Why Cleaning a Closet Gives Me a False Sense of Control and That’s Okay

Life is full of hard choices and sacrifices and love that makes everything worth the struggle. Sometimes my life seems to spin out of control: too many things that MUST get done, not enough time to do it. You know those moments when you have 20 minutes before the kids get out of school, but there are so many things on the to do list that you just can’t focus and pick one? That’s when I feel myself spinning out of control. I want to throw my hands up in the air and give up. Grab a snack. Sit on the couch, flip through the TV channels, and wish the world away.

But that would just make me feel worse because I always have to feel “productive.” It’s a weakness, one that I am always working on.

I’ve found that a wonderful way to cope, to give myself a dose of productivity to ease that out-of-control feeling, is to organize something. Even something small, like a drawer, the Tupperware cabinet, my pile of jeans, or even my pencil cup. Sometimes I go completely balls-out and reorganize my entire wardrobe and closet.

Sigh, those are good times.

A few weeks ago I had one of those days – packed schedule, messy house, frazzled brain. In the midst of all of it Kyle needed a glue stick to finish a project for his homework. I told him to look in the desk in the kids’ play room. It’s a big double-wide secretary that I bought when Brady was a baby to serve as my own desk, but now it holds all their art supplies and paper.

“I can’t find one,” he called.
“Look in the top left shelf on the left side” I answered, knowing exactly where every item in my house should be.
“They’re not HERE!” he wailed.

I marched in there and looked in. The desk was a mess, papers and markers and activities and LEGOs, always the LEGO’s, all shoved in willy-nilly.

That glue stick up there? Dry and empty and useless.

The kid should have known better. Next thing he knew, even though we were rushing to get everything done so we could get out the door, I had pulled all the contents of the desk out and put them on the floor. I made him stay in there with me and decide what to throw out, what to save, and what to recycle. Then I made him leave. Ten minutes later, he saw this:

“Wow! It looks amazing!” he marveled.
“And look,” I said smugly. “Here are the glue sticks.”

I had found them right where they were supposed to be. They were just buried by all the other junk. It only took a few minutes to do all this, and at the end Kyle had his glue and I had a tiny bit more peace of mind. Cheaper than therapy, healthier than alcohol. (But sometimes I do both at once. Wild!)

Sure, in a few days the whole thing will be a disaster again. It’s like laundry, that Zen challenge that always comes back. Whatever control over my surroundings this re-organizing process affords me, it is fleeting and slight, but it’s something instead of nothing, or instead of something unhealthy.