About to Boil

Have you ever heard of the expression, "boil the frog"? My husband likes to say it often. And, I think it exactly expresses the life I have been living for the last 10 years, maybe longer.

I have to say I don't know how I managed to get to this place--married 10.5 years, 4 children and a housewife. In high school, I declared I never wanted to get married (although I was clearly boy-crazed), have children (never could see how a child fit into the Great American Novel scheme) or be set to the same rules as a boring housewife with a family. There's humor. God laughs when we make plans right?

Honestly, I like to pretend a lot. I like to pretend I am an organized person, a planner, and independent. In reality, being alone scares me. I had felt like I was alone most of my life. I had family, but never quite knew how I fit into my family. So, I started to collect things that reminded me that I was not alone.

I think hoarders don't intentionally go into life wanting to be disorganized. I say I don't think because that's not how I went into this life. It is a slow process. Someone asks you if you'd like something free--a key word for me. Free! I'll take anything free. I love free stuff. So I would put the free stuff in my car--forget about it. And then, as the car got dirty, we'd do a mad dash to clean it by tossing the items into a box or bag or whatever is first available, and make note we needed to put them away later. But, people would visit. So, we moved it to the "secret" place like a bedroom. Slowly the things started to build up as we found less and less time to organize the rooms.

Our house did not get disorganized for a lack of trying, either. I have about five organization books. Read them. I became obsessed with organization shows, too. I started hoarding knowledge on how to get out of clutter. There's irony in that too.

And, as we had more kids the obsession to keep anything they touched caught on, too. "They may want that for their children" became a saying in our house. We attached memories to the toys instead of to the memories. Eventually, we stopped noticing the toys as they piled up. They ended in plastic containers in the upstairs of how house, away from visitors. When it started to trickle downstairs, I had had enough.

When you boil a frog, you should place them in warm comfortable water. Slowly, you turn up the heat so they don't notice the water increasing in temperature and hop out. Hoarding works the same way. Except boiling the frog is a myth. A frog will most likely jump out of the water when it gets too hot. A hoarder should too.