de-cluttering my life

by

Turns Out I Have a Few More Random Topics in My System

One of my worst habits is picking up my phone when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning. Last night, I opened up my email to see a 30% off offer from Athleta, which is irresistible because I love their athleisure. (I still don’t know if it’s pronounced Ath-leh-tuh, like “lettuce” or Ath-LEE-tuh, like “athlete.” I want very badly for it to be the latter, but I don’t know.) I already have so many pairs of high-rise leggings, but they are so comfy… and maybe one more pair would ease the emptiness in my soul, especially in the dark green, and especially if I also get this matching sweatshirt.

Okay, I’m just kidding. My soul is full of (mainly) love and light. But I do sometimes get into that mindset of This One Specific Thing Will Fix Me.

Speaking of which, I cannot stop thinking about this sweatshirt.

image from evereve.com

I saw it in person when I was doing a little light shopping with a friend while our kids were at an event. A person in my circle happened to be in the same store and was chatting with us while I perused the clothing. When I held up this sweatshirt and said, mostly joking, “I think I need an après ski sweatshirt,” she said, “No, no one needs that.” in what I can only call a Tone of Intense Derision. DO I need this sweatshirt? No, I most certainly do not. And yet my reaction to her comment was one of visceral opposition and defiance. I managed to tamp it down in the moment – again, I do not need this sweatshirt – but I still want the sweatshirt, and more so after I was scolded about it. It’s probably not financially wise to buy things out of spite, though.

You know what is the opposite of spiteful? Holiday cards. How about that masterful segue, huh??? I have said it many times but holiday cards are my favorite thing about the season. I would forego all gifts in a hot second, but I would never want to give up exchanging holiday cards.

It is quite difficult to get a photo of my cards while still keeping everyone’s faces anonymous. So you get to look at this adorable Christmas dogs card while kind of getting a *feel* for the cards on my wall.

This year, there seem to be far fewer cards on my wall than in years past, when they have wrapped around the entire perimeter of the kitchen. This is slightly concerning. Obviously my main worry is that I have been blacklisted from people’s holiday card lists, for reasons unbeknownst to me. When the more likely scenario is that a) cards are expensive and b) stamps are HELLA expensive and c) Thanksgiving was late this year, so I think some people are late in sending out their cards. I only just got my last few cards into the mail yesterday, so I clearly don’t have a leg to stand on. More cards will arrive, and I will leave them up until my husband gets annoyed enough by their presence to badger me into taking them down.

His big concern with my tendency to stick cards on the walls is that the sticky tack I use won’t come off. I have always pooh poohed that fear because it always comes off. But… last year I may have left the cards up a wee bit too long… and some of the sticky tack may have pulled off a wee bit of paint. Whoopsie. This year I am using a different brand, one that is also nearer the grey of our paint.

If you were concerned that my husband’s stocking was going to be woefully empty compared to everyone else’s, allow me to lay your fears to rest. Last night, we went to Barnes & Noble on our date night, as we do, and he spent a long time examining this book. He doesn’t usually read books in print, because of limited time, but he was seriously considering this one. It has an intriguing premise, and it’s smallish (just over 200 pages) and it has a visual element that is unusual and appealing. He looked it up on Goodreads and told me that the author’s previous book was more highly rated, but, alas, not available in the store. So during my middle-of-the-night non-sleeping, I ordered the previous book for him, along with a book of dad jokes (he’d also spent quite a lot of time lingering over a dad jokes calendar, and he loves telling dad jokes, and this book can be delivered before Christmas so it was an easy add-on). Now I am REALLY DONE BUYING THINGS.

image from amazon.com
image from amazon.com

While a lot of people, I expect, will spend this weekend baking wonderful treats and going to holiday parties, I am planning to spend my weekend TIDYING. The Christmas decor, which I love, is already beginning to close in on me. There’s the tree, which takes up space, and the necessity of moving one of the armchairs into the piano room, which makes that room crowded (there’s STILL an old couch in there as well) (also we got a concrete coffee table for the sunroom and that’s in the piano room too). Plus there is detritus on every surface – like a tin of peppermints from someone at my husband’s office, and the replacement Hanukkah pajamas I mentioned in my last post, still in their bag, and a plate of Christmas cookies, and some gift receipts, and a winter-themed tie someone gave my husband, and the two holiday letters I received from friends that I have read but am not ready to discard yet – in addition to the normal random assortment of glasses and water bottles and cat fur and tweenager flotsam and mail. Of course, there are also BOXES EVERYWHERE (the instant I break down a box and put it into the recycling bin, another box appears) because the cat loves boxes, and he also loves the brown packing paper that comes in the boxes (his version of “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things” would just be “brown paper packages, brown paper packages, brown paper packages” on repeat), and he loves to leap on the packing paper and tear it with his teeth and leave little crumbs of paper everywhere.

The Instagram algorithm, intuiting my Christmas claustrophobia, served me a video of an advice vlogger answering someone’s question about Christmas with her mother-in-law. The gist was that the writer-inner’s mother-in-law had decreed that Christmas was over at noon on Christmas Day, and so promptly at noon she started putting away all the Christmas décor, and insisted the writer-inner help. It took them five hours to put away all the ornaments and lights and the tree, and the writer-inner was upset that THAT was how she’d spent her first Christmas with her new husband and his family. She was anticipating the same thing this year, and wanted help from the advice giver.

Oh, how deeply do I empathize with the mother-in-law! I, too, reach a point at which I am simply Done with Christmas, and when I get there, I want it all to be whisked away immediately. This is one of the reasons that I refuse to decorate for Christmas before December 1. I want to enjoy the decorations, not feel stifled by them. I do typically leave them up until at least New Year’s Day, though. Even if I’m gritting my teeth by the end.

By the way, the advice given was a) see if you can change the holiday arrangement so that you spend Christmas Eve with the in-laws and Christmas Day with your family, rather than swapping every-other-Christmas Day with each family and, if that’s a no-go, b) simply agree that Christmas ends at noon on Christmas Day, and depart the in-laws’ house at that time. I don’t know about how this would go over with your family, but I just cannot imagine doing either of these things with my family of origin or my in-laws. Our families don’t even swap Christmases that often! But if we did, the swap would need to be Exactly Even. And I also cannot imagine simply opting out of what sounds like a family tradition of putting Christmas away, even if it SUCKED. But then again, I am not always the greatest at setting boundaries so maybe the advice giver has it right.

Anyway, I am going to spend this weekend tidying as much as I possibly can (GOODBYE, latest crop of boxes!), and doing laundry, and giving myself a clean-if-cluttered slate from which to begin two weeks of family togetherness.

I am also going to try out a new hair crème, which I discovered after Instagram presumed (rightly!) that I would be interested in something called “glass hair.” None of my efforts at improving my skin with expensive products have worked, but surely I can have the hair of my dreams if I just buy This One Specific Hair Crème. (I had a gift card.)

image from amazon.com
by

What Are We Doing About the Mess?

When it comes to a big, multi-room tidy, I have a strategy, which I will pass on to you in hopes that it works just as well on your children (I have not tried it on my spouse, so no promises there). My strategy is setting up a Power Hour. Carla LOVES a challenge, especially if there’s the potential of besting me. And it makes cleaning into a game, and games are fun.

What I do is I get out a big colorful sheet of construction paper. At the top I write Power Hour! in big cheerful letters. Beneath, on one side, I write out a list of things I need Carla to do (make her bed, pick up stuffed animals, tidy the living room, put her socks and underpants away, etc.) and put little boxes for checkmarks next to them… and on the other side, I write out a list of things I need to do (unload dishwasher, clean toilets, vacuum stairs, etc.) and put boxes with checkmarks next to them. I have found that it helps if my list is longer than Carla’s, because she likes to have an obvious advantage. (To her, it is not obvious that “washing the floor” is much, much more time consuming than “picking up the crayons scattered all over the counter.”) Then I masking tape the list to the kitchen wall, masking tape a marker to the wall as well, and set a one-hour timer. Then we RACE to complete as many of our tasks as possible in the allotted time, checking off each task as we complete it. This is Carla’s favorite part, I think – making a checkmark on the page, while loudly proclaiming, “Checking off another one!” – and taping the marker to the wall makes it extra fun for her for some reason.

Anyway, I haven’t tried a Power Hour! lately, but I will do so today because it desperately needs doing. (It’s my normal Day Before the Cleaner Arrives technique, and it’s worked well for many months.) (By the way, being surrounded by mess has been making me feel incredibly extra wistful and thankful for our housecleaner, and I am writing her “paid leave” checks with gratitude and hope that one day she will be able to clean for us again because I miss her SO VERY MUCH OMG.)

The Power Hour! is a good strategy for the type of clutter that accumulates over time, between housecleaning appointments for instance. But I am struggling more, lately, with the HUGE VOLUME of day-to-day messiness. Everything is so much more messy than it was prior to self-isolation. Don’t get me wrong — the tendency of a child to start one project, abandon it, and begin another project while the first is strewn about a different room is, shall we say, a familiar concept. As is the concept of piles gradually accruing on every possible surface. But it turns out that my little whirlwind can make SO MANY MORE messes when she is at home for an additional 35 hours a week. Plus, I am guessing I do a lot more of-the-moment tidying when I am not staring despondently at the news 400 hours a day.

I think the utter relentlessness of the mess is what has begun wearing on me. It was simple enough at the beginning, to breezily say things along the lines of, “Of course it’s going to be messier than usual around here! You have double the people at home all day and one of them is a tornado, so mess is inevitable! But you can live with a little mess!” And this is true. I never claimed to be The World’s Tidiest Person, not by a long shot. But it turns out that a little messiness, while endurable for the short term, over time begins to feel like NOTHING IS EVER CLEAN. And, after a few days of enduing “a little mess,” the mess balloons into a LOT of messiness and then it begins feeling like I am living in squalor and there is no point in anything anymore because we are drowning in a sea of clutter. I am already walking around in a constant state of irritation/distress/anxiety and the added mess is NOT HELPING.

So I am starting to lose it, messwise. I need a new system. Otherwise I may as well lie down on the living room floor and be layered over with magnatiles and board games and construction paper and stuffed animals and remnants of pillow forts and Barbie shoes.

I had to have The Talk with my husband last night that I need more help with the housework… But man, I feel guilty about that. He is working all day, and putting his health at risk to help other people, and he is exhausted and anxious all the time, so I WANT to be able to take the pressure off at home. But also I am here ALL DAY EVERY DAY, doing nearly all the childcare and housework and meal planning/preparation, with maybe five minutes to myself at a time and… it sucks.

For those of you who have multiple children in your care all day every day… for those of you who have multiple children AND spouses who are now ALL at home with you nonstop… for those of you who are working from home WHILE your children and/or spouses are at home with you… well, you have my deepest, most sincere sympathy and compassion. My one cheering thought is that we are ALL dealing with this right now, with our own varying levels of tolerance and manageability. Additional people in our spaces, additional maneuvering required, new levels of irritation and stress, new strategizing and planning and letting things go.

I asked a fellow parent what she was doing to keep the mess down, and she said she was trying to clean a bit every day. Well. Yes. As am I. This is a tried-and-true strategy. Every single day, I do the dishes and wipe the counters and straighten and try to get Carla to move things off Obvious Surfaces. Every single day, I try to do at least one Other Thing — a load of laundry, moving all the collected water glasses from my husband’s bedside table to the sink, moving a bundle of precious artwork from the overcrowded craft cupboard to the trash. But it’s NOT ENOUGH. The mess is a rising tide and our house is a leaky boat.

If you, too, are just trying to clean a bit every day, what does that MEAN? Do you have a checklist? Do you have a rotation of Big Items? How are you enlisting the other members of your household? If you have young children, how are you helping them get into the habit of cleaning up after themselves? I am TRYING, believe me, but a) I don’t have the energy/patience to supervise all the cleaning that needs to be done and b) it feels like just one more source of potential tension between me and Carla when we are already getting on each other’s nerves and c) sometimes the ONLY WAY I can get a few minutes to myself is to ignore what is certainly a HUGE mess in the making.

So. What are YOU doing to Keep the Clutter at Bay?

by

Instead of Dinners This Week, Some Rambling (Plus Seriously, Where Is the Ricer?)

It is a Call Week, so I am relieving myself of the drudgery of meal planning for this week. Ahhhhhhhhh, sweet self-imposed freedom from self-imposed obligation.

I just got back from chaperoning a field trip. Yes, the field trip I was whining about last week. I like to drag my worrying out as long as possible.

Taking responsibility for any children more than my own first grader is, as you may suspect, completely outside my comfort zone. The teacher may have understood this – she has met me before, after all – and only assigned me one other charge besides Carla. The little girl was so cute and held my hand whenever the teacher instructed the children to “find their grown ups.” I was HER grown up, so she was going to make sure I didn’t get lost. (Carla, in typical Carla fashion, did not care whether I was in her eyeline, just as long as I was ON the field trip.)

Our destination was what felt like an hour’s drive away. The duration of the trip – or, should I say, the perceived duration – may owe something to the endless games of “Would You Rather” and “I Spy” and “Twenty Questions” we played. We played enough rounds of each for me to have a clear Least Favorite (I Spy) and to never want to play any of the three again. These games were, however, preferable to the game the girls had been playing when we first got on the bus. “Hamster” I believe it was called. The gist, from what I understand, is that Carla was a hamster (hence the thrilling name of the game) and that the other little girl was her owner. I found it highly amusing that the other little girl would hold out a carrot – a completely imaginary, completely invisible carrot, mind you – and that Carla would say, “No, no, I want little pieces of carrot” and then the other little girl would not only not mind this arbitrary distinction (INVISIBLE and IMAGINARY carrot) but would readily comply.

This is the kind of thing that makes me hate imaginary play with my child. Give me reading. Give me art projects. Give me (gourd save me) a board game. (Not Candyland. Never Candyland.) But when it comes to following the meandering and impromptu and too-often contradictory rules of a game of pretend, I would rather stick a fork in my eye.

Speaking of forks, I am sort of wishing that my everyday flatware would wear out. My husband and I chose our flatware purposefully. We loved the contemporary sleekness of it. But most of all, we loved the heft of the utensils. They felt sturdy. Real. That’s the very thing that we hate so much about them now. The stems are TOO heavy; they are constantly falling off the edges of dishes or into bowls. They have rounded edges, too, so they slide off even perfectly flat and still plates and it is super annoying. It is time for them to go. But I cannot bring myself to replace Perfectly Good Flatware, you know? It’s not cheap, to buy a whole new set of forks, knives, and spoons. And there’s nothing broken or damaged about this set. It’s just stupid and irritates me on a near daily basis, that’s all. I guess I will just wait until the utensils wear out and I can happily replace them.

Of course, they are NOT wearing out. Not at all. This despite the fact that we seem to have officially crossed some sort of Household Item Breakdown Threshold, because over the past two years or so, I’ve noticed that more and more of our housewares are surrendering to age or overuse or existential dread. Our everyday dishes (purchased 2009) suddenly have big chips. The handles of our pots-and-pans-set (purchased 2003) have started to detach from the bowls of the pots. Our cookie sheets (2009) are dark brown and have a permanent aura of grime, not to mention they don’t seem to lie flat anymore. We’ve lost enough of our backup everyday water glasses (2009) that I had to order more. Our duvet cover (2009) developed a hole that I was unable  unwilling  unqualified to repair. Our bath towels (2009) suddenly seem exhausted and threadbare and completely resistant to the softening effects of Downy. Our kitchen towels (2009) are universally stained and resist being folded into anything resembling a straight line. Our everyday steak knives (2003) have been washed so many times the wooden handles are sprouting splinters that make dicing onions an exercise in bravery and pain. I am sure there are more examples.

I suppose this is the nature of things: they are temporary. You get as much use out of them as you can. And then you move on. Yet I am nonetheless bewildered by their disrepair. I have used these same pots in four different homes across the better part of two decades! Why would they fail me now? It is perhaps a level of betrayal that one should not feel toward inanimate objects.

We have so far replaced the duvet cover and the kitchen towels and the pots and the cookie sheets. I hope these signs of wear and tear confine themselves to our household items and don’t spread to our actual marriage. Perhaps that’s why their disrepair feels so significant: I am correlating them too closely with my marriage; understandable, since we bought some things when we moved in together (2003) and the rest when we got married (2009).

Moving on quickly lest we get too philosophical/metaphorical here: You will note that I said we have replaced several items. And yet the old, failing items remain. The dark and gritty cookie sheets? Still in the same drawer, on top of the brand new cookie sheets – which are so lovely and fresh looking I have been avoiding using them, lest they lose the newness. SIGH. I glance lovingly at the shiny new pots (well, they aren’t shiny; they’re non-stick) and pass over them in favor of playing another tantalizing round of Will It Or Won’t It Fall Off: Pot Handle Edition. The dingy kitchen towels are still folded, if haphazardly, in the towel cupboard and are still part of my towel rotation. At least I USE the newer towels, though.

I think my husband and I both suffer from (varying degrees of) a very dangerous combination of practicality and sentimentality. Alone, they are often stronger than logic. Paired together, logic has no chance whatsoever. Why do we need three coffee machines?Logic asks. What if we have a lot of people over at one time? Practicality answers.  We have never once used these crystal glasses of your mother’s, Logic points out. Plus, we already have your grandmother’s crystal upstairs in the dining room and we never use those anyway. Inarguable, right? But we might have a big fancy party someday and need EXTRA, Practicality counters. And they belonged to YOUR MOTHER, Sentimentality says. Game, set, and match.

Sometimes I wonder if I should get really into Marie Kondo like its 2014. But – from my very limited understanding of the Kondo method – I petulantly disagree with the whole “keep only things that bring you joy” principle. And I am sure – SURE – that the actual Kondo method has exceptions for things of practical necessity. I mean, no one keeps a bottle of Advil or a plunger on hand for reasons of JOY.  It’s probably more a method of thinning down multiples of things – like cardigans or jeans or stuffed cats (every single one of which brings Carla joy, I don’t even have to ask).

What does Kondo have to say about occasional-use things, though? Like a ricer or a bottle of hydrogen peroxide? Neither is going to save your life (or unclog your toilet), and I am going to venture a guess and say neither is going to bring you any sort of joy. But sometimes you just need a ricer.

I couldn’t find my ricer this past Thanksgiving, to my husband’s chagrin and my moderated glee (he and I have differing opinions about the optimal smoothness of mashed potatoes). And I wondered if I somehow got rid of it without remembering? Would I have done that? Did I say, “No joy” and toss it into a box of things headed to Goodwill? That doesn’t sound like me, (see above re: knives that give me literal splinters) but… I have no idea where the ricer could be. (Where IS my ricer?) Wherever it is, I think it’s rubbing elbows with my knife sharpener, which I cannot find either.

I could see myself applying – with prejudice – the Kondo method to my kitchen. I mean, the pots whose handles are ready to release themselves from the pot at any moment should definitely go. We ALREADY have replacement pots. Sure – addressing Practicality – it’s nice to have extras, but they are rickety and liable to break just as you are transporting a pot of hot soup from stove to counter. And yes – addressing Sentimentality – they were the first pots my husband and I bought when we first lived together a million years ago, but they are JUST POTS. In no way do these pots bring me joy. More like apprehension.

I could also go through my Drawer of Kitchen Crap and pick out the things that no longer bring me joy. The herb stripper I was so excited about when I got it? I use it so infrequently. And really, I don’t NEED it that often. And it’s just the wrong shape for the drawer, so if it isn’t positioned exactly right, it catches on the top of the counter and holds the drawer closed and I have to jiggle and jam my hand into the drawer and wiggle things around until I can get it open again. IT CAN GO.

Kitchen drawer

Drawer of Kitchen Crap

What about the Bundt pan that I have never once used and which I fully plan on continuing to never use?  Just because it is in Brand New Condition is no reason to keep it.

What even is a Bundt cake? Is it really a thing, that people make and eat? Is it, like, cake cake? Or is it, as I imagine, more of a bread? Is it good? Have I been missing out on all sorts of Bundt-related deliciousness all these years that the Bundt pan has been taking up space in my pantry?

I could go for some cake right now, honestly.

After all, even if I have forgone meal planning, it does not mean that I can forgo actually FEEDING my family. They continue to require sustenance. Cake counts, right?

All right, I am off to scrape together some sort of probably-non-cake food for my child. And then maybe see if she can I Spy my ricer.