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My daughter’s room is a probably a fire hazard, but I will take it over the contentious relationship we use to have when it wasn’t always like that.

After fighting some serious, awful battles over the tidiness of her room with her over the last several years (she’s packed to “run away” on two occasions and asked for a new mother on more occasions then I can count), I realized a few months ago–belatedly, I fully admit–that the whole room “tidiness” issue is in the eye of the beholder. Life around here has been simpler, calmer and so much quieter since I stopped battling her. As an added bonus, our relationship has drastically improved. Some of it I can attribute to her own maturity in general, but most of I know, deep down, is because I’ve stepped away from what she so passionately cherishes as “her” space.

I’m no Martha Stewart when it comes to housecleaning myself, and our house is generally what I like to describe as “comfortably cluttered.” We used to clean up every night before bed, but when my daughter in particular began constructing elaborate playsets, whether it be with blocks or legos or stuffed animals, we would let her keep them up for a few days. But then she began “collecting” things–anything from the homemade confetti she used to make once she discovered scissors and the usual kid stuff like rocks, shells, and party favors to the more eclectic: shampoo bottles, pieces of string she found, deflated balloons that she loved, seeds from apples she particularly enjoyed, a bucket of sand from the time we went to Ocean Shores on Mother’s Day, a tupperware container of grass where she had kept a “family” of worms one summer, beads from a broken necklace, old baby clothes she “remembered” wearing and didn’t want me to pass on….the list goes on and on.

I have never begrudged her the “collections.” I am, after all, the mom who has a cut-glass bowl full of rocks as the centerpiece on our side table or a stack of notebooks–never used and therefore pristine in their beauty and possibilities–on the small counter in the kitchen. My empty vases hold seashells and seaglass, and the shelf that runs the length and width of the living room holds my “collection:” my grandmother’s figurines, a a ceramic statue from a friend who went to New Mexico, replicas of Dutch shoes from my brother when he went to Holland, photos of people I have known and loved, places I have been, a metal rooster from Key West, unicorns and miniature beer steins from long gone friends who travelled places I have yet to go. As a kid, I had a long dresser with six long drawers, three on each side, and six small drawers all along the top. Most kids, I found out somewhere along the way, used those small drawers to separte socks from underwear, tights from tshirts. I threw all that stuff together, so that I could I use those drawers for my treasures.

I never liked cleaning up my room, either.

When I was around ten, my sister moved into my room while our dad renovated the upstairs to add on my brother’s room. She was–and is–Martha Stewart. To my mind, obsessively so. She was constantly picking up my clothes, my books, demanding that I clear off my bed, asking me how I could sleep, get dressed, simply live, in such disarray. At one point, we had to draw a line down the center of the room. I wasn’t allowed to throw my clothes or stacks of stuff on her side; she wasn’t allowed to straighten up my side.

To this day I remain perplexed at the entire situation: surely I wasn’t that bad, was I? I just didn’t like putting things away. One never knows when something is needed again–and that goes for a pair of socks to that scrap of paper with half a poem written on it.

I’ve been thinking of this a lot, lately, whenever I am forced to peek in my daughter’s room. Surely, I wasn’t this bad, was I? When I ask my mother what she used to do with me, she laughs and tells me she just turned a blind eye. “It was your room,” she said. “The only place, really, in the whole house where you had complete control.”

I’m still not my sister, but living in small spaces in college taught me the value of “a place for everything and everything in its place.” To a certain extent.

I wish I hadn’t learned this at all.

Despite my happy memories of my own mess, my daughter’s room drives me beyond sanity. Two days ago, I couldn’t even get through the door because she had placed an upside down rattan footstool crammed full of her stuffed animals (they were on a boat) right inside the door and then closed it.

She leaves her clothes in heaps at the end of the day instead of putting them in the easily accessible laundry basket in her closet. She takes stacks of books down to read and doesn’t put them away. Last week, she created a “sun” design on the floor with her collection of Disney books. In the middle, she set up some dollhouse furniture and her favorite dolls. She began to have a panic attack when I suggested we pick up her “design.” She collects boxes from various places and turns them into houses or spaceships or boats or trains for her dolls or herself. Today I found a ziploc bag of clear liquid far back in the shelf where one of her drawers was supposed to go. The drawer itself, of course, was on the floor.

“What’s this?” I asked her. “That’s my experiment,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It’s water,” she said. “Remember I told you I was keeping it to see what would happen?”

I had a dim memory of her talking about wanting to see what would happen to water if she kept it around for awhile. I wasn’t aware that conversation was a request or even a statement of intent.

“Ah,” I said. “So, why does it have to be here? Isn’t the drawer supposed to be here?”
“But the cats might pop the bag,” she said. “So it can’t go on the floor. The drawer can, though.”

Of course.

She’s been looking for her DS–and mine–since we returned from San Diego over Spring Break. Today, I suggested we just “tidy” up her room, and maybe we’d find them.

“But I cleared a path last night,” she reminded me. “I know,” I said. She had, in fact, shoved everything to the edges of the room in jumbled piles. “But let’s tidy up a bit more.” There were six boxes of various sizes in her room, along with a two foot tall stack of books and mounds of clothing. In the “path,” she’d set up her Polly Pockets and had been in there for several hours playing that afternoon.

When she is almost-41, and her daughter’s bedroom makes her cringe, will she remember her own “mess?”

In the process of “tidying” up, she found 1)her slinky, 2)several of her horses she’d been looking for, 3)her Laura doll and Laura’s furniture which had gone missing awhile back, 4)her Indiana Jones hat, which was “camoflauged” by the floor, 5)several books she’d been looking for, 6)her “tornado” bottle she made in science class, which is made out of two 2-liter bottles held together at the openings and, makes a tornado when the liquid in one is poured into the other, 7) her stuffed dolphin “Dolfinny,” and 8)both DSes. One DS was in her “oven,” which we’d made out of a cardboard box last fall. The other was in her drawer with her music and storybook CDs. “Well, it is electronic,” she said by way of explanation. “And the box oven?” I asked. “I guess I thought it was a good place to put it,” she said.

Having hid notebooks under my mattress, special pens in my pillowcase and money in my encyclopedias as a kid, I don’t have much room to argue.

When she got into the bath, I threw out four box “creations:” all of which were falling apart, one of which I didn’t recognize as helping her with, and none of which I had understood what they were supposed to be in the first place. I also threw out a pile of Easter grass she’d told me she’d already thrown out, but had apparently decided to keep under her bed instead.

Her room is neat and tidy and even accessible now. I don’t expect it to last more then a few days. But I will bite my tongue and take deep breaths, be thankful her neat-and-tidy brother doesn’t have to share a room with her, pray she will find a bit of organization in her future, and finally, do what my mother did with my room: close the door.

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