Show The Master Some Love
If you could peek inside my master bedroom right now, you would understand the stark irony surrounding the idea of ME being a writer for a blog about cleaning. In fact, when I told my mom I was going to be doing this, she laughed for about 10 minutes straight.
The truth is, I am not a neat person by nature. When I was a teenager, I had a big poster hanging on my bedroom door that said, “My Room: Love It or Leave It,” depicting a cartoon rendering of a typical, messy teenage girl’s bedroom: books, banana peels, and record albums (the vinyl kind; that’s how old I am) littering the floor, unmade bed, clothes draped on furniture, open dresser drawers, etc. I just have always been a little bit “clutter-blind.”
Fast forward 30-something years, and I’ve certainly matured a bit in that regard. Living in constant fear of “drop-in” company, I have learned to keep the common areas of my house fairly neat and clutter-free, most of the time. Unfortunately, though, based on the belief that pretty much no one besides my husband and me is ever going to step foot into the master bedroom, that tends to be the room where the clutter collects, and it tends to be the room that I neglect the most when it comes to cleaning, organizing, or even decorating. Based on conversations with friends, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
When you think about it, it makes sense. As a woman and a mom, I know that we often focus our energy on others’ well-being above our own. It is sometimes hard for us to think of ourselves as deserving or important enough to take the time to care for ourselves, and by extension, to care for the one room in the house where we spend the most time.
But it also makes sense that spending some time focusing on our bedrooms could lead to less stress and more productivity in all areas of our lives. I’m not a big believer in feng shui, but I do believe that even if our eyes are closed for most of the hours we spend in our bedroom, if we are spending that time surrounded by chaos and clutter, we will start each day with brains full of chaos and clutter.
So, I’ve decided it’s time to take some action. But how does someone like me, a serial clutterer, go about making our bedroom a clean, lovely haven where we can start and end each day feeling calm and maybe even a little bit pampered?