It's hard to be a Sacred Woman

My friend Heidi and I are trying to keep our houses more in order.

She has a book called Sacred Woman that details out a plan to get your house and self in order. One of the suggestions is to clean the rooms in your home with ammonia, water, with a few drops of frankincense or patouli oil added to it. After you have washed the rooms with this solution and purged out all the dust and bad energy, the next step is to wash the walls with Dead Sea salt and water.

Heidi said it took her two weeks to clean her bedroom. She is working and going to school so she had to go at the job in spurts.

"Now my bedroom is the cleanest room in the house. I would like to have people over, but I have to do the rest of the house. It is a lot of work becoming a Sacred Woman," Heidi said.

I tried part of the program one Sunday three weeks ago. I spent all day cleaning my bedroom with the ammonia solution and frankincense oil. My bedroom did smell very sweet and clean. I didn't get around to washing the walls with the Dead Sea salt and water. But now that three weeks have passed, my bedroom is full of dust again. I have to go back and clean it all over again with the ammonia and frankincense. It is a lot of work trying to be a Sacred Woman. I have only touched up a few of the other rooms in the house.

I like to have a clean house and love to go to people's homes where everything is clean and orderly. But I am more comfortable in someone's home that is less than perfect with books lying around, shoes at the doorway and dishes in the sink.

When I was first married and had only two children, I would try and never leave the house a mess. The more children I had and the more responsibilities I had, I realized that I would never ever get out of the house if I tried to keep it in tiptop shape. Now I have settled for my house being topsy turvy.

I used to be embarrassed about my messy house, but one time when I stopped at a friend's house, and she and her kids were sitting around reading books, and things were not perfect she said, "Oh we were worried when someone was knocking at the door, but it's you. Sheila, you can drop by anytime, as you never have your house looking perfect."

I took that as a compliment. I don't know many women who do have their homes looking perfect like many of our mothers did. My sister, Kate is pretty organized and does a good job of keeping things in order at her house. She always knows where the glue and scissors are, and I have learned from her to place my supplies back in the same place every time I use them. The only time I saw things out of order at her house was when we returned from a trip and her son and husband had left the night-before supper in pans on the stove.

I was glad to see that they weren't perfect. I used to get really miffed when I came home and found that the dishes weren't done or trash not carried out, but I realized that I'm not the only one living here. If the other people in the house want to live in a mess, it is not my problem. I don't like it, but I have quit ranting about it.