Organized

I have no fewer than seven ‘junk drawers’ in my house. That’s not counting the 4 cabinets and six baskets where I shove things when I’m frantically trying to make my house presentable. I can’t be the only one. I USED to be a neat freak; it was the defining characteristic of my childhood. I say this as if it might redeem me in some way. Maybe you’ll judge a little less harshly if you know that I was once an expert at organizing.  But things have changed.

I can never find a freaking pair of scissors. They belong in a cup of writing utensils in the game room of my house. But I’ll be damned if I can ever locate them when they’re needed. They’re in my kids’ room. They’re in the dining room. They’re with the wrapping paper. They’re in any one of my seven junk drawers. So, this Christmas, I bought three pairs of scissors at the dollar store. I was NOT going to be searching my house for scissors on top of everything else.

When you go out and buy something you KNOW you already have in your home, just so you don’t have to look for it, that’s a sign that there might be a problem. This chaos in my home is a source of embarrassment. I might even call it shame, which seems likely to be an overstatement, but it’s not.  The feeling is intense.

Rationally, I know that a drawer full of crap doesn’t make me any less valuable as a human, but people judge.  People judge appearances; the appearance of my home is (unfairly) a reflection upon me (not my husband- don’t get me started on that).

Then it makes sense that I want it to LOOK organized, even if ‘organized’ isn’t something I’m capable of at the moment. So I shove things in drawers.

I can’t even blame the kids for this. It’s their junk, yes. But I’m the one who shoves it into drawers and baskets and cabinets. I’m the one who takes all of these innocuous items and crams them into unseeable spaces to be forgotten.

The point of this story is that I finally went through all of these catch-all spaces in my house. Yesterday, I emptied the three baskets of random crap in my bedroom. I picked through all of the tchotchkes in the coffee table drawers. I cleaned out the junk drawer(s). I cleaned out the desk. I rearranged furniture and cleared out a bookshelf. The evidence of my hard work can mostly be found in three huge trash bags in the garage.

Today, my son was able to locate an envelope, stamp, and scissors without blinking and said, “I like this new ‘organized’ thing you’re doing mom.” For now, it feels pretty good. But I’ve been at this long enough to know that it won’t last forever. So when the drawers get full and the scissors are missing AGAIN, I will remind myself that the cleanliness of my house is not a measure of my worth.

But for now, I’m going to enjoy the fact that all 13 pairs of scissors reside in one drawer.