How Cleaning Your House Like Crazy Connects to Your Body Image

I caught this slightly crazy but totally funny video on For Every Mom. (You’ll get the gist after the first fifteen seconds. Why is it so funny? Because it’s true . . .at least for me it was.

Years ago we planted a church in our house. Yes. Our church met inside our home. Every. Sunday. Evening. You know what that means — cue me constantly cleaning the house like crazy.

Sundays between 10am and when church started at 5:30pm were not shining moments for me. I was pregnant with child four. (Yes, I already had three children ages three and under.) Yet, somehow I thought I could magically transform our mess of diapers, stuffed lovies, and electronic-toys-singing-the-alphabet-song into a sacred worship space. A perfectly clean, sacred worship space.

Sure. I can do that. I’m an over-achiever. So I began cleaning the house like crazy.

Compounding my compulsion to have our house look perfect was this crazy pressure I felt as the “pastor’s wife” to have a well-kept home. I’d pace every square inch of that house making sure toys were put away. Closets locked (you’ve gotta have some place to hide your junk). Bathrooms sparkled. Carpet fibers stood at attention. It was as if we were expecting prospective buyers, not our small church family.

The truth: I wanted everyone to see how clean I kept my house.

Deeper truth: I believed this would be a sign to our tiny church body that I was a fantastic wife and homemaker.

They needed to know this about me . . . so they would like me more, of course. 

One Sunday evening, two minutes before our first attendee would arrive, my husband and I frantically finished cleaning the house like crazy and all the last-minute details when our four-year-old decided he needed a drink. He reached up high to the counter that stood a good six inches higher than his head. He grabbed my glass of water, took a sip, and then tried to return it. Only instead of sitting it on the counter, he dropped the glass on our tile floor. Glass shards everywhere. Water everywhere.

(Children have a way of ruining our plans for perfection. (Or, at least ripping down the façade of perfection and revealing our true brokenness!))

Overwhelmed with frustration, I scurried to clean it up. They would be here any minute! We didn’t have time for accidents like this. Get to work people! Who has the Dust Buster? They’ll be here any minute!

{Ding Dong}

The first family arrived. I apologized profusely for everything being a mess and their inability to walk through the kitchen until the glass was cleaned up. Their response to my disheveled tizzy, “Oh, our daughter broke a glass right before we left. Can we help?”

{Sigh} Perhaps it’s okay for others to know we are human.

Maybe you aren’t as insane as I was back then, always cleaning the house like crazy before company arrived. (It’s likely you aren’t trying to have church in your house, either.) But do you struggle with feeling like your home must be PERFECT before anyone from the “outside world” sees it?

I get it. I’ve frantically scrubbed, vacuumed, straightened and hidden junk before guests came over.

But, you know what I’ve learned? As God has worked with me on my body image issues he’s also worked to change my need to have a perfectly clean and presentable house for guests.

The connection? I believe it has to do with recognizing real value and becoming brave enough to let others see the real me.

Recognizing Real Value

For those of us who battle body image–one of our biggest struggles is to believe that we are valuable no matter what the shape of our bodies. It’s tough to dispel the lie that says if we looked more “perfect” then we would be loved more and feel more contentment.

The same applies to our homes.

We falsely believe people need to see what great homemakers we are . . . then they will love (or admire) us more.

But just as our real value isn’t determined by the tag in our jeans or the number on that bathroom scale, our value isn’t determined by our ability (or complete inability) to keep a house impeccably clean.

We must free ourselves of the pressure to impress others (and the pressure to always be cleaning the house like crazy).

Why do we stress-clean? It’s often not for ourselves or for our families. Rather, it’s image management. The burden of making sure others think well of us is way too much to carry.

So how do we be like Elsa and just “Let it go?”

We get brave.

Becoming Brave Enough to Let Others See the Real Me

It’s easy to say, in theory, “Yes. I know my value is not tied to how clean I keep my house.” But, to actually let someone in–to let someone see that your private space looks more like a day-after-Christmas sale than an HGTV showcase home. That’s another story.

Now, to be clear: Just as I would encourage you to not show up at work wearing pajamas without your hair or teeth brushed, some house cleaning and straightening may be necessary before you entertain guests. (Germs kill people. I don’t advocate being gross.) But when you find yourself cleaning the house like crazy, try and take a step back and ask yourself why?

The broader point is this: We need to be real with ourselves and with others.

Real takes courage. It takes guts to show your piles of laundry. It takes a brave housewife to show the neighbor-who-stops-by how her sink spills over with dirty dishes. Likewise, it takes a certain amount of confidence to not fret, “What do they think of me now? They saw my messy house . . .”

Getting real means accepting the mess–admitting that we don’t have it all together. Saying, “Okay. I need help!”

As a follower of Jesus though, this should be nothing new. Didn’t we all have to stop and say, “Hey, God, I don’t have it all together. I need you!” before we accepted his free gift of salvation?

But, that getting real–it puts us on a new path. Just like the start of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, once we can say, “Hi, my name is Heather. And, I have a problem. . .” we place ourselves on a new trajectory to find hope. We get one step closer to tasting the freedom that comes from not worrying about what other people think of us or our homes. We get a few inches further away from our tendency to obsess over what others think. We then derive our confidence from Jesus and his acceptance, not from feeling like others approve of us. This releases us from the need to always be cleaning the house like crazy.

Surrendering our need to be perfect, to look perfect, to pretend that we have it all together takes guts. But, Jesus is faithful to remind us that he is strong where we are weak. He already knows our imperfections. His opinion is the only one that really matters. And the freedom that comes from believing this truth feels better than wearing that mask of perfection while cleaning the house like crazy. Any day.

(Check out my book — The 40-Day Body Image Freedom Framework to find out more about how to get free! Or listen to the podcast here!)