We have rooms in our home that function better than others—the living room is, somehow, mostly not terrible—but there are zones that are dumping grounds for shit we don't use and won't get rid of. My dining room sucks: when I want to sit down and eat a meal at the table, I have to clear out a week's worth of mail, library books, abandoned toys, and atomized Lego sets. The clearance rate for my office desk, which is usually littered with empty sparkling water cans, several unread books, a plate from two days ago, and things we can file under "weird shit" (why do I have a one-inch tall figure of Moana on my desk? And a prepaid Mastercard with $6.49 on it? And a pack of crayons? And a Japanese advertising circular from 1988?) is abysmal: once or twice a week, I clear it off, and a few work cycles later, it's back to being a mess. The kitchen, by virtue of being a place that will start to stink if the mess goes uncleaned, is relatively good; the bathroom, on the other hand, is often gross and cluttered.
Part of this is that our house is just too big for us. We are but three people in a three-story house, and it is a house full of strange nooks and crannies. Some of the house has been carved up into spaces that serve no real function, like the area outside our second-floor bathroom: it is as large as a bedroom, but has no doors, and leads to the attic. It is not a work space, or a hallway, or a foyer, or a closet, or anything else that makes sense on a floorplan. Its main function right now? It's where I keep the pile of stuff that I will "one day" donate to Goodwill. We all deserve better.
Part of it is also that we have a seven year old whose main purpose in life seems to be acquiring things, a trait I both detest (80%) and indulge (20%). He loves trinkets and knickknacks, is not inclined towards organizing anything, and will cry if you suggest donating or selling his things. All children love their treasures, but as an only child/grandchild, he has a horde that would please Smaug. He goes through phases—Super Mario Lego, Squishmallows, Back to the Future Playmobil, Harry Potter wands, endless Pokemon cards—and as he loses interest, the unshiny toys drift under his bed or get shoved into bookshelves. I don't want to shame his loves, because he can recite obscure facts about Pokemon and playact scenes from Back to the Future; his passions are as pure and incandescent as burning magnesium, and about as long-lived. Tonight he wept real tears because his toddler towel, now too small for him, will be replaced and he's just not ready to say goodbye. To a towel. Mercy for us all, please.
And the final part is that COVID made us all weird. Supply chain hiccups encouraged us to stockpile what we loved or needed; for a while, we were just home, with our stuff. We couldn't donate anything or give it away. And maybe we got out of the habit of tidying up for company, because we weren't having people over? I had flashbacks to Saturday-morning cleanup sessions in advance of Saturday-night dinner parties when I was kid, and I would understand that my parents were also extrinsically motivated in this arena, and who could blame us?
ANYWAY. I'm living with too much stuff, and it's all badly organized, and I feel like I'm losing my mind. Am I alone in this? I doubt it.
But I am at a loss as to what to do about it.
I could go the Marie Kondo route—thank my things for their service, and then release them into the wild—but I suspect I will be the only one in my family to do so. Perversely, I sometimes hang onto stuff I don't even want or need anymore as a way of taking up space in my own house; otherwise, it can be hard for me to see myself in this place. I struggled with this when I first moved in with my husband—I moved into his place, and we had to physically carve out places for me to put my stuff. He's a collector, a completist, and a nostalgia king, a trifecta that means the in-out ratio for stuff is...pretty low.
I miss the room-of-one's-own days of my student co-op days; when I lived in a big shared house, but I had a space that was just for me. I painted my walls pink and yellow and orange; I arranged my books and my houseplants just so; I had generous closets. I filled the space with myself, and knew myself well in those rooms. We all contributed to the upkeep of the house at large—scrubbing out shared fridges, cleaning showers, endless rounds of mopping—but I could retreat into something that was mine alone. Ten years later, I look back at this time with rose-tinted glasses.
The way we structure family life is that we rarely have spaces that are just ours, just for us. I share my office and my bedroom; I don't have a studio or a she-shed. Hell, even spaces that are meant to be private are regularly invaded (I can't remember the last time I pooped without kiddo knocking on the door). Maybe the solution is as simple is just taking back that privacy, insisting on it, rather than blurring the edges so abysmally.
Or maybe we just need to deep-clean, again. Maybe we need to mourn the loss of the special towel and the ill-fitting clothes and then get 'em out of here. Maybe we need to divvy up our office spaces so we each have a room to ourselves, instead of half-lives here and there all over the house. Maybe we need to get ride of the ice cream maker (used once in a decade of marriage) and the juicer (second-hand; aspirational; never used) and the slow-cooker and its attendant cookbook (used annually to cook pulled pork and pulled pork only). Maybe we need to teach each other and ourselves that getting rid of stuff is not sloughing off who we are, but rather refining our tastes? (Please tell me how I can bring this message home to my husband and son, who do not operate in this modality at all.) Maybe I need to control what I can—this desk, this kitchen counter—and find the zen in the rest of it?
Maybe I need to order the largest Dumpster?
I'm kidding, sort of. I'm mostly just frustrated; I'm the person it seems to bother the most, and who has the least agency over other people's stuff. It's an outcome of the last three years that this loss of control rankles so much; in times previous, I've coasted along in a happy mess, insisting on quarterly clean-ups but otherwise taking it in stride. But I've changed; I want my home to be less visually busy, less work to maintain (having this much stuff is tiring!), and more balanced. And I honestly truly do not know where to start.
