Cleaning House.

There’s a phrase in Al-Anon: Let it begin with me.

I’m in the process (or supposed to be) of looking back through my life and writing down where underearning/underbeing/debting has affected my life, and eventually caused it to be unmanageable.

I’ve often and easily thought about my dad’s parents and his half-brother when I think about the history of this “disease” in my family. It’s easy to do. They are the ones who hoarded, let the dog go to the bathroom in the house, and despite brains that cognitively thought at high levels, lived like people who were under a crushing weight of despair, which looked on the outside like the crushing weight of filth.

These folks, my kin, would have been the people who Hoarders would have descended upon, who would have reluctantly and silently allowed their belongings to be sorted, sifted, and discarded. And after the cameras left, would have as quickly as possible returned their home to the state of dishevelment and insurmountable disarray. The familiar state of it. The state in which they felt most comfortable, even if not comfortable at all.

After my parents’ divorce when I was 20, my dad let our childhood home fall into much the same state, with the dead bugs on the hood of the oven, the flies belly-up on the window sill, and the tree that shaded our home, that stood sentry in our front yard, so long-neglected it had to come down. And though it’s easy to see these patterns of neglect, hopelessness, resignation, and simple denial in that side of the family, through my inventory work, I’m also getting to see a different strain of ideas around money, belongings, worthiness crops up from my mom, too.

I spent some time with my brother last year in his apartment he rented alone. The same silt of neglect, of using half-broken items, of allowing the home you live in to be in a state of disrepair lay over his home, too. But, from the same familial miasma, his attitude toward money became very different than mine.

At some point, I brought up money and my not knowing how to manage it, to save it, to “make it work for me” (whatever that means!), and he admitted, surprising me, that he is a miser with it. He hoards and saves his money, and is virulently opposed to being indebted to anyone.

He hoards money. I hemorrhage it.

In the end, though, the result for us both is the same (and I recognize that my assessment and diagnosis is unfair to him, simply in that I am not him, so please forgive my hubris). But the result is that neither of us have money to spend on fun things, nice things, things that make our lives fun and easy and worth living. If he’s loathe to spend anything, even if he has it, then life becomes smaller than it needs to be. If I simply spend whatever I make without thought to long-term or significant goals, my bank balance becomes zero, and my life shrinks with it.

I may not do my dishes as regularly as I should (though I am better now!), and my fridge may house food that is unidentifiable with mold, but my home is neat, clean, organized. It feels light, despite its size, and I endeavor to make it so. But there’s an article I read recently on home decoration that said, "Do it: Clean, organize, make pretty, and then GET OUT." Get out and into and on with your life. There’s more to life than decoration.

So, as I tally my numbers each month, calculate my income & expenditures, as I put money into a savings account and a vacation account, I have to remember it’s not just so that I can have a neat and orderly spreadsheet. That, in fact, even if there were a million dollars in my account, I’d have to remember, like my brother, that it’s there for me to enjoy thoughtfully. That it’s there for me to live, to support a life worth living. I have to remember that I do all this work so that I can go out in the world as my family was unable to do.

I let it begin with me.