My Little Meltdown

I’m supposed to start slowing down now. My doctor thinks that, if I slow down a lot, perhaps this baby will stay put longer than Megan did. I sure hope that’s true. Although slowing down doesn’t really work for me. At all. I mean, how does a mom “slow down,” exactly? Can any of us actually sit around all day? Ever? But knowing that I’m supposed to “slow down,” and thinking about my giant to-do list, I have asked my darling husband to start giving me 30 minutes each night to tackle this to-do list. And the first night I asked that of him, he obliged without a word. Yay! I now have hours of his help each week, so this to-do list will be gone in no time, right? Apparently not. See, I forget that we sometimes need to remind our significant others about things like cleaning up clutter and doing housework. I’m not sure why I forget that, since I’ve been married for 7 years, but I do. Can I blame pregnancy hormones?

So the other night, my husband helps tuck Megan into bed while I look around the house at everything that needs a better home than it currently has. And the minute he gets downstairs, I lose it. “This house is too cluttered, and you’re not helping! You need to get rid of the clutter! Pick up the toys, because it’s really hard for me to bend down!” His response to picking up toys was, “What’s the point? Megan will play with them again and they’ll end up on the floor again, so why put them away?” Now, I’m sure that’s perfectly logical to some people, but it just slays me. For one thing, I’ve noticed that Megan tends to play more with things that are put away. I don’t know if it’s the fun of “finding” things, but if her toys are in a heap in the middle of the floor, she won’t play with them half as much as if they’re all tucked away in a basket. And for another, I would like my house to have some semblance of neatness at least a few hours a day.

If I thought I’d lost it before, I really lost it after that comment. I proceeded to make my way down to the floor, huffing and puffing, pick up the toys, and put them away, doing so, of course, while making as much noise as possible so it was quite clear that I was not happy. I’m pretty sure no one in this house needed to ask about my current mental status.

I think that part of this freak out is knowing the amount of clutter that can so quickly amass once a baby is here. And since the plan is for me to stay home with our girls once the baby does arrive, I also know that clutter is going to be mostly my responsibility to clean up. And even if I can get help with cleaning it, it will be mine to look at all day long, and stew at, and then blow up at my husband at when he least expects it. Because that’s what I do best! So, I need the clutter gone. All of it. And I’ve always been a bit of a clutter-friendly person, so de-cluttering is not easy for me. How do the truly organized, clutter-free people do it? And why didn’t I get the clutter-free gene like my sister?