Advice from a small town girl

It’s really hard to let things go when you’re a control freak. I have a hard time with poor grammar. I struggle with disorganized organizations. I want the rows of vegetables in my garden to be straight and at least sort of the same distance apart.

On the other hand, my flower gardens are jungles, with no rhyme nor reason to the placement of plants. I see it, I like it, I buy it and occasionally I manage to plant it before it expires.

It appears that what I really want is to control everyone else’s behavior while being perfectly happy with my own. Hmmm.

I come from a long line of control freaks. My mother was an elementary school teacher who grew up on a small, poor farm in Minnesota during the Great Depression. They may have been poor, but they were literate. My grandmother wrote small poems which she sold to the local paper for “pin money.”

Mother was not shy about correcting grammar, no matter who was speaking (at least until her hearing went south.) Nor did any of us dare to use foul language.

As far as grammar goes, “ain’t” was about the worst I remember. I’m pretty sure I was born knowing both how to spell and that “I seen” was unacceptable. “Them are” was unheard of. Generations of children she taught are still well spoken.

I cringe when the person I live with uses the colloquial language of the area, but I try very hard not to say anything. It makes me feel like a nag, and it just makes him irritable. Kind of like teaching a pig to sing.

I watched my older sister “perfect” her late first husband right out of participation in parts of their marriage. When she corrected his diapering of their first child, he decided she was a critical perfectionist and just quit trying.

Dishwasher loading is another opportunity for me to learn. And the really funny part is that if I load my sister’s dishwasher, she reloads it to her satisfaction. Right in front of me! At least at my house I wait until after Norman has gone to bed before reloading mine.

I was listening to some experts try to define the difference between a “collector” and a “hoarder” on my way to work this morning. According to one of them, a collector is proud of the items they’ve acquired, and has them displayed where they may be shown to others. A hoarder, not so much.

Can that be applied to control freaks as well? If your own house is clean and organized and you always know where not only the staple gun is but where the correct extra staples are, you’re a great housekeeper.

If you go to your friend’s house and are compelled to clean it, you’re a control freak.

Mind you, a visit to my house could inspire nearly anyone (except me) to a housecleaning frenzy, but that’s usually the last thing I notice when I’m a guest at someone else’s house. Unless it’s my younger sister’s house – but that’s another story. At any rate, it makes me worry a bit. If my visitors feel like they need to clean for me, does that mean that my house is as bad as the ones that make me want to clean for them? Or is it really not about “clean” at all?