I sort of want to write a post today, but I sort of want to curl up under a blanket and watch the leaves fall more. Of course, I say that, all romantic, with this great image of myself curled up with a cup of tea and a cat on my lap, but have you seen my house today? No. Thank goodness, none of you have. Nor have you smelled it.

Do you have kids? Do you know what a house looks like when they've been home for the weekend, generating dirty lunch dishes and taking stuff out of the Goodwill box to play with and leaving army men on the floor for people to step on? (Note to self: e-mail son's teacher to ask if he's limping.) A better mother and woman than I would put the kids and the husband to work cleaning up their own messes, but let's not get into that. Really, let's not. Well, ok, let's, but only if I don't have to hear about how you'd do it better.

In this house, your mother does live here and she's way more worried about contracting salmonella and falling to her death tripping over Legos than you are. So, yes, I could employ "natural consequences," leaving the dishes for someone else to do, until they reach up — in a stinking, fetid pile — to the ceiling, but then I have to live with a mountain of putrid dishes (and with the years of therapy it will take to bring me out of a state of catatonia when I find them covered with roaches) while my family cleverly fills the kitchen with discarded paper plates instead. (And yes, my husband has actually gone out to the store and purchased paper plates. You think I haven't tried?)

I could employ those old mothering standbys of nagging and punishing, rounding up family members and standing over them, poking them with the underwire of the bra that's currently on the kitchen floor until the dishes are done. (How did a bra get on the kitchen floor? Excellent question. It is mine and believe me I wasn't doing anything sexy in the kitchen with it. Somehow the dirty laundry migrated there this weekend. Yes, it really did. I don't know.)

I could ask for help, appeal to my family's better nature, institute a sticker chart or any number of other things (and don't think I haven't from time to time), but you want to know the truth? All of those things — the consequences, the nagging, the poking with bra underwire, the yelling, the endless sticker charts — take way too much energy. There are three people in the house who are happy to live in squalor and one who can't rest easy looking past the ping pong paddles on the sofa and the carrots and ranch dressing still on the table from last night's snack, who can't bring herself to kick the sleeping cat off the quilt that's currently on the floor and who can't quite enjoy drinking tea from a paper cup while looking at the leaves.

So that one person either needs to learn to look past the mess (and buy a noseclip to block out the smell of, whatever that smell is...) or she needs to get up and do the damn dishes. If I'm lucky, I can finish it all 5 minutes before my daughter comes home from school. And I did manage to get a blog post out of it. Thank goodness the glow of this computer screen blocks out that... Um, ew... Did someone actually leave a snotty tissue in the middle of the living room floor? I have to go clean that up.

When I first found out that my husband Mark was a sex addict, I threw myself into the thing that had always saved me in the past: research. I had graduated at the top of my high school class, gone to an excellent college and had a successful career thanks to my ability to analyze problems and find the answers. When I became a mother, I researched. When my son had speech delays and was eventually diagnosed with autism, I researched. So, when I found that Mark was a sex addict, I researched.

I read about sex addiction and looked for meetings and therapists. And I looked for help for myself. Only I didn't like what I found. Whenever a book or a speaker or a therapist would talk about the partners of sex addicts, they'd talk about this thing called codependency, which totally didn't sound like me. I started attending S-Anon meetings in the wake of Mark's admission of sex addiction, not because I had a problem, of course, but because I didn't have anywhere else to go. I would tell anyone who would listen how totally not codependent I was. Why was everyone telling me I had a problem when my problem was Mark? If he didn't have a problem, I wouldn't have a problem. Therefore, he needed to get fixed. Problem solved!

It took years of work untangling our mess to see that my problem was not that Mark had a problem but my belief that Mark's problem controlled my happiness. That was something that research couldn't tell me. It was something therapists couldn't drill into my head. It was something that the other people in my S-Anon meeting couldn't force me to see.

The research had failed to give me the answer, because it simply didn't make intuitive sense to me. It was like my high school physics teacher telling me that most of everything is nothing, that my body, seemingly so solid, was made up more of the space between atoms than of the atoms themselves. It was so counter to everything I had observed and known to be true in my life, that I wrote in my diary that night "I don't believe in atoms." Someone couldn't just tell me something was so, I had to learn more, to experience it, to draw inferences about it and to see the other ways in which it made sense before I could discard what I had known so long and what seemed so true: my body is solid, my happiness depends on other people.

One of the hardest things for me now, a thousand times harder than dealing with an addict's denial, is to deal with the denial of another codependent. It makes me uncomfortable, because I see myself: both how I was and how I often still am. And I still have that feeling that the problem with my happiness is that they have problems, not that the problem is that I think their problems have an impact on my happiness. I often still find that I want to ease my own discomfort by saying, "Wake up! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people!" But of course, when I insist they stop holding that mirror up to me, I'm doing the exact codependent thing I want to stop them from doing, so that it doesn't remind me that I like to do that codependent thing doing. I end up seeing myself in a mirror inside a mirror inside a mirror, stretching to infinity.

So I take a breath and say, "Wake up, self! Stop being such a control freak! Stop trying to change people! Other people have to experience life for themselves, wear out the other roads for themselves, be crushed down to their own bottoms themselves. I can't do their research for them; my research didn't even work for me. I must trust that they are capable of living their own lives, as I am capable of living mine. I must trust that they have their own higher power, and I am not it. I must trust that they will come through it, like I came through it, on the power of their own experiences." And sometimes, just sometimes, remembering all that even works.

Years ago, I read The Dilbert Future by Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and was especially fascinated by his use of affirmations to focus on his goals and achieve success. I even tried the technique myself and found the process of spending some time each day affirming, in writing, some measurable, long-term goal was helpful.  But I didn't want to stop at writing affirmations about things like finding a new job or exercising more.  What I really (secretly) liked about the idea of affirmations was the notion that it might be possible to use them to somehow control the world around me.

Maybe I could write something like "The Yankees will win the 2009 World Series" fifteen times a day and magically cause it to happen.  I'd tried praying in the 1981 World Series (with obvious disastrous results) and had give up on both God and prayer in one swoop.  Affirmations were like prayer, only atheist friendly.  I wanted the world to do my will, and if wheedling a deity into using its omnipotence on my behalf didn't work, maybe I needed to cut out the middle man and magically control the world myself.

Today, I found myself thinking about writing affirmations.  Only I wasn't thinking of using them around my personal goals; I found myself idly considering using them to try to control the outcome of a lottery that will determine whether or not my daughter gets to participate in an activity she's interested in.  It's something I don't have any control over, but desperately wish I did have control over.  When I realized what I was considering, I thought of what I so often need to remind myself: God's will, not my will; I pray only for the knowledge of God's will for me and the power to carry it out.

Damn.  Caught at that same old thinking again.  I felt a momentary release as I started to let go and trust that everything would work out for the best, even if it didn't work out my way, and then in one last desperate attempt, I thought, "Still, maybe I could try just a little, this one time.  I'm sure just a little control of the universe this time wouldn't be a problem, would it?  And I won't try it again.  After this, it will be God's will all the way."  As if I could stop at just one.

"Worry Brain, your mama's so ugly, she makes onions cry!" I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband.  I had to hang up the phone because I'd burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me.  I'd read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts.  As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn't use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that's probably just my Worry Brain trying to get out of having its mama called ugly.

The company Mark works for is on shaky ground.  There have been layoffs and the people he knows that have been let go have had a hard time finding new jobs.  But I wasn't worried about that.  I was worried because he had a job interview.  For a really good job.  That pays a lot more than what he makes currently.  Working in an industry he's really interested in.  And the interview went well.  Crazy to be worried about that?  The job is (gasp!) in another state.  We'd have to move.  And the thought of that level of change grips me with anxiety.

I started whirring right into a panicked overdrive, "Fine.  I'll just tell him he can go, but I'm staying here with the kids.  I can't believe he'd pick a job over us!  And if we're not there, he'll probably just go on an incredible acting out spree.  He'll pretend he's not married and have sex all over some new town.  But I can't move, can I?  It took a year for Austen to be able to sleep through the night the last time we moved, and we stayed in the same area.  We'd have to find new 12 Step meetings and new doctors and new friends and a whole new set of resources for Austen.  And for crying out loud, we are a mixed race family and I look like a crazy bohemian.  We can't just move anywhere.  People will burn crosses on our lawn and the neighbors will tear the Darwin fish off my car and kill us.  We're safe here.  Everything is familiar here.  Everything is under control here."

That's when I brought out the big guns and called my Worry Brain's mama ugly.  (I mean she had to be ugly.  She was a big slimy brain, right?)  Mark still has a job.  He hasn't lost his job.  He hasn't been offered a new job.  Even if he were offered the job, we'd have time to discuss it and decide what's right for our family.  No need to try to soothe my anxiety by jumping on the computer and spend the next two hours doing Internet research on school districts a thousand miles away (although I was sorely tempted to), not when I can use my prodigious recovery skills to stay in the moment and tell myself ugly mama jokes instead.

I used to love to watch The Odd Couple on TV growing up. I always hated Felix, so prissy and uptight, but I loved Oscar, unable to find his bed under piles of clothes and bits of old sandwiches. That, I thought, is me. And it's been true.

Mark and I had a friend come to visit once at an especially crazy point in our lives; Mark was finishing school and looking for a job while we simultaneously searched for a new apartment. We came home after an afternoon out apartment hunting to find that our friend (much to both our chagrin and delight) had done the dishes and made dinner. She asked how our day had been and we said it had been largely unsuccessful, as several of the places we saw did not come with dishwashers, and that was one of our primary requirements. Our friend wrinkled her nose and said, "It should be." Our dishes had been on the verge of growing enough life on them to become sentient and walk away.

After that, I did get a bit more fussy about cleaning before we had guests over. And I always inwardly roll my eyes when people who have never seen my house tell me not to fuss about cleaning so much. "People who love you won't mind if the house isn't perfect!" They say that, blissfully unaware that my aspirations have not generally been in the realm of a pearl-clad, white-gloved June Cleaver but more like "no overwhelmingly noxious odors."

Still, far from being ashamed of my slovenly ways, I've always had a deep pride in them. I was tickled that my kids had to learn from a book what an iron looks like and what it does or what a mop is for. "I'm no prissy, uptight Felix Unger," my home says to the world, "I'm casual and lovable Oscar Madison. And I have more time for fun since I'm not fiddling with all that silly cleaning."

Still since I've had kids, I have to admit, overall it's been less fun to be a slob than it used to be. I started worrying about what was around that they might shove in their mouths as babies. I started losing things and spending hours searching for them in piles of junk. I started impaling my feet on toys. And I started cleaning up my act, just a little: trying to have places for things rather than throwing them wherever they might land, doing the dishes at least every other day, occasionally sorting the laundry rather than dumping whites and colors all in together.

Yet I found myself taking offense the other day when I told a friend I needed to cut our chat short so that I could clean up the house in preparation for a guest and she told me not to sweat the cleaning stuff so much. I wanted to scream "I'm a slob! I have dead ants on my kitchen wall that are a year old! I am not some uptight, controlling perfectionist!" And that's when it hit me. This whole slob thing isn't about what I am, it's about manipulating other people's perceptions of me.

Being a slob, like its evil twin of being fastidious, is an extreme. I didn't want to be perceived as one extreme, so I swung to the other. And it's not serving my needs anymore. I don't like not being able to find things. I don't like smelly dishes. I don't like once white shirts that look rumpled and pinkish grey. I don't like looking at dead ants on my wall. But there's one thing I do like about being a slob, one thing that has always served me, the reason I still cling to my squalor: it allows me to say what I'm not. It lets me hold up my moldy dishes as proof that I am not an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent.

Guess what? I am an uptight, controlling, perfectionist codependent. And it's time to recognize that and work on balance rather than continue to leave unwanted crumbs on the floor to refute it.