In Which the Chaos Finally Swallows Me Up

I'm not the kind of person that's good at tending to details. Details don't bother me. I don't sweat them. I'm not meticulous about anything. I do not make excuses for my children when they dress themselves in mismatched clothing. I do not lose sleep at night if there are dirty dishes in the sink. I'm perfectly comfortable reading a book (or a blog) with two baskets of laundry strewn on my couch.

In fact, I'm comfortable with a certain level of messiness around me. I function well in it. I feel at home in it. I'm just a left-handed, right-brained, scattered-about, disorganized mess, and I'm okay with that. If I lived alone, I would have no conflict whatsoever with my natural inclination towards chaos.

However, it seems that I have found myself in charge of running a household. A household filled with other messy, disorganized, scattered-about messes who continuously need me to manage the whereabouts of petty little things like socks and cold medicine. They are constantly expecting me to be able to identify where their mittens are and where the black sparkly tights are that go with this pretty Christmas dress, with matching hairbows that we haven't seen in a couple of weeks, which I suspect are on the floor of my car.

I gotta tell you, I'm flunking out in this department. I just don't have the organizational skills to stay on top of this stuff. I am constantly searching for things.

Which brings us to Monday. Brownie meeting day. In the afternoons, I must leave my house by 3:25 to arrive at the carpool lane at school just in time to meet my daughter and Brownie friends at the curb. So of course, I sat at my computer on Monday until the clock read 3:23. (I just had to check a couple of blogs and leave my witty comments, you know, because I know how much people crave my witty comments.) At 3:23, I rounded up my younger kids and headed for my car, but.....where are my keys? Not here. Not there. Not in the kitchen. Not by the front door. Not in my coat pocket. Not in my purse.

I looked everywhere for my keys, and my frustration level rose as each minute ticked by. Finally, at 3:35, I found my husband's keys and dashed out the door, only to remember as the door was slamming that he doesn't keep a house key on his car key chain. (Why, honey? Why do you do that?) I pushed on, and arrived to find my little girls in brown sitting dejectedly on the curb at 3:39 while their teacher patiently waited. I apologized profusely and zoomed back home to find the rest of the Brownie troop waiting at my front door to be let in.

At the end of the day, exasperated at my inability to find my keys, I checked one last place for them: on the hook in the kitchen. Where they belong.

Yeah. I need help.

But I'll settle for your witty comments.