On Breaking Generational Cycles and Unlearning Bad Habits; or Why We Hired Professional organizers
Obligatory "my opinions are my own and not intended to represent the whole of millennials, wives/daughters-in-law, or badass cycle breakers" caveat.
MIL told me, “His father was the same way, I just threw stuff out when he wasn’t home.” Respectfully MIL, I’m a Millennial and we do things differently.
My husband (39M) and I (40F) recently celebrated our one year anniversary. My second marriage, his first. We both had full households worth of stuff to merge when we moved in together. Husband has ADHD and is not only chronically disorganized but loses spoons faster than I do when faced with the idea of throwing away something that is technically still usable.
I, on the other hand, will lose motivation once I stop. Momentum generates momentum for me and restarting after I already expended energy is even harder. Am I physically capable of pulling everything from the last eight years (when I moved into this house) out of my closet and going through it? Absolutely. It’s the feeling of backwards momentum of putting the “keep” pile back into the closet it just came out of that I can’t do. The organizers pulled everything out, made categorized piles, THEN PUT THE KEEP PILE BACK. Worth the price of admission just for that (and the organizers weren’t cheap, this is fully a luxury I’m aware we’re privileged to have spent our tax return on).
Please don’t mistake me: this process was still difficult and exhausting—both mentally and physically—even with professional support. The organizers gave us several key skills that felt “obvious” in retrospect, but that neither my husband and I could see for the trees. We both took “everything has a home” too literally, too granularly. The organizers said “every category of thing has a home” and it was like turning on the Big LightTM while we’d been fumbling in the dark with flashlights. It’s MUCH easier to pick up a thing, identify its category and think “this is for using outdoors, it goes with the outdoor things” rather than “my snow boots are shoes and go with my other shoes except they’re big and awkward so they should go next to my regular shoes…” You get the idea.
After a year of neither car fitting in our garage (free storage is better than renting a storage unit that’s very much “out of sight out of mind”), three 6-hour days with the organizers, my husband surprised me before work with both cars in the garage! Last night (as of writing this), enough space was cleared for my car. Then, after I went to bed, he made a final push and got his car in too! There’s still a lot of clutter we need to tackle in the house, and Hubs has expressed the desire to find a therapist to address other things, but we have a BIG win on the eve of our first anniversary so we’re taking a well-deserved break from “doing things”.
I don’t want to dunk on MIL’s approach. She did what she had the tools to do. Both my husband’s parents were (and still are) incredibly supportive of his ADHD. He wouldn’t be the man he is today if they had tried to force him to “act normal”. I prefer to think of the garage as an extension of that support. Everyone does better not just when they have generic support, but when they have the right support.
This essay started because I went to write a note and accidentally wrote 600 words. And that’s why I call this series “Patch Note Tuesdays”, because my brain encountered a new model for understanding something and I had to update the documentation.