Why I Struggle with “Embracing the Mess”

Reflections on Interview with Lisa D’Annunzio

“With two kids, we’d have another schedule to figure out. Some say the second is easier, but I don’t believe them. The administrative tasks alone! Right now, I have my whole day structured.” – Lisa D’Annunzio

Lisa and I share a passion (compulsion?) for order—of schedules, houses, and life more generally. It’s one of the things that made us the best kind of roommates in college. We have spent substantial time in each other’s closets, not so much to look at the clothes as to admire the organizational systems. No one else in my life quite matches my level of zeal for The Container Store.

The visual evidence of this love of organization announces itself from the clutter-free surfaces and tucked-away toys the minute anyone enters our house. (Anyone who knows my husband David knows he’s not to blame. Although I will say that after 18 years of regimented training, he does help me uphold the standard.)

What friends and family may not know—okay, many of them probably know—is that our house is not just this way during planned visits. This is the daily state of affairs, including now with our 18-month-old. I used to feel a little embarrassed about this: my neuroticism on full display. Now, I am starting to own it.

I don’t organize and clean for other people. I do it for me, when no one else is looking.

Organization for me, and for Lisa too I suspect, is not just about appearances. It’s about feeling settled deep inside. And it’s from that settled space that I do my best creative work. I struggle to begin a writing project—whether a novel, or a legal brief, or one of these newsletters—until the bed is made and the dishes put away and the toys picked up. I am not saying this is true or necessary for everyone, but it is for me.

This brings us to the question of kids, and particularly the decision to have a second kid. Because kids bring disorder. They each bring an extra schedule to the mix, along with a deluge of extra things, even to the most minimalist of households. There is now a highchair and an art desk tucked under my counter where three DWR stools used to be. I don’t love them, but at least they match.

David and I aren’t as far along in our internal sort of the second kid question as Lisa, but the disorder factor is one that can stop me in my tracks. For a long time, I would have felt a need to apologize for that. To excuse it. To say that I know it’s superficial, and I’m working through it.

I don’t feel that way now. I’m not saying that it’s either the beginning or the end of the second kid equation for me. It is not the most important factor. But, like for Lisa, it is a real factor. Because it is out of a clean space and an organized schedule that my novel was born—and that this newsletter was born. Organization is a building block for my creativity. And that means it has a worthy place on the table in any of the big life sorts I undertake.