Where of where can they be?

I have been battling my 10 year old recently about a lot of things lately including her hairstyle, the condition of her bedroom, and about some missing socks-that’s right, socks. You see my daughter competes in gymnastics, and along with the team warm ups and leotard, she is supposed to arrive at every meet wearing a pair of black socks. And, like any good mother, I bought her a couple pairs last year so that she would always have a pair on hand for meets, or so you would think…

Now about 1/3 of the way into her season last year, and on the morning of a meet (of course!) my daughter tells me that she can’t find any black socks. I remembered seeing at least one pair in the dirty laundry so the “clean” pair just had to be in her sock drawer, but convinced that her looking had just been opening a drawer and turning her head left and right, I decided to look. So, I waded into the sea of white socks but there was not one among them that was black-how could this be? My two pair system should have been infallible-one pair dirty but the other pair clean… But all was not lost-she could just wear a pair of my black socks until we got all this black sock mess sorted out, or so you would think…

Move ahead about one month, and the same scenario mentioned above is repeated, except this time it is done the night before (I got a little smarter), and I hadn’t seen her lone pair of black socks in the dirty laundry. Socks cannot just disappear into thin air, and I am pretty certain that they can’t walk away unless there are two feet along for the ride, so where could they be? Now I started to help my daughter look around her room, but searching the premises would require a major clean up, and I was just too tired to tackle her mess, so once again mom’s black socks came to the rescue. I would also pick her up another couple pairs the next time I went to the mall-problem solved, or so you would think…

Jump ahead to the preparations before the state meet in May when once again I am looking for a pair of stinking black socks! I dove once again into the sea of white socks and came up with only one pair-yes that’s right, a single, solitary pair of black socks. Now let’s do some math here:

We had two pairs and subtracted one pair to equal one pair, then we took that one pair and subtracted one pair and had no pairs-follow me so far? Then we added two pairs to no pairs to get two pairs, but soon we took two pairs and subtracted one pair to get one, measly pair-are you seeing a pattern here?

We are now into this year’s season and my daughter still has that one pair of black socks, and do you know why? Because mommy got smarter, confiscated that pair, housed them in her sock drawer instead, secretly bought an extra pair to keep that pair company, and ended the mystery of the vanishing black socks-or so you would think… But something weird has been happening within the confines of my sock drawer-something or someone has been taking my black socks too! I am down to two pairs plus one, and I have searched everywhere except my daughter’s room. I meandered down the hall and had every intention of starting a search, but when I opened the door and looked in, I decided I could live with those two pairs plus one-besides, didn’t I see a sale on socks this week?

Organization is the Key

I am not an organized person-there, I said it, and isn’t that the first step in overcoming a personal shortcoming? I wish it were that easy. I read somewhere that neatness is not a hereditary trait, but I strongly disagree-I am the product of two slightly disorganized parents, sister to three disorderly siblings, and I have attracted an equally unsystematic spouse, although he will never admit it. He often quotes the phrase, “Organization is the key,” whenever I am in a panic over some misplaced item, but he never finishes this saying-he stops there and I want to know the key to what? Is it happiness, success, individual fulfillment-maybe knowing the answer to this could help spark a change?

I am not an organized person and I wish I could change all that, truly I do. Somehow I do manage to keep it together at work, often resorting the “pile” approach for student papers and paperwork-this pile needs graded, this pile can be handed back, and this pile is, well, um… it’s “miscellaneous.”

However, I am not an organized person at home, and I often refer to my husband and myself as Mr. and Mrs.“Piles” because there are more areas than just our computer desk that have a pile of papers. It’s almost as if these piles are reproducing, you know, this pile got together with this other pile and they created these piles? And these papers do not belong to either one of us-these papers come from the little people in our lives and are various graded assignments, fliers about soccer and cheerleading, information about upcoming events at the school, and artwork of various shapes and sizes. If you are the proud parents of a primary grade student you know exactly what I am referring to. Every day I empty at least 10 papers out of my son’s daily folder, so multiply that by 5 days, then 4 weeks, that’s 200 papers a month and one heck of a lot of trees biting the dust!

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not an organized person so I can’t blame my children’s school for my lack of organizational skills. Once a week I sort and purge things down to one pile by my computer, and sometimes this is an insurmountable task, but I get through it and get things ready for the new piles the next Monday. I have to be a little sneaky when it comes to the school papers though-my son is very proud of all his work and doesn’t want to part with any of it, even the drill exercises. If I let him have his way, we might be living inside one of those piles of papers, so I put these papers inside other paper piles when I am actively tossing, and as long as he doesn’t see them sitting in the trash, I am home free. (I didn’t do this once and he came running into my room waving his papers and demanding to know why I threw them out-no amount of explaining eased his hurt feelings so I still have these-somewhere in a pile…) I have also learned to be more selective when it comes to what art pieces I keep because even though I love that macaroni collage with its missing macaroni pieces, I reserve space for the bigger projects. I can do this after child number two but couldn’t with child number one…

So what started me ranting and raving about how I am not an organized person (did I say that already?)? Well I had everything else organized on Thursday-I got home early, got dinner together and we ate early, helped the kids with their homework, and I was planning on taking a long, leisurely bath (my time out for Theta mom) when my husband jumps up saying he forgot about the soccer registration (the last day to register was last night). So I helped get the shoes and coats while my husband looked in the files for our son’s birth certificate, but then the looking turned to searching, and the searching turned to panicking because the elusive birth certificate could not be found anywhere. We had my daughter’s birth certificate, we had both baptismal certificates, marriage certificate, you name any other certificate and we had it. My husband went to register anyway and the coach gave us a two-week reprieve, but it’s a $10 replacement cost if we don’t find it-which I guess is not that bad, but we know that thing's in this house somewhere. And what about my leisurely bath? My husband does not have the best searching skills (just ask his mother), so I was sure I would find that blasted piece of paper while he was gone, but I couldn’t find it either, and it took so long to put everything back in order that I had to settle for a measly shower instead. (Disorganization =1, Susan = 0, but maybe I shouldn’t keep score...)

Sigmund Freud once said,

"Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."

Maybe all of this is a sign that I need to develop a better system for organizing our stuff, or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I’ll think about it tomorrow-now where did I put that store list?