Physician, Organize Thyself
April 30th, 2007Last night I got word from Sarah-Architect that she was organizing her closet. Naturally, I donned my Organizer-Superhero cape and flew over there. Seven hours later, we had …
- three bags of garbage
- a box and a large bag of stuff for Goodwill
- two additional large bags for Jeremy Sr. to look through and consider parting with
- a box of things to be donated to my vet’s office (towels)
- two hopeful bags for Buffalo Exchange
- some potential phones for donating
- one very organized, dusted, cleaned closet
This was amazingly fun work. I love a good organization project. Labels, containers, color-coding = yum. I can remember as a little girl visiting my grandparents’ house and being “allowed” to organize a drawer for my grandmother (just one at a time). I would take out everything and put it back in neatly. In the process, forgotten belongings—photos, letters, bargains found in discount stores and stashed for later use—were found, and unwanted treasures were mine for the taking. Every drawer held moments of discovery, memory, and story telling (the story so often beginning, “Oh, that was a BARGAIN!”). Best of all was the feeling of accomplishment once the drawer had been pared down and tidied. It was useful in a new way. I’m thankful that my grandma didn’t find this too weird a characteristic in a grandchild, because I enjoyed it immensely (thanks, Gram!).
But the enjoyment is only one of three sides of my organizational bent. The second side is my anxiety, which I have pretty well under control these days, but which is soothed by cleaning and reorganizing things. I’m not neurotic for things to constantly BE organized, but I do find comfort in emptying something—anything, a closet, a drawer, a ROOM—and setting it up anew in a more efficient way. I even love to move furniture around into new configurations, and I like to make something messy into something clean. I worked one summer as a maid for a cleaning service, and it was the perfect summer job in many ways.
The third aspect of this is my tendency to make giant messes. I drag things out, pile them up, USE them. Part of having a system to my belongings is knowing what “stuff” I actually own, and wanting to make use of it. Waste not this box of colored pencils, this plastic container of nails and screws.
I forgot a fourth aspect: What Stevel calls “high turnover.” I do like to shop, and shopping introduces new items into the household. Places must be found for them. Space must be made, items they can replace, gotten rid of.
So, there are my impressively labeled storage boxes of computer accessories, and my color-ordered, hanging shirts. My binders with labeled tabs for teaching materials, notes from grad school, homeowners association papers. My lovely photo albums, my neatly stacked towels—one stack for beach towels, one for bath towels, one for cat-bathing towels—and the decorative red boxes labeled and organized to contain Stevel’s impressive collection of video games from boyhood on. But there are these un-glamorous sides to my organization as well. It’s just not as beneficial as it may seem on the surface to live with an Organizer Superhero such as myself. Often—so very often—Stevel comes home to find a room completely torn apart. The place is a disaster, with my insistence that it’s “temporary” indicating they may be this way for days. There are items in the doorway (his pet peeve), shopping bags of new things in view. His belongings are everywhere, destined, he knows, for new locations where he will have trouble finding them for a while without my help. And in many cases, I’m anxious—committed to continuing without stopping to spend time with him or do anything else. In a word, obsessed. Often, there’s something major due very soon, and the project seems like pure procrastination. He’s become very understanding (resigned?) about this aspect of my personality, and I appreciate him for it.
I have to wonder what it would be like if I didn’t have such a “thing” for organizing. If instead I had a thing for just putting things away where they belong all the time, rather than having this constant thought that the messier I make things, the more interesting they will be to straighten out once the mess gets, not “too big,” but big ENOUGH. To be worth it. Why keep my students’ hand-ins in order during and after class, when if I just shove paper after paper into my bag, I can go home and luxuriate all by myself in the making of piles? Why hang up that skirt, when, by Friday, I can have a jumble of clothing on the chair to delve into? Oh, God. Help.
May 1st, 2007 at 5:24 am
Its strange being a bystander-recipent of your Superheroic efforts, but not unpleasant. Thank you for the de-crapification.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:18 am
If you ever want a challenge, I know of a 30 year old house in the Greater Toronto Area that has, well, about 30 years of crap built up in it. I am one of a family of pack rats. :S
May 1st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
I have to admit that the Superheoine of our story has met her match with her stepmamma, my wife Pauline. Krissy has given up on trying to organize our refrigerator or Paulines closet. Like Stevel I have just resigned myself to things being the way they are until one of us dies. Which I guess means forever.
Even Super-Organizer has her kryptonite!
Having seen my loving, cleaning obsessed, daughter in one (of very many) of her beserker cleaning onslaughts, I have to admit to both awe and fear at the same time. A warning here, YOU DO NOT WANT TO GET IN HER WAY AT THIS TIME, you could end up at the Goodwill or on the curb. Either would be an acceptable alternative to her. Colateral dammage is just a fact of the cleaning war she wages. Krissy may even remember where she put you afterwards. Then again she may not, DO NOT TAKE THIS RISK, STAY AWAY FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY.
For those of you who did not have the privelage of knowing Krissy as a young girl, I will relate the story of when this all began.
It was a beautiful spring day when Krissy, age five, came down the hall one morning, before school. To inform me that I had better go and check up on her Mom, she apparently had gone crazy. So I went in to Krissys’ room to see what was going on, only to find her mother on the floor crying, with every one of Krissys’ dresser drawers empied out on the floor. And evry piece of clothing from her closet scattered about the room. Sue’s comments went something like this; “I have the most beautiful little girls, and this little *#it won’t even let me dress her”. A Barbie Doll Krissy has never been. Even at 2 years of age she was choosing her own clothes to wear. By age 5 I guess this finally got to her Mom. Any way Sue straightened up the damage and then Krissy came home from school and re-organized all of her dressers and closet the way she wanted them. What do I know, I am just a Dad, Krissy has always looked good in what ever she chooses to wear.
Stevel my heart goes out to you. I am just glad that you have not sued us for Truth in Advertising. If we had told you what was actually in store, you may have run away. Then who would we have foisted her on. You are a Saint in my book. Just keep up the long suffering stares and and learn to perfect those heavy sighs.
Love
Dad
May 1st, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Hmmmm – an organizer you are and an organizer you will always be. It’s an interesting facet of your personality because creative people usually enjoy jumble and clutter, I think. But it’s true that you are extremely creative and a super organizer at the same time, as if organization was a form of creativity for you. I greatly admire your ability to keep things orderly and get rid of things that are hanging around without a purpose just because they have some sentimental value. I’m afraid my house is doomed to be a museum of old memories and dusty volumes read long ago that had some meaning in my life at one time and so can’t ever be parted with.
As for the day that your dad spoke about – that was the day that you broke my heart for the first time. You insisted on picking out your own clothes and took your first step away from me. It was a hard moment of realization for me. A bond was being severed that I could never put back together. You were on a natural path that would lead you further and further away from me until you had a life of your own and didn’t need me anymore. I hope that you can fogive the battle that I fought to hold the bond together and the tears that I shed when I surrendered to your fierce 4-year-old will to be free of me.
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:55 am
Pretty sure that creative people don’t prefer clutter, but instead the prefer not doing anything about clutter. The absence of clutter in the closet is super.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Your Mom IS SOOO RIGHT, Fierce and Strong/Self Willed are perfect adjectives for you.