Confessions of a Disorganized Housewife
By Tiffany Lewis

I am the world’s worst housewife.  Oh, I can keep my counters clean and I do the dishes daily, but open the cupboards or the desk drawers, and the truth, along with receipts and stray pen caps, comes spilling out.

After five years of marriage, housekeeping still eludes me.  I have to do the dishes every day, several times a day!  Kitchen cupboards do not organize themselves.  Dirty towels don’t walk their way into the clothes hamper.  Call me a slow learner, but this is all a bit overwhelming.  I keep waiting for my house elf to make her grand appearance, but she must be off sunning herself in Bermuda.

I have a friend with two little girls who lives a Zen lifestyle.  Her condo is tranquil and clean and streamlined.  Every couple of months, when my own condo seems to be overflowing with junk, I’ll sit her down at the park and say, “Okay, Sharon, where do you keep all your stuff?”

“What stuff?” she’ll say.

Stuff!  Like books and papers and un-filed mail.  Where do you keep coupons you just might use in the next six months and magazines you want to read but haven’t had the time?  Where do you keep boxes of unlabeled photos and postage stamps and awkward things, like extra shoelaces?  Where do you keep old calendars with pretty pictures and the winter clothes you just might wear if you move to Alaska and those darling but completely useless knickknacks you get in Relief Society?

I feel like I am ever cleaning but never able to come to a knowledge of true organization.  To give you an idea, here’s a list of things I found in my double jogging stroller last summer:

1 empty Ziploc baggie
1 string-cheese wrapper
1 plastic Ziploc container with one graham cracker stick
1 baby rattle
1 bottle spray sunblock
1 bottle Cutter bug spray
3 Luvs diapers
1 swim diaper
1 set snorkeling goggles
2 sand shapes: lobster and octopus
1 tennis ball
Great Day For Up by Dr. Seuss
Board book, Roll Over
13 copies of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” for ward Christmas program
1 old visiting teaching list
2 sheets white tissue paper
1 green toy rake
1 manila folder
1 maroon swimsuit, size 6-12 months
1 BYU Women’s Chorus baseball cap
2 water bottles
1 package Kirtland baby wipes
1 baggie of raisins
Play-do lid, fluorescent orange
1 wheel to freestanding clothes rack
2 clothespins
1 L-shaped cookie cutter
Recipe for “Perfectly Easy Dinner Rolls”
1 pencil
1 rock
and 2 pounds of sand

I know what you’re thinking: Can I get the recipe for those rolls?  No, you’re thinking: How did she fit all that into a stroller?  Good question.  I have no idea.  That’s the main problem.  I don’t have room to fit all the things I need.  My husband dreams of the day he has his own home office in which to squirrel away heaps of Wall Street Journals and unread Economist magazines.  He’ll sit arranging his piles into more piles, like a sultan sitting on his mounds of gold, counting his treasure one coin at a time.

It really comes down to two basic problems.  My husband and I both came from large families, where resources were scarce.  Therefore, we have a hard time discarding anything. 

True Story

Last week I discovered my bread pan rusted through.

“Mind if I throw this away?” I asked, holding it up for my husband to see.

“I don’t know,” he said doubtfully.  “Do you think we could save some money and use it as a flowerpot?”  As if we were living during the Great Depression and had to unravel our sweaters to make new sweaters — we might as well melt down the bread pan and donate it to the government so they can use it to build an airplane.

But I’m just as bad.  I spent a week agonizing over getting rid of our overstuffed armchair.  Finally, to appease my mind, we donated it to Salvation Army.  When they came by to pick it up, they said it wasn’t up to their standards.  They also rejected our discarded couch.  Since when did Salvation Army get so choosy?

On another occasion, my husband went blitzing through the house in a rare moment of cleaning frenzy.  He marched into the kitchen, where he spied an empty white wine vinegar bottle on the windowsill.

“This!” he exclaimed. “What on earth are we doing with this?”

“You can’t throw that away!” I said. “I’m saving it for when Jackson wants to do science experiments.”

“Tiffany,” he said decisively, “in five years, when Jackson is old enough to know what a science experiment is, we’ll buy him another.”  And so the vinegar bottle got tossed, although I insisted it be recycled.  (I may be a rotten housewife, but at least I’m conservation-minded.)

My other problem is this: I am on the losing side of a never-ending battle.  Armed with my vacuum, Lysol, broom and Soft Scrub, I am no match against the energy and zeal of little boys who have two purposes in life: to get really dirty and upend everything in sight.  I can sweep, mop, shine the mirrors, bleach the grout and pick up toys, only to turn around and find my kids spreading Italian bread crumbs on the floor, dumping out their dinner, smearing soap on the mirror, coloring the grout with orange crayon, and pouring toys down the stairs.

In the end, I like to think that my house is not “messy” but simply “lived in.”  There are evidences of life around every corner.  This is a dynamic place: the color of the walls and carpet changes almost daily.  Why should I decorate with bowls of fake limes from Williams-Sonoma when I have a brimming bowl of bruised apples just waiting to be eaten?  I would love to install textured stone floors in our dining room, but my kids added their own texture with this morning’s corn flakes.  Our condo smells, not of Spiced Apple, but of Moldering Diaper.

There are books everywhere.  Pots and pans litter the carpet, where the kids are busy making “block soup.”  An army of ants is doing a merry dance around the remains of the breakfast pancakes.  I pause in a frenzy of morning cleaning to take a bite of my boys’ wooden soup.  Housework will be around for eternity.  But childhood, in all its glorious messiness, only lasts so long.