Messaholics Anonymous

The only time a shocking swear word escaped from the mouth of my lovely, sweet mother, it was my fault. I was five and didn’t want to clean my room. After many hours of complaining and finding excuses, my very frustrated mother said "If you would just stop b#$%@ing about it and do it, then it would have been done by now." This was a big deal to me. The swear word didn’t bother me. But the fact that my mom swore, and that had never happened before (and has never happened again) meant that I was indeed going to have to clean my room. There was no escape. She was serious. No amount of complaining, singing and dancing, being cute, and drawing "I love you" pictures was going to get me out of it. So I sulked off to my little pink room and cleaned it.
I have never been a neat person. I can remain organized and tidy for a few months, and then something happens. As a kid, I blamed it on evil elves that loved to get me in trouble by following me around and creating a chaos of mess. I was like Pig Pen, but it was not a cloud of dirt that followed me, it was stuff...things. As an adult, I remain the same. I can spend a day cleaning, and somehow, by the next day, all those things I put away have walked back out into the middle of the room. It is a talent. I am far, far away from appearing on Oprah.....but I could use some lessons.

I am now packing up some of my belongings and selling the rest in hopes that our current job offer for Korea sticks, and we will actually be leaving sometime in the next month. Cross your fingers everyone. We are excited about this job. However, the absolute chaos and mayhem that has taken over our small apartment is not pleasant. Packing and selling my things means pulling everything out of every cupboard and storage bin, examining it, making a decision, and sorting it into the correct box. And even for messy me, the disorganization is driving me crazy. I knew how big this job would be. Doesn’t mean I like it! I hate it. I often wonder if a neat and organized person would survive this ordeal......or if maybe they would have a trick to somehow pulling everything out of everywhere neatly.

As I was packing away my Mr Men and Little Miss book collections, Brett pulled one out and examined it. On the back of each book is a photo and label of each character (and they are all named after their one strongest personality trait). He looked at a Little Miss book and said "Well I know who you are NOT."

Little Miss Neat