'm a bit of a control freak, I certainly would after reading this.
But having been reminded of that podcast I mentioned before, I remember it giving me another priceless reframe too with regards to washing up. They were talking about how it's so easy to feel frustrated when you come home from work to find a pile of washing up someone else has created by the sink. You think "why couldn't you have just done the dishes?" We fail to see any reason why those dishes may have been left beyond laziness. But how about instead of feeling annoyed, we pause and think "wow, they must have had a really busy day. They didn't even get time to wash up their lunch things."
This simple reframe has changed the way I view Watson not washing up after himself during the day now. Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that my want for a spotless kitchen at all times is unreasonable and impossible and it is entirely a "me problem" and knowing that, I would never actually expect Watson to live up to my ridiculously high standards. These are impossible standards that I hold myself to, not anyone else, but as a result, this reframe has allowed me to loosen my grip on those old control reins and has meant that I can be far more accepting of things that are "less than perfect". Now when I come home to a (albeit very small) pile of things that need washing, I don't jump to the conclusion that he doesn't care as much as I do about our home looking nice (he doesn't), or that he's lazy (he isn't) or that he's left the washing up for me to do (he hasn't). Instead, I'm thinking that he's probably had a really busy day and could use a cup of tea and that half an hour for lunch isn't actually long enough to spend any of that time washing dishes.
Our experiment with the dishwasher has been a bit of a game changer in this area though, because now those mugs and plates and spoons don't have to wait on the side to be washed up anymore. They can now go straight into the dishwasher, out of sight, out of mind. Of course now the new obstacle is who is loading it the right way and the wrong way but again, I've been working on myself long enough now to realise that these are demons of my own making. And just like the endless cycles of washing dishes and clothes, this journey of self development and learning is a never ending one as well. Once you've processed one limiting belief or controlling tendency, you find another one and on and on it goes. It's never done, just like those dishes, you just move onto the next stage of the cycle, with maybe a little time for respite in the middle. Just long enough in fact, to make a cup of tea and look around at your newly cleaned home that is all lovely and neat and tidy, right before you put that dirty mug down and start all over again.
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