How Can I Get Organized in the New Year?

Helping people get organized has become big business in the last few years. It amazes me how much money people will pay to have a professional organizer come into their home and tackle their clutter. How did we get to this point? If you have a problem with getting organized the answer may lye in your roots. Take my roots for instance. I do have difficulty with staying organized once I have gotten there. My roots lead me back to a family of ten children. My mother had to be the queen of handling the organization of hand me down clothing from child to child. Nothing was wasted in our home. My parents could not afford to toss a pair of jeans because they got a rip in the knee. My mother did not have a mending basket near her sewing machine in the front room. The entire room was her mending basket. Not in a disorganized, cluttered way though. There were old fashioned wooden peach or apple baskets that separated articles of clothing. One for socks, and yes, my mother did darn socks with that wooden thingamajig that looked like a rattle only solid. Others for jeans, blouses, or skirts as hems perpetually were being raised or lowered depending upon who was getting them. Large glass gallon pickle jars held such an assortment of buttons that nary a button was ever purchased. A second glass jar was for zippers only. When a pair of my father's work pants had really been done in my mother removed the zipper and saved it. She did that for all of our pants that no longer could make it through one more child.

I keep trying to tie up lose ends

Out of necessity my mother recycled, re-used and re-organized long before any of it was in vogue. Imagine living in a climate of four seasons and having to do the wardrobe switch to accommodate changing weather for at least six or seven children at a time. Eventually as we got older we started to handle this on our own but for many years she was the organizer par excellence! She had to be or she would have suffocated beneath a sea of clothing. So, I tend to keep things because that's what my mom did. Only, my basket of mending keeps growing and multiplying until it is draping all over the surrounding floor because I never quite seem to get to it. Which begs the question why? Why do I have to mend things? Why can't I just toss them in a bag and dump it into a donation bin on the side of the road? I don't have ten children. I have four grown children that buy their own clothes. I have two grandchildren that I buy lot's of clothes for. I get stuck though when it comes to buying myself clothes if I have some perfectly nice things that just need some repairs. I was brought up with the example of using what you have and reusing what can be fixed. If something can be fixed I keep it even if I do not have time to fix it. I take zippers out of jeans that cannot be worn in public and stuff them in a gallon jar. My mother's jar of buttons has made it's way to my house and I have added to it.

Do I have a screw loose?

Intellectually I know I am just repeating the pattern of what I learned by example as a child. My mother mended, cooked, scrubbed and cleaned her way through forty years of her life practically. She loved us and wanted to make sure we all had what we needed and she succeeded. My father showed by example a very similar pattern when it came to fixing things around the house. I do not remember a repair man ever coming into our home except for the television repair man. Way back when tubes had to be replaced in T.V.'s Everything else my father handled. His basement resembled my mother's sewing room. Organized pieces of equipment on the walls. Homemade wooden shelving that held Autocrat Coffee cans with different sized nails and screws. If he unscrewed something broken and one good screw remained he saved it in the correct can. Our basement was a bicycle repair, carpentry and electrician's shop all rolled into one. Not to mention the neatly stacked cans of half used paint which indicated which room it was used in. Left over rolls of wallpaper in case one of the little ones decided to color all over a three foot square section of bedroom wall. He would carefully cut around the mini Picasso-like image and gently scrape off the paper. Taking a square of left over paper he had the foresight to save he would patch it. There wasn't anything he couldn't fix. There was a method to anything he or my mom ever saved.

There is no method in my madness

This is why getting organized is a challenge for me. I save stuff because I may need it. I stash it in the basement or attic in helter skelter fashion because I am short on time. There is no method to what or why I am saving things and therein may lye the madness of it all. I don't need forty five brass seven inch zippers because I most likely won't ever replace that many zippers in my life time. Let me get even more honest. I actually know I will never replace that many zippers. I know I don't ever want to replace one again because it is extremely time consuming and I can afford to buy more pants. My gallon jar of buttons is just pretty and it was my mom's and that's why I keep it. Can you even imagine how many buttons would fill a gallon jar? Probably enough to button up a third world country. I am never going to get organized unless I let some of this stuff go.

I am not a hoarder

There is a big difference between having difficulty with organization and hoarding. I know I am not a hoarder because I watch the Hoarder series on A&E television. I don't need to rake my bedroom floor to see it. There is nothing growing in my refrigerator that would interest the late Madame Curie. My attic is atrocious and I really do not know what is up there. My basement is the icky kind that gets damp and spidery. I have stuff down there like furniture that was meant to be fixed and now would be regarded as fire wood. There is no logical reason for me to have twenty five percent of my stuff. My mother and father grew up in the depression era. They experienced not having sugar in their home. My mother did put hot bricks wrapped in cloth under her blankets for her feet when she was young. My parents raised ten children and each of us always had plenty of food. Our home was always warm and snug in the winter. When I was a teenager I owned six of my own new brassieres. My mother at the same age had one that she had to wash nightly for the next day. There were reasons and practicalities behind their saving of things.

Letting it go

The key to my success in getting organized in the new year is reflection on why I keep what I keep. The emotion I will feel when I heft that gallon button jar on my hip and finally donate it to a charity. Will it feel like I am letting some of my mother go? Will I ruminate about the hours she toiled away year after year searching for a matching button for one of us lucky kids? While she is still here with us it will seem okay for me to let it go. If she passes away the day after the jar gets donated my fingers will never be able to feel the smooth buttons that her fingers felt. Buttons that have her fingerprints still on them will find themselves on shirts of people that never knew how lovingly she mended our clothing. Tossing some of that old furniture in the basement may prove difficult as well. That old beat up toy box that actually has water logged mold spots on it once held all the toys of my first born child. Boxes of child scrawled cards and kindergarten papers in my attic may by now house a family of mice for all I know. Maybe I could keep a few special ones if I could only choose which ones were more special than others. How is a mother to choose when anything a chubby little hand ever gave her is more precious than gold.

Memories are forever

In reflecting on why I keep what I keep it is evident that the actual articles that clutter certain areas of my home are just things after all. It is in the remembering when an article is seen or touched of a happy time that is hard to let go. In reality that time is already gone and the items don't hold any magic. Although my mother's fingerprints may be left on buttons in that jar her years of unconditional love and support could never actually be given away. Buttons could never retain such intangible emotions made indelible on my heart. That beaten up toy box that I find hard to discard in reality was beaten half to death by it's owner by the age of eight. I have hung on to it for twenty one years in the basement with the intent of restoring it for a grandchild. Kids today use big safe plastic bins for toys. Some things are meant to be let go. What I know to be true is that memories are forever. I don't really need to keep all that stuff in the attic to remember how my kids hair smelled when they came home from school. A few handmade Christmas ornaments on my tree from each child is sufficient as a keepsake. Happy memories are forever and as the years go by I find they have a way of multiplying. Getting organized and letting go of stuff in the new year will not change a single memory. It may just give me the freedom to enjoy them unencumbered at last.