Exquisite Mess

Somewhat astonished to note that we do not, in fact, have the messiest house in America. I finally got around to reading a hilarious/unsettling article that appeared in WaPo last month about a new cable reality show where they take some poor slobs and clean up/makeover their house.

Not that I’ll be watching it…As a member of a TV-free household (actually, we do have a television set on which we watch Netflix, but no reception whatsoever), I’m pretty much out of the loop on the latest in reality programming. I didn’t even know there was a “Style Network” until I read this piece. We did watch a couple episodes of Top Chef while on vacation with my sister and her gang a couple of months ago. Entertaining-- but not enough to make me sign up for a satellite!


Still, nice to know that there’s somebody out there in worse shape than us. Our house is pretty chaotic. My mother, God bless her, has to be one of the worst housekeepers of all time, so I come by it honestly. The truth is, Christian and I are both embarrassingly disorganized—in different ways, of course, just to be sure that we drive each other totally crazy. In my previous life, I kept it together by simply not accumulating stuff. I’m a minimalist at heart. I really do get some kind of endorphin buzz from throwing stuff away. But I’ve discovered that one of the harsh realities of parenthood is that you start to acquire things related to the health and happiness of your children and are forced, for one reason or another, to hang onto them. Also doesn’t help that I’m married to a collector. Our house overflows with boxes and boxes of his unsorted junk. When we were dating, the sneaky bastard stored all of his extraneous belongings in a conveniently unoccupied apartment across the hall, only to have to reclaim them all around the time I moved in. This is the guy who, as a fifth grader, had his desk dragged out of his classroom and prominently displayed in the hallway as an example of how not to maintain one’s personal space. "It really was an exquisite mess," my beloved recalls, with what sounds like great nostalgia. They gave him until lunchtime to clean it up, which he did. Afraid, I guess, of being forced to skip a meal.

Anyway, the pathetic folks on the show are in a totally different league. The question, as raised in the article, is when does clutter become pathological. At what point does messiness reflect honest-to-god mental illness? It sounds like poor old Mindy and Phil may have crossed the line. As for us, I think we remain, at least for now, on the side of sanity. I usually manage to clean the bathrooms once a week and good old Papa hits the catbox with something approaching regularity. We just need a good purge (five years and I’m still waiting!), some storage solutions and to remember to put things away when we’re done with them (Mama!). I haven’t yet tried withholding food as a motivational technique but may be on to something….