I’m dating Marie Kondo – I gave up all hope of a tidy home when I had kids too

“Until now, I’ve been a professional cleaner, so I’ve done my best to keep my home clean at all times,” she said in a recent online conversation.

“I kind of gave that up, in a good way for me. Now I realize that spending time at home with my kids is important to me.”

The decluttering expert, who famously advised people to get rid of household items that didn’t bring “joy,” said her life was turned upside down when she gave birth to her third child in 2021. “My home is chaotic, but spending time the way I do is the right path for me at this point, at this stage in my life,” she said. I bet Marie Kondo’s idea of ​​a messy home is probably my version of a clean one.

A few commenters have already pointed out that someone who chooses to prioritize education over cleaning their gaff really shouldn’t be a big deal. But since this is Marie Kondo, many online have been doing virtual cartwheels, seeing it as the result of some sort of Marigold-wearing hubris. There have been hilarious social media posts asking if she would go back in time and apologizing to parents who felt pressured to keep their homes spotless eight years ago, tweets about apology and articles, in wondering if this was the start of Kondo’s kobold mode era.

Personally, I was very relieved when I heard that the neatest of all tidy-ups had “kind of given up” on tidying up. Nora Ephron famously said that having a baby is akin to “throwing a hand grenade into a marriage.” I would add that it has a similar result in your home. Dirt seems to be drawn to children like iron filings to a magnet.

You can leave for the school run with everyone sparkling clean, but when you reach the gates it will look like you’ve covered seven hours in jam and rolled over a dust bowl. Cleaning your home becomes a Sisyphean task with kids; They just vacuum and polish so a Looney Toons hurricane will be racing around moments later, painting on walls and throwing LOL dolls at your head.

And then there’s the laundry. Little did I know that parenting consisted so much of putting on laundry, rummaging through baskets, and having mental breakdowns folding fitted sheets. All around our house there are little lulls and mountain ranges of precariously stacked clothes. These can be divided into different categories, “just out of the laundry”; ‘clean’; ‘dirty’; and ‘Christ! Better leave that through the back door.’

So I was grateful when Marie Kondo said her house has gotten messy and that she realizes it’s perfectly okay to hang out in that mess with your kids. It’s sometimes seen as parental failure when you let your pre-child parenting standards falter — as if you’ve given up and admitted defeat.

It can be assumed that if you don’t keep party lines, you’ll get your kids trampling on you. But it really shows that you’re adapting to the clutter and rolling with the changes and your kids’ needs. And sometimes that’s the only way to maintain some semblance of sanity.

Their comments also show how malleable our defining characteristics—both personal and professional—can be. Things you were passionate about fade and change. This happens in everyone’s life, but for many people with children, parenthood acts as a catalyst.

I used to pride myself on my encyclopedic knowledge of lower tier Irish celebrity leggings or Girls Aloud’s sassy clothing evolution. But these vanished from my brain when my first daughter arrived. Also the ability to hold a reasonable conversation. I started writing down non-baby issues to discuss when I met people. You have children, it’s amazing, and your world becomes necessarily small. Your mind changes (sometimes radically), your home becomes an absolute heap of garbage, and you may lose yourself for a while. The hope is that one day you will return with a reasonably tidy house.​

Not a cool girl mystery for me

Fashion magazine has decreed that we have reached the “peak of cringe culture” and we must pull ourselves together and stop it immediately.

“It’s hard to say when the ‘hug your donuts’ discourse made its way into popular culture,” they note. But they believe it was the combination of Taylor Swift telling college graduates to “learn to live alongside cringe,” or the rise of cringe content on TikTok (e.g. . It may also be when publications, like e.g Fashion myself, started suggesting the top cringe watch tv shows you should be consuming. “So bad they’re good,” the magazine wrote in 2021.

But times have changed and now Fashion has enough. “A little mystery for cool girls has value,” says the fashion bible. “Think of Aubrey Plaza. Evan Rachel Wood. Rihanna, obviously… Those who are self-possessed. Or have impeccable style. Or are carefree but have the vibe to pull it off.” They add, “Not everyone has to be ‘relatable.’ Sometimes they can just be cool.”

I mean, that’s great, but what if you’re not Rihanna or Aubrey Plaza? What if being cool is way, way out of your reach?

The magazine also cites some “cool” activities, including “going to art shows that no one understands, not even the artist,” wearing sunglasses around the house, and not knowing who Harry Styles is. Right, I don’t know about you, but “Cool Girl Mystery” sounds like a lot of work and not much fun.

MAFSA is back and I can’t resist