clutter

I spent most of the morning cleaning the house after being gone last week. My husband and I are both ‘people of clutter’. The difference between my clutter and his is two fold; mine is much more colorful and he can’t see his. I picked up the following items of his this morning: a toolbox, a model airplane, a box of mail that hasn’t been opened (not a small box by the way), a briefcase (which hasn’t been used in 3 years), a pair of work shoes, forestry flagging, a pair of sunglasses, various papers and a set of keys. Now this clutter doesn’t seem all that important except that when he walks in the door he never sees it. He sees the wedding dress that I have to return to a friend laying on the chair but doesn’t seem to see any of his piles of to-dos. (He also doesn’t seem to see the dishes he dirties.) My mother has a similar problem, she is more of a hoarder than a clutterer, but until someone comes to stay at her house for any longer than a week, she doesn’t seem to notice the mess. Not only after a prolonged stay by the vistitor does she notice the mess, and then mess becomes the visitor’s fault. I don’t know what this illness (if it is an illness) is called and I don’t know if it can be changed. What makes us not see our own messes? What makes others’ messes bigger and more important than our own? And keeps us from recognizing our messes until we have someone else to blame them on? Maybe it is because in our entire marriage my husband has never deep cleaned a room. When you have scrubbed every corner, taken apart every cupboard and tidied back up you have a better appreciation for the cleanliness of the room. My husband had his mother to maid for him and my mother had a maid for most of my growing up. So maybe there is a cleanliness detachment. They are both artists and maybe their mess is actually a ‘work in progress’ and should not be interrupted. I don’t know.