Did you grow up in a neat or a messy home, and how did it affect you

[Anonymous]

Cluttered house growing up for me, clean for dh. I used to be super clean, picking up toys while kids were still playing with them! Now I’m much more relaxed and yet everyone still thinks I’m overly clean. One thing I do is don’t delay, see a smudge wipe it immediately, never let the little tasks accumulate.

[Anonymous]

Grew up in a hoarder house, I am very organized and minimalistic, love to purge.
Cleanliness level could be better but piles of stuff make me super uneasy so there’s none of that barring moving or some such.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Cluttered house growing up for me, clean for dh. I used to be super clean, picking up toys while kids were still playing with them! Now I’m much more relaxed and yet everyone still thinks I’m overly clean. One thing I do is don’t delay, see a smudge wipe it immediately, never let the little tasks accumulate.

I have family members who do this. You can never relax because they follow you around readjusting pillows after you stand up from the couch or wiping a few water droplets off of a counter from the condensation on a glass. It's exhausting and you feel very unwelcome.

[Anonymous]

I grew up in a easy home. My mom never cleaned ever. I can remember a poop stain on the back of the toilet seat for months. Nasty soap scum buildup in the tub. Cats that left fur everywhere. Ring around the collar because no one made me bathe and let me sleep in my clothes. It was disgusting, and I was embarrassed by it as a kid an SC didn’t have many friends because of it.
Now, I’m very clean. I’m constantly cleaning.
My mom’s house is still disgusting.

[Anonymous]

We had a clean and comfortable house. We moved all around the world, and sometimes we had servants and sometimes we didn't. Regardless our house was always spic and span whether mom did all the housework or the maids did. No matter where we lived, as kids our house was the house other kids came to play at and my parents entertained their friends a lot. It was a wonderful experience.

As an adult I think my household and one of my sisters has a household that is the same. We have a sibling who never "got" the thing about cleaning up after yourself and so that household is very haphazard and messy. It is hard to be in there because the house feels dirty and disorganized, and there is a high level of stress associated with everything.

That was the nice thing about our house growing up - it was a wonderful haven. Living our lives, in nice housing sometimes with servants, sounds nice but it was difficult to move all the time and always in a new environment. We were always having to adjust. Yet when we moved we always had "our" home. Our house always had "our" things in it and looked like "our" home. Occasionally our parents would even take in families who were having difficulties and they would stay for a night or two if there was some discordance in their household. I can't tell you how many kids (not close friends who would have been in our house otherwise) over the years came up to tell me later how much they had liked being at our house and how lucky we were. I totally agree.

That's what my husband and I want for our household. We're foster parents and I think we've achieved that. I hope that the children who have been with us during terrible, turbulent times in their lives feel good about the time they spent with us and that we were their haven during a difficult period. It isn't about things, it is about feel.

[Anonymous]

My mom is a hoarder and my husband grew up in a house where you could practically eat off of the floor at all times. I’m not dirty, but I am not prone to cleaning the house as much as my husband does, either. I posted this on another thread recently, but my mom has now taken to sending us packages all the time because she has a shopping addiction and the clutter drives my husband nuts.

[Anonymous]

Messy home. Dirty. Mom was a bit of a hoarder. I am the youngest of 7 kids though so didn't help. I have a cleaning person come once every two weeks and I don't save anything.

[Anonymous]

Messy, both both parents only focused on my messiness (not even my brothers’) although everyone, including parents, was as messy if not messier. It really messed with my head. My parents are both hoarders as elderly divorced adults. We had to get hazmat company to handle the apartment when we put my dad in a nursing home. My mom at least is clean, just holds onto everything.

I switch between throwing everything away even if I know I will need it later or trying to find a place for it. Drives military-trained, neat-freak-raised DH crazy.

[Anonymous]

I am a child of hoarders. It was awful. My parents were very loving but I grew up in filth and chaos. Haven't been inside my parents home in over 15 years, my kids have never been inside.

I married a neat freak, and it probably subconsciously wasn't an accident. I still struggle with being organized, I want to be so badly but I don't know how. We have cleaners come twice a week because I want such a clean home. My closet is a disaster, but otherwise the rest of the house is clean.

I feel that an uncluttered house provides calm, and that a messy house is chaotic and not good for children. It was horrible for me.

[Anonymous]

In the middle. Things are clean, but sometimes messy. I think overall my house is a bit cleaner because it's smaller. I like common spaces to be clean but the kids have a toy room that is their space to keep as messy as they want. Which is basically how my house operated.

[Anonymous]

I grew up very poor. My mom kept our simple home neat and clean. She was extremely hard working and a perfectionist. When I was 10-13 I really got into cleaning and would do it without prompting. My mom would inspect my work by putting on a white glove and swipe down the furniture to see if I missed any spot. I've somehow blocked that part of my childhood out until some old friends brought it up recently.

As an adult I'm overall tidy, but I don't stress over it.

My MIL is very clean and neat. Cleaning is actually her passion and makes her happy. She raised 5 kids. Only 2 of the 5 turned out neat, though they both accumulate a lot of clutter. My H unfortunately is not one of them, but he's also not the worst. One of his siblings has hoarder tendencies and another lives in a pigsty.

[Anonymous]

I’m sure some people would think my house is messy, but it’s a home and 4 people live there, so....

I’m not trying to be on the cover of House Beautiful or HGTV magazine. I want my home to be comfortable, inviting, and a nice place to come home to. A showplace, no.

[Anonymous]

As a kid our home was "tidy" but not perfectly "clean." For example, I don't remember mom and dad obsessing about wiping down the countertops or cleaning toilets, but leaving our backpacks out in the open was a cardinal sin. And the tidiness only applied to open spaces - mom didn't care if everything was shoved into drawers or closets.

I'm somewhat the opposite as an adult. Cleanliness is more important than tidiness. Even pre-Covid, I was a heavy user of Clorox wipes. And I especially don't like jamming things into closets or drawers. I'd way rather have a pile of mail on the dining table for several days until I have a chance to deal with it rather than shove it all into a drawer just so everything looks superficially tidy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I grew up very poor. My mom kept our simple home neat and clean. She was extremely hard working and a perfectionist. When I was 10-13 I really got into cleaning and would do it without prompting. My mom would inspect my work by putting on a white glove and swipe down the furniture to see if I missed any spot. I've somehow blocked that part of my childhood out until some old friends brought it up recently.

As an adult I'm overall tidy, but I don't stress over it.

My MIL is very clean and neat. Cleaning is actually her passion and makes her happy. She raised 5 kids. Only 2 of the 5 turned out neat, though they both accumulate a lot of clutter. My H unfortunately is not one of them, but he's also not the worst. One of his siblings has hoarder tendencies and another lives in a pigsty.

OMG, this is a repressed memory for me as well. For a couple years in high school I lived with my aunt, uncle, and cousins. Uncle was literally a drill sergeant who took the bit too seriously, and would "white glove" for dust.

[Anonymous]

Our house was always clean and not cluttered, but not obsessively clean. Like nobody was scrubbing the baseboards regularly, and there might be some dusty shelves and stuff. That's pretty much how my house is now.