For me there is a definite relationship between the two. On one hand, the condition of the housework can serve as a pretty accurate barometer for how I'm doing mentally. On the other, if it gets too far out of control, I am easily overwhelmed and will have a harder time bringing it back into order than I would keeping it up a little bit every day. So I try to make sure the basics are always done.

I discovered about myself that I'm not the slob I (and everybody else) once thought I was. As the oldest of four children, I shared a room with my younger sister while my two brothers shared another bedroom. My sister and I are the bookends. My brothers come in the middle and are closer in age to each other than my sister and I are. Therefore they had a lot more in common growing up, and my sister and I didn't relate to each other as well. But I shared a room with her out of necessity.

I being the oldest and she being the youngest, messiness was automatically blamed on me. I remember trying to defend myself saying I wasn't the one making the mess, but while my parents would acknowledge that my sister was messy, it was still my fault. "Look at the example she's got," my father said. I can't count how many times I've heard in my childhood, "I'll hate to see your house when you grow up. I bet it's gonna be a pigpen!" Well, now I'm the one with a house that's always in fairly decent condition, and she's the one wading through garbage like something you might see on Hoarders. Even she, just a few years ago, remembered how they used to get on me about our bedroom, and they didn't believe me when I said it was her, and as she admitted, "It was me."

But for a while there, in my first marriage, it looked like all those predictions were going to be right. I didn't know it until that marriage blew up, but again HE was the slob, and I simply found it impossible to keep picked up after him. So I'd give up and not do anything, overwhelmed like I said, and because I didn't do anything, people judged me but not him by what the house looked like. "Just do a little every day, and don't let the messes get too big" doesn't work when you live with an extreme mess-maker who won't even so much as flush the toilet when he's finished, because he expects his wife to do that for him. I know now that I wasn't the problem, because I am living with a husband who does his share, and the house never gets too awful, even on a bad day. And my ex, like my sister, lives in a garbage can.

Personally, I think all those people who called ME messy owe me an apology. (PS: "But you're never going to get one," says my husband, reading this.)