Normal Prerogative

What exactly is normal? Who decides what is acceptable and what is inacceptable? I clean my house every day. This started when I was very young. My mom used to say that she, “didn’t have kids to have kids she had kids to have slaves now get to work.” I am not saying that I can always pass a white glove test but I am saying that you would be comfortable in my house visiting, eating and just in general. It’s not so clean that you feel uncomfortable even moving around for fear of making something dirty and it’s not so dirty that the carpet is made of… well you can’t tell because there is too much stuff, roaches and filth everywhere. Some people’s houses are much like the latter. They have no problem with clutter and being part hoarder. My mom always told me that “people” could come take your kids for living in filth. Our house had to be spic and span when company came over like having a dirty house was a symbol of shame. My sanctions for not being clean could be quite severe in my youth. In my adulthood, I cleaned out of habit and to work out negative energy. The sanctions I received then were positive because I felt happy about being productive and working out my frustrations. Apparently in some families clutter reigns supreme. They are raised in an environment that having only walking space and having to dig through piles to get anything is completely normal. They never received any type of punishment for living like this and will continue to do so. I do my best to not judge because it just is not my place to judge others but it leaves me very curious about rather or not the fear of judgement is a sense of somehow being outside of the range of acceptable behaviors for cleanliness or is it that my being forced to clean led me to think of extreme clutter as inappropriate?

It is very confusing to try and understand where we stand in this world. Trying to be so very different from everyone else just to end up being seen as the same it’s frustrating for sure. A lot of people smoke cigarettes I did for 25 years but I have been cigarette smoke free for six years I can’t stand the smell of them. People used to be able to smoke anywhere anytime and then as cancer information about the carcinogens the smoke creates increased the places they could smoke altered. For a long time there has been a push towards anti-smoking which includes not being able to smoke in the car with your kids. There are still people who do not see a problem with the exposure to cigarette smoke but the normalcy of this is changing. This has been a gradual shift from smoking everywhere to being shamed for smoking. As we grow and our knowledge base increases we learn more about our place in the world.

It’s still very surprisingly interesting to me to find out what others think of as normal. The news said that there was a report that the average American couple has sex 66 times a year. This is a little over once a week. I consider this to be an extremely low number I made a post on Facebook to find out if my friends thought this was high or low. Most of my friends thought it was a low number too. My other friends thought this was a high number. But almost all of my friends thought that my own recommendation to have relations 2-3 times a day was just crazy. Normalcy is all a matter of prospective. To the friends that don’t like sex, 66 times a year was a big number. To my friends that enjoy their sex lives the number seemed low. But to both I was outside the norm. This just goes to show that are all standing firm in our truth while our perception of it is ever changing. Our socialization in this world brings about new understandings all the time. That our folkway, mores and laws all influence each other and the individuals they come into contact with. Normal is a prerogative that is as multifaceted as the unique individuals that are trying find their way.