February 2, 2010

One of my biggest challenges in life has always been keeping my house organized. I’m pretty good at making sure things are always clean, it’s the clutter that seems to bury me. It is even harder when you have small children. I thought that when I became a stay home mom I would have a perfectly clean house. Little did I realize that I would actually have less time to clean. Lately, I have been feeling a strong desire to get the house organized. It could be my pregnant nesting instinct. It is also a little bit of my fear that the clutter will completely consume me when I have three children. Therefore, I have resigned myself to get my house under control once and for all.


I think part of the problem is nature. You know how there are always people when you drop by their house, unexpectedly, and it’s clean. No matter what, their house always seems clean and in perfect array. My mom is one of those people. While I have been blessed to receive many attributes from her, a perfectly organized house gene somehow didn’t get passed on. It’s not for lack of trying though. I wake up every day and say “today will be the day” and I go to bed at night staring at a pile of laundry or stack of bills I didn’t get to. I truly love being in a clean, organized home and have a tremendous amount of respect for those who keep their homes up. My husband always teases me because I am pretty obsessive about cleaning and organizing before company comes. I like to give the illusion that my house is always clean. He refers to it as playing “fake house.” It infuriates me when he says this, but he’s right. I think I am, however, finally ready for our “fake house” to be that way on a regular basis.

The problem with a disorganized house is that it bleeds in to other areas of your life. It makes you feel stressed, chaotic and often overwhelmed. In the book, Simple Steps – 10 Weeks to Getting Control of Your Life, authors, Lelas, McClintock and Zingarella point out that “messy drawers, cabinets and closets drain us of our energy.” Furthermore, their research has shown “clutter and chaos in the home appear to be linked to eating as an emotional escape. There is a connection between organizing clutter and losing weight.” If that’s not motivating what is? Louise L. Hay agrees, pointing out that in order to make room for the new in our life (and not just stuff) we must have a place to put it. Hay notes “cluttered closets mean a cluttered mind.” I, for one, know this to be true. Your house can look clean from the outside, but God forbid anyone open a drawer. When your life is lived this way it feels as though you are hiding and even though the outside looks good, you are still well aware of the work needed to be done on the inside. Hay says by cleaning closets and drawers we are making a symbolic gesture to the universe that says we are ready for change, and “the universe loves symbolic gestures.”

While all of this is enough to make you want to clean out every drawer of your house, I am going to be reasonable and set a goal of cleaning up one drawer/area every day until it’s complete. I will get rid of that which I no longer use, including those size 6 jeans that I have been planning to wear for 5 years, and I am going to make room for a new baby and a new life. I often feel my house is too small, and it is in many respects, but it doesn’t help that I don’t have things clean and organized. I am tired of the drawers and closets of my mind being cluttered and am ready for a fresh new start!