What do you see when you look around your home?
I see a landscape of failure.
There are piles of paper.
Piled on the piles are more piles.
Books and DVDs have escaped the shelves and are now in, well, piles.
I tell myself I will sort through them one day.
Unfortunately, I have not had that extra day in years.
I have twin 4-year-old boys whose toys have overflowed into every room in the house.
The new wallpaper is already, inexplicably, peeling.
I was very clever to have the contractors create a laundry room.
Had I been cleverer, I’d have purchased a washer and dryer to go in it.
And my clothing…well, it’s very nice.
Or at least I think it is.
I cannot even start to talk about my kitchen without crying.
My supply of kitchen gadgets is unparalleled.
This mess is one reason my husband and I still maintain separate apartments after more than a decade together.
He loves me, but he can’t live with me.
I can’t say that I blame him.
I don’t particularly want to live with me either.
That’s not exactly what happened.
My editors actually wanted me to work through my order issues myself, the bastards.
Tidiness, I believed, was for dorks.
People who chased dust motes lacked creativity and vitality, qualities we chaotic slobbolas had in abundance.
By 45, she’s busy saving string and collecting stray cats.
The truth is, although I laugh about the state of my apartment, it also embarrasses me.
or unsuccessful (“Poor thingshe must not have had enough money to finish the renovation!").
Next, Glovinsky has me identify my biggest organizing roadblock.
Lack of time, I tell her.
“The irony is that you waste time because you might’t find anything,” she points out.
He wears pull-ups at night, but he was born with a house-key tracking system.
I think he can smell metal.)
For an hour of your life, you’ll make your place feel more homey.”
It would take me an hour just to find the hammer, nails or glue.)
She tells me to create little pockets of order instead of constantly fretting about overhauling the entire house.
“Clean one shelf of one cupboardanything you’re free to accomplish in a half hour or less.
Then pat yourself on the back and say, ‘Great, I did this.’
You get a momentum going.”
Not that Glovinsky doesn’t cut me a break here and there.
“Organization is a feeling,” Glovinsky says.
“If you feel organized, you are.
It’s not about what anyone else thinks.
It’s all about the level of organization that makes you happy.”
Take a picture of it.
Or keep a scrap of the fabric!
You shouldn’t have to get rid of your memories entirely."
This sounds demented until I remember a certain rain slicker I keep hidden in one drawer.
Only it’s not the whole slicker; it’s a single sleeve I scissored off the slicker.
But it was a great trip.
I needed that sleeve in my life.
Every one of my pocketbooks is like a tampon farm.
Once I empty them, I have enough Tampax to last until menopause.
Her mission: to help me do big-picture organizing by telling me where to put things.
Jhung has me list the items I need to make my apartment more livable.
Hooks on the back of doors!
I look around and realize I own a cherry pitter.
I’ve never made anything with cherries.
But might I not whip up something exotic like a blancmange one day?
Jhung gazes at me sympathetically.
“Do you have any idea what a blancmange is?”
Then on to my bedroom, which essentially looks like a glassed-in diorama at the Museum of Natural History.
So I ordered a different curtain, paid for it, then never got around to having it installed.
After our tour, Jhung gives me my marching orders.
“As soon as I leave, call the closet people.
And check that you put up your curtains,” she adds cheerfully.
“The boys are getting older.”
I call California Closets.
I call the curtain guy.
One night, I decide to unsnarl and polish all my jewelry.
Another, I clean out a single desk drawer.
I toss a startling amount of outdated computer equipment.
I clean under my desk and discover I own…a typewriter.
This isn’t organizing; it’s archaeology.
She looks around my place quickly and says, “Oh!
This isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.”
She sounds a bit disappointed.
Zaslow is a hands-on organizer.
She is here to help me throw out and neaten my crap.
We start with the simple stuffsorting through my motley collection of linens.
She asks me why I have queen-sized sheets and comforters and no queen-sized beds.
“Do you have a country house?”
“No,” I reply, a little defensively.
“But I might get one.
And then we could get queen-sized beds again.”
“Do you plan to get one in the next six months to a year?”
“If not, these linens are old and they should go.”
I take a stab at distract her by showing her my two new California Closets.
I had them installed a week ago.
That’s why Zaslow is here.
Some purging is surprisingly easy.
I get rid of six or seven saliva-stained pairs.
Not the mother-in-law I have now.
Worse, since I’ve been engaged three times, I can’t remember which one.
“Have you lost a lot of weight recently?”
she asks, holding up what appear to be clown pants.
It’s that I tend to cover up.
When I was pregnant with twins, I didn’t buy a single piece of maternity clothing.
In fact, it was probably the first time a lot of my clothes fit me.
Zaslow is not the only person to hint that muumuus do not make a person look thinner.
But for some reason she is the first to make me believe it.
“That was my wedding dress,” I say.
“Oh,” she says.
When Zaslow leaves, I realize my blood pressure is probably lower than it has been in a while.
With less stuff around, mocking me, I feel calmer and more centered.
And the whole process has taken only two hours.
Still, there is one decluttering issue I couldn’t share with Zaslow but feel I must confront.
There are about two dozen of them, nestled together in a file cabinet like wee Frisbees.
I carry them to the door of my apartment building’s incinerator.
Then I take them back to their hiding place.
I do this six times before I let them tumble into the bowels of the furnace.
Panicked, I consider running down and gathering them up again.
Instead, I sit down and have a glass of wine.
So here’s the part where I trumpet my triumph over clutter and messiness.
I am a changed person!
So I’ve decided never to have sex again.
I can now wear necklaces that have been snarled for years.
(Some of those turtlenecks were cowl-necks.
My closet had become the place old cowl-necks come to die.)
I’ve made a good start at throwing away stuff, which for me is a major hurdle.
There is still much to do.
The only downside: My son Henry, key finder extraordinaire, seems a bit sad.
Since the introduction of that key hook, he’s going to have to find himself another job.
Photo Credit: Stephanie Rausser
