finding myself?

I've let my house go since Handsome passed away. I used to pride myself on having a clean, organized home for my family, but a few months ago, I just quit caring. It was one of the many things in my life that I just let slip, recently. Not that I've let it get dirty, because it's still very much clean. It just... it lacks what it used to be. In my opinion, a person's home is a reflection of themselves. I look at my house like a representation of the type of person I am. I've always wanted my house to send a certain message to my visitors... That I'm not lazy. That I take care of what's mine. And that I'm well organized. But after Handsome passed away, I felt like it was excusable to not have a perfect home. People expected a messy, cluttered home from me, so that's what I delivered. I felt like for the first time in a long time my home was no longer part of the way people perceived me. I was the woman who lost her son. No matter how clean or how dirty my house, that fact would remain the same. 

But as the days keeping passing since Handsome earned his angel wings, I find myself wondering when is it no longer an excuse. When will I get a visitor who thinks that my not- so- tidy bathroom makes me careless housekeeper? What about the people who are visiting who don't know I lost a child, like the sears delivery people who delivered my treadmill yesterday? How long can I just get by with "picking up" every day? When will people start expecting my baseboards to be bleached, my floors freshly mopped with pine- sol, or my beds to be made and laundry put away? 

And then there is the feelings of self worth, or should I say the lack of. I might not feel like decluttering my house, but I feel so... inadequate as a wife and a mother, if I don't. My husband had to return to his job, after losing Handsome. My children had to return to school. Why should I be the one who doesn't fall back into her routine? What makes me special? I sit during the day thinking about the clothes in the dryer that haven't been folded. The dishes in the washer that haven't been put away. The toys scattered in the kids' bedrooms that need to be picked up. It's not that I don't want my house to be the way it used to be, because it bothers me to the point that I lose sleep at night. I just keep telling myself, though, that it's okay, because I lost my child....

I want to be who I used to be. The person I was before I had to watch the life fade from my toddler's eyes. I want to be happy again. I want my house to represent what an organized and clean person I am. I want to come home after going out with the kids and my house "feel" the way it used to. It's not fair that I had to lose my child and it's definitely not fair that I had to lose myself, too.