During breakfast today one such pest appeared on my counter. I brushed him off. Okay, that is a lie, I killed him. Three seconds later, another came strolling past my toast. I "brushed" this one away too. Sure enough, another was right behind him. I waited and watched while I sipped my coffee. Obviously my newest Ghost Ant family had moved in over night. Lucky for me these suckers had an identifiable origin, they were coming from bum, bum, bummmmmm, wait for it... behind the oven.
Okay, maybe not so lucky for me, because...
There are two detestable places I avoid cleaning at all costs: 1) inside the refrigerator and 2) underneath the oven. I loath them. I just do. I typically manage to successfully ignore said locals until, well, until I just can't any longer. Usually this comes in the form of fate or an act of God. For instance, a massive spill on the top shelf of the fridge that floods all shelves beneath. (Apple juice, it is always the apple juice spilled by am understandably evasive culprit). Or, as was the case of the oven this morning... ants. I simply can't un-see bugs in my house, much less successfully pretend they are not hiding behind my oven.
In my search for the leader of the ants I reluctantly, against all my better judgement- pulled out the oven. If you have an oven, you know what this means. You are choosing to confront all the accumulated nasty. All the crumbs, dirt, dust, spillage and crud that has been silently collecting beneath the shiny, usually wiped down exterior of your stove top. Any person with an inner Martha Stewart will agree, once a mess like this has been seen, it must be acknowledged and significantly mitigated. Inner Martha won't let you have an ounce of peace until you do.
And so it was, I found myself in my pajamas, at 6:30 on a random Wednesday morning vacuuming, scrubbing, spraying, dusting and sanitizing while exterminating the microscopic ants behind my oven. Praise Jesus for cold cereal and PBS Kids- because I cannot actively parent while cleaning out the backside of an oven and still maintain my sanity.
The whole process lasted until well past 8 am. Much longer if counting the four hours it took to run the self-cleaning oven feature followed by the subsequent scraping off and vacuuming up of remaining oven debris. (The self-cleaning oven feature you ask? Why? There were no ants in the oven?! Well, inner Martha always has lofty goals for me. She is pure nuisance once I let her voice be heard.) For almost two hours my normal, very busy and productive morning routine was pushed to the side, children virtually neglected and my own breakfast postponed all because the trail of Ghost Ants compelled me to look behind the shiny exterior of my stove top. I will say it again: Once you move the stove, the reality of the mess will undeniably haunt you, just like a Ghost Ant, until you clean it up. It doesn't matter how clean I keep the front of the oven or the top of the stove- once I've been face to face with the underbelly of gross- the pretty facade I keep up on a daily basis is purely negated.
Perhaps it was the OvenOff fumes, but while I was back there scrubbing it struck me, this is my life right now. I am actively cleaning the hidden parts of my oven while I am figuratively cleaning the underside of my life. And with that simple correlation all sorts of grace for myself came flooding in. I have learned that any time I feel a flood of grace wash over, I best pay attention because something is happening.
I am just now coming out of an oven cleaning season. In many ways, because of my need to deep clean a few hidden heart places, other usually prioritized areas of my life were neglected. I've felt a tad guilty about this. Guilty and discouraged as I battled thoughts that perhaps all the hard work was for nothing. I wondered if maybe I was selfish for spending so much time behind my oven. But cleaning the actual backside of my oven put it all into perspective for me.
The reality, I so easily forget, is this: we are given a finite amount of emotional energy to tackle a day's worth of troubles or to embrace a day's worth of joys. This is why anxiety or fear of the future is so devastating. Anxiety and fear use up today's resources on tomorrows potential trials, all while still attempting to accomplish today's stuff. This is exactly why anxiety and fear lead us to feel exhausted, all the time. We only get so much energy for today.
Now, it is extremely frustrating to encounter these people, but some people get a larger share of emotional energy than others, it is part of that whole "you are unique movement" God began. And it is true that some people have learned to manage their allotment of emotional energy much better than others of us. However, this does not change the facts: what we get, is what we get. Figuring out how to make the most of it is key. Pretending that we have more than we actually do is risky. I feel feelings hard and often, so when I am in a season of intense emotional work, I use up a lot of emotional energy. Accepting that I do not have the emotional space to do it all is huge for me. Grace whispers, some things can wait because He has already done the frantic soul redeeming work for me. As in, it is finished.
The way I see it, how we manage our emotional energy is much like how we manage the hours on a clock. Sure, we get 24 hours, but some of those hours must be used to eat, sleep and poop. They cannot all be "productive" working hours, as most of us measure productivity. However, it is my humble opinion that eating, sleeping and using the bathroom are all incredibly productive activities and should actually constitute as "work". (This could be due to the fact that as the mother of babies I need to plan, strategize and implement to find time to use the toilet alone. I'll save elaborating this thought for another time.) Emotional energy is the same, we can't be "on" all the time- we need soul food, peace, quiet, rest and release. And from time to time we must make space for the healing of our hearts. This is how we guard our hearts- the wellspring of our very lives. It also means that when big heart issues descend upon our lives, our emotional energy is going to be reallocated. For me, understanding this is crucial to healthy living.
Let us go back to the oven. If I am the oven, which is fairly accurate because I can get hot too, I spend most of my time and energy on keeping the front and top sides clean. This just makes sense, they are the parts I use most and the parts that are most visible. It doesn't take a lot of energy to keep the top and front clean. I spray it, wipe it and move on. The oven will then sit pretty until the next meal which inevitable comes 20 mins later. (Kids. They eat ALL THE TIME.) This system works well, when things are going normally well. I clean the bare minimum on a daily basis, thus saving my energy for more important tasks like the actual cooking of the food. On most days, people can look at the oven (me) and say, hey- she has it together, look how clean and and shiny her oven top is! In fact even if people came over and looked around at my oven, they would have to look pretty hard to see the Ghost Ants. From a distance, or even up close my oven has got it going on.
Yet, there is an underside to the oven. There is ALWAYS an underside. In our rampant Social Media, put your best of three hundred selfies out there world, it is so easy to forget this. The hidden parts of an oven are just as important to the functioning of the oven as the top is- maybe even more so. However, for the most part, an oven is going to run just as smoothly with or without the dirt, crumbs and gunk that has accumulated underneath. But cleaning it out from time to time is just good sense. Maintenance and cleaning help avoid long term problems. Problems like Ghost Ants. The issue is, cleaning out the backside is a painstaking process. It takes considerable time and more importantly, it takes extra emotional energy.
What if we are all ovens? We go about our day doing all the things, using all of the energy, living fantastic lives. We, are a people who are great with keeping the stove top wiped down and our exteriors nice. Most times this is all we need to do. We have busy, meaningful lives. We have important work to do and children to raise and causes to champion. We are all changing the world to some degree or another. All of this takes time and emotional energy. There just isn't a lot of space for the deep cleaning work. Let's face it if given the choice, dirty diaper or moving out the oven? The baby in the diaper will win every time.
Then a Ghost Ant appears. It will happen. Sure as we all have undersides, Ghost Ants will come. When they appear we have one of two choices, look away and pretend they aren't there, or follow the trail to the backside of the oven. Granted, sometimes it is wise to look away. Sometimes one or two ants are nothing but an annoyance, worthy of ignoring until another, better time. Other times, we have no choice but to move the oven and peek behind.
Cleaning the underside of the oven happens when we are called to address the big heart issues. The hidden things in our lives. The things only we know are there. These are soul searching, heart repairing and often gut wrenching seasons. They can be seasons of self improvement or grief, loss and mourning. They are seasons of hard, focus and utter determination. Nevertheless, they are seasons we are adept at putting off and avoiding.
But I don't think we avoid deep cleaning because we are lazy or ignorant or even careless. In my own experience the reasons are far more nuanced and usually practical. Here are my top three, OvenOff induced reasons why:
1) Cleaning behind the oven offers little concrete, obvious reward.
No one sees my hard heart work and thus there is little encouragement or extrinsic reward. In our culture of "carrots and stick" motivation, we have a hard time staying focused on tasks that don't bring immediate gratification. I am no different- I like to see my results NOW, yesterday even. This is why I believe I gravitate to weight loss goals. As I achieve them, people see my results. I see my results every time I look in the mirror. I get all sorts of positive feedback from others as I lose the weight. I don't think I am alone in this because I see it time and time again. Yes, we can lose the weight but fail to do the hard heart work that might have preceded the weight gain or was caused by carrying extra weight. So we inevitable gain the weight back. Hence the yo-yo diet and patterns that cause us to re-lose the same ten or twenty pounds year after year.
Almost always, the purpose of cleaning behind the oven means healing on some level. Healing takes up so much emotional energy with often slow and difficult to measure gains. It leaves one feeling unaccomplished at best, as many of our typically routine day to day tasks are left unfinished or poorly done because there isn't enough energy to do all the things. Prioritization can be demoralizing on many levels. Since none of us like a dirty stove top, this is also disheartening. Leading to a loss of motivation.
Deep heart work is when we are doing something that NO ONE ELSE knows we are doing, unless we tell them. This means there isn't a lot of external motivation for cleaning the back of the oven. There is no tangible gold star or accolades from admiring fans for our efforts beneath the oven. Heck, sometimes the rewards for hard heart work aren't visible to us, ourselves until months or maybe years later. It all hinges on hope, we roll up our sleeves and get to it because we believe it is the only right thing to do for ourselves and the big picture.
Hear me though, a shift in energies while we are doing hard heart work is not neglect or carelessness. It is compromise and is a necessary part of hard heart work because we cannot do it all, all at the same time.
Long term, sustainable change happens on a heart level and is the product of incremental, barely visible change that is intrinsically motivated. That means the only reason we are doing the heart work and going behind the oven is not because we want to please other people, but rather we move the oven because it is important to us and worth the sacrifice it requires. Which leads to the next reason...
2) Cleaning behind the oven requires sacrifice.
If we only have a certain amount of emotional energy for each day and cleaning behind the oven takes extra amounts of energy- something will have to give. It might mean some or all of the below: needing extra quiet, alone time,
feeling unwanted, troublesome emotions we usually keep buried,
leaning how to manage those feelings differently,
money and time for therapy appointments or medications,
vulnerability with others as we solicit their help in meeting the needs or accomplishing usual tasks we are momentarily unable to because of our energy shift (THIS is why we have spouses, family and friends and why if we are part of a team some people will need to know the true oven situation), or
not appearing as put together to others as we are accustomed to (it is really difficult to keep the front of the oven shiny as you are digging out year old crumbs from the underbelly of your appliance).
The above list is not exhaustive, those are the ones I have personally experienced. I am certain everyone's level and nature of sacrifice for heart work looks different. This might also highlight why sometimes we need to leave buried things buried for a bit. Some seasons make hard heart work impossible. For instance, right after you have a new baby? New babies make for a terrible time to start cleaning behind the oven. If possible, waiting for the right time to move the oven is wise, with that said we can't ignore it forever.
3) Cleaning behind the oven will often lead to uncomfortable feelings of selfishness.
This is the Big One for me. Cleaning behind the oven can be a selfish endeavor. Yet, in the same breath I add, it is often the most selfless thing we can do for the people in our lives. Isn't it ironic, don't cha think? See, most of the time my problem is, I love being a martyr. I love the self-righteous feeling I get when I ruminate on how hard I work and how much I give up for all the people I love. Sure, it breeds resentment and anger in the long run, but what a small price to pay for how noble I feel about all I sacrifice for those ungrateful little punks. I joke, my Littles always graciously thank me for all I do and are perfect angels.
I'm not all evil though. Yes, I relish my martyr role a little too much but, part of me also genuinely wants the best for my people and I want to go above and beyond when it comes to meeting their needs. I love them and I really do love serving them (most days). My role as mother and wife brings me joy overall- even the parts that require losing sleep when I would rather selfishly be sleeping.
A lot of motherhood thus far has meant putting my own immediate needs on the back burner of the oven. Allowing for lots of character growth in the realm of patience, priorities and compassion. Bonuses of growing up alongside my kids? I no longer feel naked without mascara or self-conscious for not brushing my teeth. I don't crave designer jeans or feel like a trapped animal when I can't get out to the bar and dance like a hoochie momma at least once a week. The world is probably a better place overall because I became a mother, except maybe that whole teeth brushing situation... you guys, 1 PM! Yesterday I did not manage to brush my teeth until 1 PM. Yet I PROUDLY walked my kids to school and hit the grocery store sans clean teeth. This IS maturity at its' finest.
For all of its encouragement of self-growth in some areas, motherhood has also been a breeding place of genuine self-neglect, especially of the hard heart work variety. It is hard to find any time to move the oven when I am constantly, without hardly a break between meals, snacks and mini-disasters, trying to keep the stove top tidy. I gots all sorts of tiny people in my life whose mission is straight up ensuring my stove top never stays too clean. Amen? Amen.
Bottom line? I often feel guilty for taking too much time for me. Especially when that time away seems to detract from my immediate ability to accomplish my daily goals. In oven speak, it seems ridiculous to clean the backside of an oven when the oven is functioning adequately and the stove top is clean enough for guests. This is especially true since cleaning the backside inevitably means extra catch up cleaning once I finally finish the added behind the stove work and finally push things back into place. A mess waits for no mom. That should really be a saying.
Hard heart work has to happen. At some point, healing must occur. Focused, deep, self-care, reflection and ongoing healing must be a part of our lives.
We need to be selfish at times to be our best version of selfless.
I don't know what is behind your oven. Maybe you've got nothing right now or maybe you just don't know because it has been awhile since you looked. And that is okay. As I said, I myself am coming out of a two month season behind my oven. I had some serious messes that needed tending. It was hard. It isn't over, but I don't regret pushing that oven out for even one minute. I share this because I want to be a source of encouragement or maybe just a big ME TOO for you. If you are there right now doing some of this hard heart work of which I speak, you have this. You are doing good. Other people might not be seeing your efforts right now. Heck, you might not be seeing the results of your efforts yet either. But there is freedom on the other side. Pushing that oven back into place, knowing in your heart that things are fixed up and cleaned out- it will be worth it. A whole, healed heart is always worth it.
There is so much grace and freedom in realizing we cannot do it all, all at once. If now is the time to prioritize yourself to free up some emotional energy to pull your oven out, I say do it. I whole-heartedly believe you, your goals and your people are worth the hard effort, sacrifice and temporary setbacks of the normal routine it will require. You might be the only person who knows what work is being done, but God sees it, is with you in it and I am certain He thinks you are worth it too." No where does Jesus say in the Bible, "your heart isn't worth healing." Instead, I believe quite the opposite is true. He came to heal and bind up the brokenhearted. He is in the business of oven repair and deep cleaning. Ghost Ants best beware.
One last thing, my inner Martha and I suggest a face mask if you decide to use OvenOff. Full disclosure, these words may or may not be the product of toxic oven cleaner hallucinations. Because really? "We are all ovens????" Thanks for that OvenOff. Next time I am definitely using protective face gear... you're welcome.
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