Dh has his areas of house. I have mine. His are messy, disorganized, greasy, dirty, disheveled. Mine are cleaned and tidy and organized. Sunday night after company, I didn't feel like washing the dishes, so I didn't. Yesterday I didn't feel like doing the dishes in the kitchen so I let everything out on counters. Today I looked at the messy kitchen and thought, "This is what dh's areas look like all the time. He doesn't organize or prepare or clean his areas. Will he notice that the kitchen is a mess and that there is no silverware or dishes? If I stopped being concientious and had no food in the house prepared for lunch and dinner and didn't bother to make dinner, will he notice?" Does he expect me to take care of all the little things to make a home a place where he is able to eat and navigate while he messes and hoards? I will let my areas of mess go and see what his actions are for a while. See what happens....I will bet he will be surly and angry but will not put into words what is bothering him except to cuss and posture at me....I bet he will be slamming things today in the kitchen because I don't have things "ready and organized for him" like a wife is expected to do.
Just an experiment. I know it will not teach him anything...but I am trying to figure out how I got into this weak-willed situation I am in and how I let so many of my own boundaries drop. How had I gotten to the point of being a little afraid of his reactions and enabling our unequal expectations?
Interesting - my house is the
Submitted by redhead1017 on
Interesting - my house is the same. He has the bottom half (filthy, unorganized, piles everywhere) and I have the upper half (clean, organized). His side of the bed? Piles and boxes and piles. My side? Organized, clean.
Weirdly enough he views himself as someone who is "extremely organized", when it fact it's the exact opposite. He does love to come up with a lot of organizing rules for the rest of us, but doesn't apply them to himself.
If you think about it, that's the ADHD mindset, though. Everything is entering at the same time, there is no organization, and it's completely overwhelming. Scary to think about it that way, but it gives you insight into how their minds work.
What's up with that?
Submitted by jennalemon on
They don't see their mess or disorganization as messy or disorganized. Yet, Dh will come into the neat kitchen and will angrily re-organize the way I packed the dishwasher saying "Don't you even know how to pack a dishwasher correctly? How stupid can you be?" He will also go through my garbage bags and tell me I throw the trash away wrong. He must take apart everything that is trashable and throw the pieces in a container of like pieces....then it goes to the trash and recycle area in one big place. He used to tell me I must wash the empty glass jars with soap before I threw them in the trash....not just rinse but wash them out. He has his trash strewn around the living spaces and his waste baskets are too full to put anything in.
Wow, mine does the same thing
Submitted by redhead1017 on
Wow, mine does the same thing. Nobody can load the dishwasher correctly except him (and he redoes it every time). We have toys still waiting to be repaired from when our kids were babies because he doesn't throw anything away. We have three storages and an entire bottom half of the house dedicated to his stuff - which he claims is super organized - but when it comes to actually finding anything, we end up having to buy it because he can't find it. And so we have multiples of a lot of things, since he "organizes" so well. He spends literally hours going through the recycling, since we haven't recycled right.
"that's the ADHD mindset"
Submitted by sunlight on
I wasn't trying to offend
Submitted by redhead1017 on
I wasn't trying to offend with my term "that's the ADHD mindset"; I was merely attempting to illustrate how this example - unorganized, messy, all over the place - illustrates many ADHD minds.
Definitely not trying to impart data. This forum is for sharing experiences.
I'm glad that your DH is able to manage so successfully; that does not seem to be the norm for many who use this board as a support.