Pack Rat

Tonight, I hated myself.

I have a closet in the bedroom that I share with Bruce. About 3/4 of the closet is my stuff, but there isn't enough room for my stuff even with that much space. What I really need are (big enough) shelves or drawers, because there is plenty of room for the hanging clothes, but the folded stuff- T-shirts, yoga pants, jeans- that's usually a crazy mess. Over the last couple of months, however, the crazy mess has gotten out of control. The closet may technically be a walk-in- even completely empty there's room to take about one step in- but lately, all I can do is peer in from the closet doorway and hope I can find what I need. There is a pile of clothes mixed with other things that is about as high as my hip on the floor in the closet, and it makes the closet almost entirely unusable.

This condition was born of good intentions. I had wanted to sift through my closet, reorganize and weed out and make everything pretty and accessible. I wanted to remove my maternity clothes and bring back my old wardrobe, and I wanted to be able to find everything. That required pulling a large amount of stuff out, off the shelves, off the floor, off the hangers. I got halfway through and got tired, so I shoved it all back in with the intention of finishing up another day.

And I never did.

I have hated the way my closet looks. I hate the lack of functionality. I hate that I wear the same five outfits every week, because it's what I can reach and find. I hate that there are things buried in there that I have forgotten I own, things I would find useful.

Last week I was determined to fix it, to clean it up for good. Bruce has been on a kick of reducing our stuff lately, and fixing the house up in general, hanging pictures and packing up books we've read and giving stuff to Goodwill. Inspired by his example and feeling continually ashamed of my closet, I pulled everything out of the closet and into a pile on my bedroom floor, thinking that if I could see it, I could make a plan of how to deal with it.

It sat on my bedroom floor for a week and a half, untouched, just getting in the way of my scale and dirty clothes hamper.

The ladies who come clean the house every two weeks are coming tomorrow, and it was unthinkable to leave it there for them. We don't pay them to organize my clothing; we pay them to clean the floors and bathrooms.

Rather than face the pile, I threw it all back into the closet.

I hated myself when I was doing it. Every armful of clothes I dumped into the shadows of my closet floor whispered my failure, my inability to take care of even the smallest things at home. My inability to hold it together when I am working and the rest of my family carries on without me, my failure to be useful for my family beyond my paycheck.

It was especially reproachful in considering the hour and a half my wonderful husband had just spent cleaning his parts of the room, while I sat and looked at a computer screen. As if I don't do enough of that at work, but somehow it was the only thing I could make myself do this evening, even as my daughters were bathed and dressed for bed and had stories read to them and fell asleep. If there were a time-lapse video of my evening, it would be Bruce and the girls swirling around me, while I sit on my bed behind a laptop, barely moving.

I barely move a lot these days, metaphorically speaking.

I don't know when I'll be able to deal with the closet. It seemed so symbolic, the packing away of mess behind a door, leaving a tidy exterior. I look like I have it together. I look like a good parent, like a provider, like someone "having it all" in the parlance of the feminism I was raised on.

I know the mess waits for me, even as the door is closed, though. It's not just that I don't know when I'll get to it. It's more that I don't know how to deal with it. In some ways, it's just about folding the clothes and finding a place for them. But the the folding overwhelms me. The finding the place for them overwhelms me. I just don't know how to manage it. I don't know how to unpack it, organize it, make it useful again. I just don't know how.