Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
My Mother’s Influence
I’ve probably mentioned my mother to most of you. Certainly she is responsible for teaching me, against my natural instincts, to be organized. Enabled by living in the spacious Midwest, my father’s family had a tendency to keep things like postcards and long ponytails of human hair for decades. Looking at my room my mother would shake her head and say, “just like a Sullivan.” Then thing by thing, we would sort, pitch and organize.
As a girl in Little Rock, Arkansas, my mother was thrown out of the public library for giggling uncontrollably while reading, Cheaper By the Dozen. The original book, by Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth, is the account of a family with twelve children whose father happens to be an ‘efficiency expert.’ If you google Frank Gilbreth you will find out all about motion-time management and other hot trends of the 1930’s. My mother loved this book, and took its lessons on how to be efficient to heart. While other mothers might be grateful that their husband and children had loaded the dishwasher, mine was constantly explaining how we could have loaded it more efficiently and unloaded it using fewer steps. She loved multitasking- she did leg stretches and plies while putting on panty hose. She would have us do relevés in the elevator. As a teenager she had me use a razor blade to scrape off the paint splatters that the super has sloshed on the glass-paned kitchen cabinets while I was (endlessly) talking on the phone. She was always motioning to me to bring her the garbage can so she could purge her desk while she was on the phone.
So, I think of my mother all the time. I think of her when I do calf stretches on the curb while waiting for the light to change, or organize my purse while waiting for the subway. I think she would laugh at the assembly line of my life with three children. And as I lunge-pick-up-toy, reach-put-it-on-the-shelf, I think she and the Gilbreth’s would feel their legacy continues.