My mom’s five ground rules for decluttering
My mom is a neat freak. Everyone always remarks on her tidy and well-organized home. When she was younger, she would sometimes clean her friends’ houses just for kicks, rearranging their kitchen cupboards for greater efficiency. I know, right?
I’m not like that. Given a choice between mopping floors and reading a good book, words always win. But I haven’t fallen too far from the tree, and I feel guilty if I’m short of mom’s gold standard. Which is why my kids vacuum and dust the house every week. Someone has to keep up the family tradition.
Yet despite good intentions, clutter has crept into my house this past year. I thought I would make time during my sabbatical from teaching to deal with it, but here I am, staring down the barrel of a new school year surrounded by bags of old clothes, sports equipment, piles of books, decorative items, small appliances, exercise equipment and too-small shoes, all of which seem to multiply in the night.
I’m not sure how I got here, so I call my mom for some advice. She doesn’t lecture, but offers some ground rules for decluttering:
1. If you haven’t used it in a year or more, you never will. This is well-known decluttering advice, along with: even if you keep it, you will never find it when you need it. Still, it’s hard to part with some items, like my ice cream maker. I love that thing, even if I haven’t used it in two years.
2. Get yourself in the mood to declutter. You need to psyche yourself up for the job first. “When I start to resent my clutter, that’s when I know I’m ready to deal with it,” mom says. “It usually takes a few months of thinking about it, and then things get done.”
This explains the state of my base- ment. I haven’t reached Peak Resentment yet, which is why I keep tripping over the two slow cookers and five bags of clothes and old shoes clogging the office.
3. Don’t feel bad or guilty about decluttering — think of it as repurposing. This is a big one for many families. Many of my friends complain their parents never throw anything out. I ask my mom why she is so comfortable with regular purging.
“Everyone has different backgrounds. Maybe some people didn’t grow up with much and they don’t want to lose what they have.”
Her old friend Rochelle used to complain that her mother was a junk collector. “She will not let anything go, including food, she wants a good stock of everything. But she knew it was because her mother lived through the Second World War. It comes from fear and insecurity.”
As for my mom: “I grew up (in India) with money but I resented it. Money doesn’t buy you peace. I wanted to live simply, my house well kept and clean.”
4. If you live with someone who is reluctant to declutter, just wait until their back is turned. Just kidding. It’s better to lead by example. Mom has been nagging my dad to deal with boxes of old paperwork, to no avail. Instead she shamed him into decluttering by throwing out her collection of old magazines and calendars first. I promise to try that with my husband, who has a large collection of old computer parts I have been itching to dump on the sly.
5. Resist filling your newly emptied space with more stuff. Mom wins “Neatest House” every year because she is comfortable with empty space. She resists the urge to fill decluttered areas with oversize furniture, kitchen gadgets and bigger electronics. Every time I visit, my parents’ home feels airy and well tended, warm and inviting.
I’ll probably never fully embrace the life-changing magic of tidying up, but after consulting with my personal housecleaning expert, I realize that everyone has to find their balance. I’m comfortable living in the shadow of my hero, inside my relatively tidy, slightly cluttery, mostly peaceful space. Uzma Jalaluddin is a high school teacher in the York Region. She writes about parenting and other life adventures. Reach her at ujalaluddin@outlook.com.