Hidden Messes

Several thousand times in the history of this household I have asked my children to clean their bedrooms. Invariably there is an automatic response to this request consisting of one heavy sigh, between one and ten “whys?”, and finally the token cleaning job. Sometimes the bed has been made, usually most of the dirty laundry has been put out of sight and occasionally there will be a space on the floor where it is possible to walk. But of all the times that my children have attempted to clean a room, there is one thing they all have in common: The hidden mess. This mess is usually under the bed, but can also be in the closet, behind the door or just in a dark corner, but it is always there. The hidden mess in cleaning bedrooms is so common among my children that on the few occasions when I could not find a hidden mess I confess that I almost couldn't believe it. However, in all these years of asking, teaching, training and helping my children to clean their rooms I couldn't help seeing the bigger picture.

A long time ago something happened to me that caused me a great deal of emotional and mental pain. I was embarrassed to a degree that I became extremely shy and unwilling to speak or do anything that would draw attention to myself. Through the course of my life I was able to learn more about that very terrible situation. I discovered that I was still angry about what had happened and that I had never resolved those feelings of frustration and self-doubt. When I realized that I had been letting this experience determine responses and feelings in my life right now, I decided that I had had enough and I let go of those initial feelings. I literally picked up the mess, looked at it, decided where it really belonged and put it there. It felt a little bit like cleaning out under the bed only it made me feel even better when I was done.

Just as every child who has ever cleaned a room has left a hidden mess, so everyone who has grown up on this planet has inside of them a hidden mess of some kind. Old, unresolved feelings or thoughts that have been laying around for years are part of everyone's hidden messes. The trouble with them is the same trouble with hidden messes in a room. There may be dirty socks or dirty dishes, old food or old underwear, piles of laundry or piles of lettuce, but the longer it stays under the bed or in the closet the more dangerous it can become. Bad smell, mold, uncleanness and filth can easily combine to form a monster so terrible that even a mother would shrink in fear. Similarly, the hidden messes in our lives have the potential to go bad as well. Hard feelings kept close to the heart, over many years' time can turn otherwise good people into bitter and reclusive individuals. Unresolved conflict can lead to lost health and happiness. You can hide them for a while, but these messes eventually show up whether we want them to or not.

It's very important in a young child's life that he realize that the messes in his room are his own. When the bedroom needs cleaning, HE is the one to do it. Often the child wants to blame others for the messes and so may feel justified in not cleaning it up. But, no matter who made the mess, HE is the one who has to live with it. Better to just clean it up and get on with life than to spend the rest of his life blaming someone else while the mess festers and gets worse.

No one can clean up my messes. It's easy to blame parents for “the way I was raised”, but even they cannot clean up who you are right now. It was very refreshing to clean out my closet, in a manner of speaking. I had been waiting for someone else to come along and give me more room in my life, to organize the shelves a little better or maybe even build me a new room to live in. But all I needed was a little courage to tackle that monster that had been growing in my closet for so many years. He turned out to be not nearly so terrible as I had imagined. He practically evaporated in my hands. And since cleaning out my closet I found that I had the courage to also look under the bed. Cleaning out those things gave me a new outlook on myself and my life. It gave me the extra room I needed to grow, and gave me the knowledge I needed to prevent that habit of stuffing things in dark corners and under the bed. Hey! Maybe I've finally grown up.