Thursday, December 20, 2007

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.

5 comments:

  1. Doesn't that just figure?!

    I wondered over by way to Big Mama's blog.

    My husband constantly harasses me about not putting my debit card back in the same slot twice. It's ALWAYS in my purse, but never in the right place. One day we spent the better part of 5 minutes in the grocery store hunting for said debit card to purchase groceries for the mouths of starving babes *read: children*

    I hunted and hunted and hunted. I FINALLY found it in the slot of my wallet designated as debit card holder.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh crap. I have to be witty.

    I sat here and nodded throughout this entire post. The inability to care about the details. The staying in the blogosphere until the last possible second and having that reek havoc on my entire morning.

    And mercy me, if the hairbow situation here isn't completely hopeless. Do you know sometimes I actually buy Clara hairbows to match her outfits? I would do just as well just to throw that money directly in the trash. She wears the thing one time and I never see them again. Or I do see them, but never actually at the time that she is wearing the outfit.

    So I am flunking too. Flunking terribly. Me in charge of keeping other people organized, who thought this was a good idea?

    Oh yeah. That was me too.

    So no, wit here. Just a big huge dose of commiseration.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I lose my keys ALL THE TIME. And everything else. The only reason I don't lose the kids is because they're so freaking LOUD. SO I have no good advice, just a feeling of sisterhood.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I actually am detail oriented. About everything. I like everything neat, tidy and organized. And ya know what? IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!!!
    It is virtually impossible to have a neat, tidy, organized house with three insane boys and a scatter-brained husband. I HAVE to find a way to relax a bit or I will not only drive myself insane, I will most likely take my whole family with me.
    So, don't be so hard on yourself. Being neat and tidy all the time isn't what it is cracked up to be.

    ReplyDelete
  5. this is why i LOVE the code thing on my garage door - i can get into my house with 4 simple numbers.

    ReplyDelete

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