Who's the Most Organized Person in the world? My mother the X-pert

Posted Jan 26, 2012 By Sarah Crosbie

EMC Lifestle - One of my mother's claims to fame - and she's amazing, so she has many - is that she is the most organized person in the world.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

You feel better when your bed is made.

A tidy home is a happy home.

I, on the other hand, am a filthy, cluttered disaster.

When I was a teenager, we had an ongoing argument from about the time I was in Grade 9 until I went to university. She maintained that I'd be happier and more productive if I'd just "pick up after myself and get the wet towels off the floor."

I was quite happy to leave a trail of destruction and I'd poke my mom hard with facts she couldn't dispute: "Mom! I have a 94.6% average! That's not good enough? If I make my bed I'll be a 98% student!?"

Of course, what I didn't realize then, but I do now: All that clutter and mess didn't seem to affect my life because my mother was my safety net.

When I couldn't find the white shirt I had to wear for our choir performance, my mom was there to iron me a new one.

And the wet towels on the floor never bothered me because my mom was there to pick them up.

And I'm guessing all my textbooks didn't magically pile themselves into a neat pyramid every night.

The most amazing thing about my mother though, is that she never loses anything. Every board game my brother and I have - from the early 1980s - still has all the pieces: Trouble still has 16 red, blue, green and yellow pieces. Yahtzee has original dice.

Even Trivial Pursuit with those million pie pieces? All there.

And then there's my home. Our Spider-Man puzzle has a gaping hole in the web. My son's Transformer Bumblebee has lost an arm. And we have this large wooden puzzle with pieces A to Z. But, somewhere along the way, X vanished.

I've probably lost a week of my life looking for that stupid X. Every once in a while, I get obsessed and spend hours looking through toy bins and under the couches.

It's just - gone.

"How do you just lose a puzzle piece!?" my mother will ask. "You have to keep track of these things."

Guilt sets in and I search again.

And then my husband will take the other side.

"Baby, it's one letter. There are still 25 other pieces," he'll say, rolling his eyes at me.

It's funny I'm such a slob because I can be incredibly compulsive and neurotic about things - and I do worry about that letter. Did we suck it up in the vacuum? Did it get tossed? Or one day, will we find it and put it back between W and Y?

My mother is coming for a visit soon. She mentioned she thought it was time we did some de-cluttering and she'd like to help.

No puzzle piece, Trivial Pursuit pie or Bumblebee arm gets left behind in my mother's regimented home.

But what she doesn't know, won't kill her soooo ... I think I'm going to have to hide the puzzle or she'll spend eight hours looking for the X, too.

And, really, when your home looks like mine - yes, those towels were piled in the same place at Christmastime, mom - is a little ol' X really something to worry about?

My thoughts, eactly.

(Still missing the X.)

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When she's not washing her baseboards (ha!), Sarah Crosbie can be heard weekdays on K-Rock 105.7 starting at 5:30 and found at sarahcrosbie.com.

editorial@theheritageemc.ca