I Am My Own Oxymoron

I am literally a living, breathing oxymoron. How can someone be so completely neurotic about some things and not give a crap about others? I despise cleaning, seriously hate it. I used to think that being so anti-clean was a way of rebelling against my mother being so OCD, but I don't think that is it. If there was anything that my mom and I butted heads about most when I was growing up, it was my messy room. I used to pick on her and say that someone could perform open-heart surgery on our kitchen floor because it was so clean. Needless to say, none of her "cleaning gene" was passed down to me.

However, my mother's organization gene was definitely passed down to me, but only in certain instances. When it comes to my work, I have always been completely neurotic. I was the kid who would write a full page of notes in pen, make one mistake at the bottom of the page and have to throw out that page and start all over again. Everything I do is color coded. My work in school or at my job is always obsessively organized. On the other hand, come to my house and you'll be lucky if you can find my kitchen table under all the crap that is piled on top of it. Jared and I have been living in our house for almost 2 years and our office still looks like a tornado went through it. I would post a picture on here for your entertainment, but my mother would probably die of shame. The box that I packed away my Christmas ornaments in is still sitting in the corner of my living room. Yet, on that same token, I'll be damned if my Valentine's Day flag is still flying on my front porch on February 15th...hell no, the St. Patrick's Day one will already be up.

In my classroom, I clean up in between every class period. All of my data about my students is color coded beyond what would be considered a "normal" amount of highlighter usage. I redecorate my bulletin board at the beginning of every month, in coordination with the season or holiday of that month. If one of my students touches or bumps into my bulletin board, all of my students gasp in horror because they know that I am about to end that child. I can't stand for my books to be out of place or my desks to be out of their rows. For heavens sake, I individually colored like 50 little pencil shaped paper cut-outs to decorate my classroom door because they didn't look enough like real pencils. At school, and only at school, I am psycho obsessive compulsive.

When I get home from work, its like I transform into a completely different person. There could be a huge pile of dishes in the sink, don't care. I take my clothes out of the dryer and lay them out in a pile on my nightstand, they might be there for days. Pretty much, I am the worst wife ever. But all of this is nothing new. I lived in the sorority house for two years in a 12' x 12' room with another girl. You would think that this would make me less messy because I didn't have any room to spare, but no. I would bring my clean laundry into our room and throw it on my bed. Then when it was time to go to sleep, I would move the pile onto my computer chair. When I woke up in the morning, I would move the pile back to my bed and this routine would repeat everyday until I finally decided to put my clothes away. Still to this day, I put a lot of effort into being lazy.

It really does bother me that I am capable of being so clean and organized at school, but I can't carry it over to home. I'm working on it, but trying to break a habit that is 23 years in the making is quite a challenge. I honestly think that people would never believe that the person who owns my house is the same person who runs my classroom, I am my own oxymoron.