<p>My difficulty with order is that I don’t know how to prioritize. Everything seems important.Should I make sure I pick up my suit from the cleaners or should I try the cherry pie recipe of my grandmothers that my aunt has been asking about?
Should I attempt to take up all my sod myself and lay stone walls to define the garden beds? how about organize the kids papers from elementary school? Oh darn, now I blew out my thumb joint so I can’t use my hand.
Have to do everything one handed or let it pile up. I have to go shopping to buy something to wear for a formal dinner, but I should also look at some new living room furniture to replace our trashed couch.
Oh and those bowls I like are on sale. Hmm, never did find anything to wear, now I have to go on Thursday.
Oh but Thursday is my Dr appt downtown, forget how long it takes to find parking and wait.
But now I am too tired to do anything except go to the grocery store and cook dinner.</p>
<p>In pain all night can’t sleep, get up at 5 am when H goes to work. Barely make it downstairs to do a couple loads of laundry.
Try to get back to sleep at around 9am. Try for 30 minutes doesn’t work, have some yogurt. Think I should clean out our (one) closet.
Put half of the contents on the bed. Start looking at the kids books and wondering which books were whose.
Sort some of them into their respective boxes down stairs. Try on old clothes to see if they fit.
Start mending clothes with tears. Go through boxes down stairs to try and find sweater that I am sure I still have that goes with the dress from the closet.
Find water damage by chimney from last rainstorm. Try and figure out if chimney needs mending.
time to pick up D at airport. Need gas, big line.
Get home from the airport and what is all that stuff doing on my bed? Have to dump it on the floor of the closet and finish tomorrow.
Oh but tomorrrow is a beautiful morning, and I need to prune the fruit trees…( and the closet door is shut so I’ve forgotten all about the big mess!)</p>
<p>DD is extremely neat and tidy…and organized. So is DH. I’m very organized but OTHERS cannot see my organization. DS is neat and tidy but not extremely so.</p>
<p>Since we taught both kids to be neat and tidy from an early age, it’s hard to say if they came that way or just learned to be that way.</p>
<p>We have plenty of clutter here! But it’s neat.</p>
<p>Thanks for this thread – glad to know I’m not alone.</p>
<p>I’m a neatie married to a messy, and parent to a messy. DH has proven to be somewhat trainable. OTOH, D’s room looks like a bomb went off in it.</p>
<p>I’m a very messy person by nature. The clutter just doesn’t bug me. ** I ** know where everything is- why does anyone else care? Unfortunately, my mom does not agree. </p>
<p>I live with two minimalists. They’re messy but they don’t make much mess because they don’t really do anything to make messes.</p>
<p>At work, I’m very neat and organized. Mainly because I have so much down time.</p>
<p>Yup, in my family the messies sleep til the last minute and the neatie is always up WAY before hand.</p>
<p>EK, great post! Describes my life only too well. But you forgot the part about check CC, because you have to sit down and relax for a moment regardless. </p>
<p>It seems this issue has defined my life, unfortunately. Angst over one end of the neatness spectrum or the other. Mom had great trouble keeping the house up. I have messy tendencies, keep things in piles, though like clean, nicely put together surroundings. But married an over the top neat nick (and later divorced over some of the surrounding issues), and you’d think some of that neatness would have rubbed off on the kids. Wrong. </p>
<p>Though they do know how to clean. With impending guests, they know how to pitch in and tidy in a hurry, do the bathrooms, make a kitchen shine. </p>
<p>But day to day? Forget it. I was just bemoaning my kids inability to make beds, ever. Unpack when arrived home into the empty bureau. Keep clothes folded. </p>
<p>I blame the youth orchestra, Saturday morning rehearsals left little time or energy for family cleaning, room cleaning. Also lack of home structure in the morning, as start work early and they had to fend for themselves. </p>
<p>Is it psychological? Rebellion against the high level of angst surrounding those issues? Or just bad genes-mine. </p>
<p>How much as a society do we value cleanliness? In my mom’s day, it was a point of pride, of shame if not able to keep things up. Now it seems like more a point of personal expression, on either end. Less value judgement, depending on which circles you run with.</p>
<p>I do not like clothes with any stain or dirt on it. When kids were little (babies), if they spit up or got any food on their clothes, off they went. Their coats were spotless, unlike some of their friends’. When D2 was in K she got some paint on her outfit, she asked her teacher to clean it up before she went home. She used to ask me to pack an extra shirt for her sometimes.</p>
<p>D2 was born to be messy. When she was younger, her room used to have clothes, toys, books all over ther floor. We used to make her tidy up before the cleaning person showed up. It was always so painful because it would take her hours - stopping to play with her favorite toy or to read a book. Since high school, her room is usually the neatest. She makes her bed every morning, the kind that’s made in a hotel room - straight and tight.</p>
<p>D2 has been on her own, but whenever we visit, even unexpected, her apartment is always clean and neat. She has a cleaning lady to come every other week. Her apartment is decorated very nicely, even if decor is not very expensive. I think she got that from H.</p>
<p>For me, nurture definitely played a huge role in going from messy to neat freak. I’ve been a nurse for over 30 years and if there is one profession in which you must be organized, tidy and immediately know where things are, it’s nursing. Habits I developed at work eventually made their way into my private life: folded laundry, cleared desk, weed-free gardens, etc…
The rest of the family? Not so much.</p>
<p>I used to be neater, but have grown accustomed to the males in the house who are not neat. They are messy. I have had to learn to tolerate it and I’ve become less neat as a consequence. There must be a defect on the male gene- they dont know how to clean up after themselves. ;)</p>
<p>We just spent a weekend with friends who are way neat and scrub everything silly. I invited them to visit us, but I’m wondering if they could even sleep in our more “relaxed” environment. Sometimes our mess bothers me, but I’m pretty sure excessive need for neatness would bother me more. Lazy? OK.</p>
<p>Thanks, MD Mom. I once decided to see how bad my son would let his room get with no assist from Mom. Unbelievable! Could not walk into the room safely. Then he developed a dust allergy and I just took over the cleaning again.</p>
<p>My daughter’s room door is never open when she is in the house. It is terrible. She keeps her bedroom in her apartment in the same condition. I have decided that she has no shame when it comes to certain things. She simply does not care. Well, she cares enough to shut the door so no one says anything, but not enough to clean it.</p>
<p>I choose my battles and this is notome of them. I would never wish an allergy on anyone, but…</p>
<p>I tend toward the messy side which annoys my mostly neatnik relatives. My messes tended to be clusters of PC towers, computer parts, and books. </p>
<p>I think it’s some sort of mixture between nature and nurture. Messiness in my case is a mix of father and some older male cousins on the nature side and nurture in the fact that most boys/older men in my old NYC neighborhood regarded being messy as a form of machismo that’s not chained to authority…whether it’s parents or the military. In short…it was considered a respected way to rebel a la Twisted Sister’s “We’re not gonna take it”. </p>
<p>This aspect continued in other forms in high school and college. In high school, being too neat/fashion conscious was considered a sign one “didn’t have their priorities in order”(a.k.a. Academics/ECs uber alles) and in the case of hardcore STEM aspirants…a sign of lower intelligence and a preference for style over substance. </p>
<p>At my LAC, being too neat was regarded by some of the neo-hippie/radical left contingent that one has been “brainwashed” into being a mindless conformist of Eco-unfriendly “bourgeois capitalist values”. It extended to avoiding showers for residents of one strongly identified neo-hippie dorm which meant that students who weren’t as radical as they tended to avoid going near it to avoid the stench on warm/hot days and having to put up with such classmates in class to avoid being considered a “close-minded bourgie tool”. One bright spot in this celebration of messiness…both genders in that contingent celebrated it in seemingly equal measure.</p>
<p>cobrat–I was one of the radical left original hippies in the 60s/70s and I still didn’t appreciate that my college roommate insisted on having a cat with kittens in our dorm room. Most of us did shower as needed.</p>
<p>I’ll throw all the answers out the window. I could have sworn it was nature, but then D2 (the messy family member) switched and went to neat after she graduated from college and moved back home. Seriously, a complete turnabout. Spent almost two months being messy, then had an about face and has been regularly neat since then… even purges her closet from time to time. I’ve sometimes joked with D1 (who is neat and who lets D2’s messiness get under her skin) that someone kidnapped D2 and replaced her with a look-a-like who is now neat.</p>