Relaxing standards
After 10 minutes with List, I’m convinced that my messy basement is holding me back. But there’s a nagging voice in my head. Isn’t clearing my house to improve my self-esteem like dieting my way to happiness? Not unlike being pressured to achieve physical perfection, women are bombarded by messages to get organized, precisely at the stage of life when they’ve made peace with their bodies. Decluttering is a multi-billion dollar industry, marketed primarily to women — and driven by shame. “You hear it from your boss and your colleagues,” says Freedman, “and you can’t turn off the TV without hearing it from Oprah: ‘If you aren’t straightening yourself out all the time, what kind of failure are you?’”
Until we finally shacked up, my man and I had functioned — separately — as joyfully cluttered individuals, holed up at our desks with our respective teetering piles, and blithely indifferent to the chaos, interrupting our work with random short bursts of housekeeping. I cooked full meals only on alternate weeks when my daughter was with me. Life was chaotic — but also full and productive.
Now we were merging households, forging a new domestic entity with my daughter who, on the cusp of 13, was a vigorous jumble of lip balm, books and hair accessories. We would have to be organized. We would have to be tidy. I bought Cheryl Mendelson’s book Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House and made detailed lists of chores: daily, weekly and monthly. I mopped, I took up ironing, I nagged — and fell into bed exhausted. My daughter was confused by the new regime after years of good-natured, laissez-faire homemaking. My partner was irritated. In retrospect, I made us miserable.
What a tidy life looks like
I wondered what life might be like if being tidy was second nature. So I asked Jo-Anna Ash, a 50-year-old Edmontonian with a warm laugh and a daily routine that verges on compulsive: She won’t leave a dish dirty, vacuums daily, and matches the Kleenex box to the bedding. When they were in elementary school, her kids had colour-coded file trays by the kitchen door. Highly organized since she was a child, it’s only in the past five years that she has, as Ash puts it, become “obsessed with decluttering.” While her teenage sons joke that the house looks as though no one lives there, Ash says she feels pressure to constantly get rid of things. “I’d feel bombarded if I didn’t keep up with it. When I go to someone’s house with stuff in it, I feel claustrophobic.”
Hellen Buttigieg, also the mother of two teenagers, is a 45-year-old professional organizer and life coach in Oakville, Ont., and host of the HGTV show Neat. I ask if it’s possible to be too organized. “Yeah, it’s called OCD,” she laughs, adding no one comes to her saying they’re too organized. But then she’s suddenly serious. “What you’re talking about is perfectionism, which is something I struggled with for years. There is a point of diminishing returns.” Buttigieg happily admits her house is far from magazine-perfect. “I’m always up front about that. Once you have kids, you relax a little.”
