Sunday 19th April
5) My goal is to GET ORGANISED. It's been my goal since I was fourteen.
Home organisation is to me what dieting is to fat people. It has taken over my life and become my goal, every new house, every new year, and usually every new week. I constantly create the equivalent of diet plans – which rooms I will do on each different day of the week; or a tick-list of weekly jobs to get done, in order of priority; or a monthly cycled rota so I purge each room once a month; or taking a timer into a room and seeing how much I can get done in twenty minutes. If there’s a method of tidying and cleaning that you can try, I have most probably failed at it.
If I believed in karma (which I don’t) I would say it’s my parents revenge from when I was young and constantly lived in a messy bedroom. Nothing they could say or do would make me tidy it, until it all got on top of me and I would charge at it full pelt for forty eight hours, get it nearly done, run out of energy and time to sort the last few remaining piles, and then gradually they would spread back into the room, seeping into every corner until suddenly one day the carpet had disappeared again.
Now I live in a messy house, with a messy husband and four incredibly messy children. I spend all day every day cleaning and tidying (or planning new ways to clean and tidy) and never have a tidy house.
It’s like running on a treadmill while eating cream cakes.
I love organisation. I crave it. If I can find little pockets of my life when order reigns, I want to stay in them forever. It was why I loved MySims so much. It was neat and orderly and everything stayed where I left it. It’s why I love ironing. That’s right – I LOVE IRONING! You lay the piece of laundry on the board, you smooth over it, you fold it up and voila – a beautiful piece of symmetry where once there was a crumpled mess. The fact that it’s the only household chore you can do while sitting on your backside and watching TV is immaterial.
But I hate doing what needs to be done to get to that place of order. I’ll work really hard on one small corner, and if I don’t get interrupted, leave the room feeling satisfied with myself, only to walk out and drown under the chaos of the other eleven rooms in the house. It’s soul destroying.
I can stand over the boys and help and support them to tidy their bedrooms or the playroom, but by the end of the week, it’s as bad as it was when we started. I can scrub the kitchen and take all day to make it gleam, but after a couple of meals and any DIY job of Richard’s, it’s full of grime and tools and dirty dishes again. It makes me want to cry.
So I binge and I purge. I set myself unattainable goals, I fail to reach them, and then I give up for days on end. I trail the internet looking for systems and ideas and hope that the promise of each new one will fulfill, but I never keep up with the plan. Because it’s been a long day and if I stop to clear the side now, I’ll never get my paperwork done tonight. Because I woke up too late and didn’t have time to empty the dishwasher, so I’ll have to do it later. Because I can’t be bothered to have the Battle of the Playroom tonight, I’ll get them to do it tomorrow. Because I’ll just have a cup of tea and go on Facebook for ten minutes before I get started.
Like waiting until you’re a size ten to organise that class reunion, my dreams are all based in ‘one day’. One day, when I am on top of everything, I will start writing my book. One day, when I am organised, I will do my third year theology correspondence course. One day, when my house is tidy in every nook and cranny, I will invite my grandma round.
Will it ever happen? I really don’t know.
I can't start a really good book unless I know I'm properly ill and will actually be in bed for two days straight.