I know I’ve always been kind of a clutterbug.  My room didn’t stay clean for long when I was growing up.  My room in college was always just barely functional (what vacuum?).   As a newlywed, I could care less if my spices were in alphabetical order.  And then it hit – motherhood.  The Mother of all clutter challenges.

When I became a mom, I had to not only deal with my own clutter issues about my stuff, I now had a new person’s stuff to manage.  My husband got the neatness and organization gene in his blood.  I missed that one.  But who’s generally in charge of the swarm of belongings that orbits around a baby all day long?  Mommy.  Yep, good old organization-flawed Me.

Another blow of misfortune to this uphill battle was my postpartum depression.  So now, instead of just dealing with my stuff and my baby’s stuff, I had MENTAL stuff piled on top of it all.  I didn’t live in a pigsty or
worry about the health department stopping in.  But I didn’t deal much with anything that had already piled up before she arrived.

I started feeling like I was probably not living up to being the mother I was supposed to be.  I couldn’t get it together – my kid seemed OK, but my house was a wreck and so was I.  It seemed like I could either put my
energy towards raising a pretty good kid OR I could put my energy toward having a good looking home.  Notice I didn’t really give myself much energy to work with.  I chose my kid, so you can imagine what everything else looked like for a long time.

Even since my depression has gone away, I still find myself putting things somewhere “for a moment”, only to realize that they are still sitting there three weeks later.  Thankfully, I don’t feel so completely burdened by it anymore.  Instead of thinking how bad of a mom I am, I just shrug my shoulders and say, “Um, I’ll get to that tomorrow,” and move on.  I still have guilt over it – trying to work on that – but I don’t let it overshadow my day too often.  Most of the time I can keep enough positive dialogue in my mind that I do get to each pile eventually.

I’m not a super-tidy person – that’s just a fact.  And no amount of lamenting over it or self-loathing has seemed to change that.  I’m just going to stay  loosy-goosy on staying organized.  I’ll do what I need to, but I’m just not going to go overboard keeping it up.  I know it will fall back and forth between being “pretty decent” and “kind of cluttery”, and that’s OK.

I can’t be the only born-unorganized parent on the planet, right?  Anyone out there struggle with a “bad mom” identity and clutter?

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (June 6, 2009)

    Last reviewed: 5 Jun 2009