Spring Cleaning

  About a week and a half before Cam and I got married, I got deathly ill. I was so, so very sick. This sickness also coincided with my finals, receiving my endowments and moving out of my apartment. For some reason, it seemed like a good idea in the dead of winter to schedule a wedding two days after the last day of finals. Which is neither here nor there, but for the record is a bad idea on so many levels-except that we nailed the timing for spring flowers. Temple Square was picture perfect...but I digress.
  So, I was outrageously ill. We had to call the temple and reschedule my session because I couldn't stand up without the world spinning and I actually just chose not to take my linguistics final because I was too sick to study or drive to campus to take my test. I remember Cam telling me that he would like to spend some time together the day before our wedding and though I was racked with guilt, I laughed in his face. I was driving around like a crazy person, hacking up a lung and chomping on cough drops like they were popcorn.
   It should come as no surprise that when it was time to move out of my Promenade apartment, I was in no condition (physically or emotionally) to pack. My mom and Nick came to my apartment with an armload of black garbage bags and started shoving things in. We hauled the garbage bags to Lehi, dumped them in our future basement apartment and continued the mad rush to have things in order for the wedding. At 10 pm the night before our wedding, I drove to the dark apartment and rifled through the garbage bags to try to pack a bag for the honeymoon-eventually dumping most of them out onto the filthy kitchen floor.
   The wedding was beautiful and perfect. The honeymoon and Washington reception were lovely. With the exception of a hairbrush-which Cam had to buy me in the Marriott gift shop-I had what I needed. When we returned home, the overturned bags of clothing and personal belongings were waiting for me. Add wedding gifts and Cam's collections of "special things" and our apartment was really something. I thought I'd get it under control, but then we entered the dark period of Cam's PTSD and me right in the middle of the El Ed program with 7 am classes and a 45 minute commute. Then we moved to Alpine-shoving the piles into boxes to be dealt with upon arrival at our new house. Then I started my first year of teaching and got pregnant. I was sick and exhausted and overwhelmed. I never quite got the mess tamed.
  We've had moments of "control" since then, but it's never been completely done. This is kind of shocking because I love organization. I thrive in organized spaces. I have organized and de-junked every nook and cranny of my parents' house, including each sibling's room. I have literally filled trailers full of their junk and hauled it to the DI. Nothing makes me happier and I'm good at doing it. But I've never done it all for myself. I organize a drawer or cabinet here or there, but not my whole house top to bottom.
  I'm doing it now, and I'm completely giddy. My kids are watching movies non-stop and I'm feeding them insane amounts of junk food and I don't care. I will be a better mom and a happier wife when the piles of papers are filed. We need empty drawers and full garbage can before I can get back to being the best version of myself.
  I don't think it's any coincidence that I've felt overwhelmed at everything I'm trying to balance. I haven't been able to start the projects I want to do-even when they're important to me. I have to start and finish getting rid of all the excess. I'm knee-deep in it right now. In some parts of our house that is actually quite literal. But, truly, it's a dream for me.
   On a side note, everywhere I try to work, I am met with broken crayons. Charlie's never been much into art. He's never really liked to draw or color, but I've got a bin of crayons just in case. A few weeks ago he brought a crayon to me and said, "Mom, this is what happens when a dam breaks." Then proceeded to snap the crayon in half and check to see how impressed I was. Then he did it again, and if the enormous amount of broken crayons I've found are any indication, he then did it again and again and again and again...and again.