by Jancee Dunn
So Tom and I work out a system to divert our leftover mad money to separate accounts without any meddling from the other. Beyond that, we pledge to have no more financial infidelity for purchases over $150.
We move on to the subject of Sylvie. Beyond establishing a 529 fund, we have never had basic money conversations about her, either. Did we want her to help pay for her education, for instance? Was it important to us for her to have a summer job when she was old enough? (Yes, and yes.) And—a perpetual squabble—how much should we spend on her activities?
Financial therapists say that arguments like these aren’t really about whether your daughter should get an allowance, or whether your son should have the pricey sneakers he claims all his friends have. The real battle here is about values: one parent may yearn for their kid to have an idyllic childhood without scrimping and the other thinks that money should be spent on basics like clothes and school supplies. Clayman says that with disagreements like this, try to zero in on what’s important to you and how money factors into it, and make a practice to notice what you’re doing out of emotion. If I’m afraid Sylvie is going to be spoiled, she says, dig down further and ask myself what traits I would like to see in our daughter.
Tom says that he wants her to have access to the kinds of classes his family couldn’t afford when he was a kid. Why, he reasons, wouldn’t you want the best for your child? And enrolling her in activities opens up the opportunity to find something she loves to do.
I counter that well-meaning parents have bought into the idea that it’s our job to winnow out any hidden “passions” or talents with a barrage of lessons—how else will you discover if your child is a future Mozart? I feel that it is just as important for her to have plenty of unstructured downtime to futz around in her room or wander through a park, picking up rocks. The fact that my parents didn’t have the money for various lessons, either, turned out to be advantageous for me, because I spent many hours in my bedroom, immersed in what childhood experts term “self-directed free play”: dreaming, singing, staring into space, doodling, and writing. That was how I discovered that I wanted to be a writer.
I tell Tom I also have a horror of entitled children—another value revealed—and don’t want Sylvie to be spoiled. When Clayman asks what sorts of traits I would like to see in our daughter, what comes to mind is kindness, empathy, generosity, and, to coin a phrase, exuberant nerdiness.
The more Tom and I talk, the calmer we feel, eventually gaining enough courage to print out our credit scores and share them with each other (wondering about them, it turns out, caused a lot more stress than actually viewing the numbers on a page). We craft a budget around Sylvie’s activities (“It has to be a compromise—you don’t get to be the boss of your spouse,” Clayman warns). And once a month, we start going over our accounts together. I loathe hashing out fiscal matters, but as with our other issues, transparency and communication are, for us, the only way forward. Therapists specializing in money disorders—an actual field, and one that’s growing—say it’s crucial to explicitly, and sympathetically, discuss money issues to alleviate ongoing financial tensions. You may not be able to make your debt go away, but you can at least come to a better understanding of where your mate stands. Research shows that communicating about your cash flow on a regular basis, rather than having a doom-laden conversation before tax time or when debt piles up, is one of the keys to a contented relationship. A study from TD Bank found that couples that talk about money at least once a week were most likely to describe their relationship as “extremely happy.”
The next time I visit my folks in New Jersey, I sit in their sunny kitchen with my mom and tell her about financial therapy. I expect her to laugh, but she says it makes sense. “Because your father always did the bills when you kids were small, I didn’t get involved,” she says, placing two mugs of peppermint tea in front of us. “Then Jay’s father died, and his mother had never written a check in her life. She was totally overwhelmed.”
She squirts some honey into her tea from a bear-shaped container. “Well, that was an eye-opener. At the same time, I started working. So I finally began looking at our finances, and now I do the budget. I like that it’s absolutely black-and-white. To me, the fear around money lies in the unknown.”
I go in search of my father and find him in the driveway, washing my car. He does this every time I visit. “There’s major pollen on your windshield,” he says. “Impacts visibility.” He squats down and inspects the front tires, his lips tightly pressed together. “Air’s low,” he informs me dourly, giving me a piercing look that says, If you want that low tire pressure to compromise braking, cornering, and stability, be my guest. Just know that when those tires overheat and cause tread separation, it’s your funeral. Your actual funeral, because you will have a nasty accident, guaranteed. But hey, do what you want.
When I tell him about financial therapy, he snorts. “So you talk about money issues?” He wipes my car’s windshield and squints at it. “Just save 10 percent of your earnings, and don’t spend what you don’t have. Boom. No more issues.”
“Dad, it’s not that simple anymore.”
He disappears into the garage to fetch a clean rag, grumbling as he goes. “In my day,” I hear him mutter, “we didn’t have issues.”
Hot Mess: Less Clutter, Fewer Fights
I am visiting my sister Heather on a rain-soaked summer Saturday. We sprawl on her couch, eating freshly baked Dunn Family Cheese Puffs (slice canned crescent rolls into one-inch squares, wrap each square around a cube of Laughing Cow cheese, sprinkle with sesame seeds if you’re feeling extravagant, bake at 375° for 12 minutes).
Heather gazes bleakly around her living room at the various heaps of stuff deposited by her husband, Rob, and their two sons. “My kids’ hockey equipment does not spark joy,” she says, shoveling in another cheese puff. Because her teaching job typically stretches to ten hours before her second shift of shuttling the kids to practices and playdates, she is usually too overwhelmed to even think about getting organized.
I tell her I understand. One of the many traits I share with both of my sisters is that no matter what our life circumstances may be, we all bicker with our husbands about clutter and mess (to sum up: the men are fine with it, the women… not so much). Early in our respective marriages, this was a minor issue we laughed about at family gatherings (Why does Patrick need 100 baseball caps? How many baseball cap requirements does a person have? Are there casual versus dressy baseball caps, or do most go from day to evening?). But when children began to arrive, the quarrels in all three camps grew more heated.
Rob swerves by the coffee table to grab a cheese puff, and the sight of him leaning over a wobbly tower of unread library books and backpack detritus reminds Heather of a recent tiff. Before he manages to pop it in his mouth, she starts in.
HEATHER: Okay, I love my husband, but I have asked him every week for the past year to clean out the garage. Every week!
ROB (CHEERFULLY): And it sucks! You know why? It’s never that bad to me. My definition of “bad” is when you can’t walk through the garage to reach the door.
HEATHER: If he can still wind his way through the piles to take the trash out, he’s good.
ME: At least he takes the trash out.
ROB: Thank you.
HEATHER: He says, “I’ll clean the garage later.” And “later” becomes “never.”
ROB: Come on, it’s a pretty big job.
HEATHER: But if you just did it once, then after that, it would turn into a small job.
ROB: But I’m so fried after working that on my day off, I just want to read. I like to relax. Otherwise, it’s not really a day off, is it?
HEATHER (WEARILY CHEWING A CHEESE PUFF WITH HER EYES CLOSED): Women never have a day off.
As Rob wanders away, Heather says, “You know what I need? One of those professional organizers who sweep in and organize your life.”
The preponderance of clutter is undeniably a First World
problem, but the anxiety it provokes is real. A Huffington Post survey found that clutter was a major source of stress for Americans—ranking as high as unanticipated expenses and not having enough time for loved ones. When the retailer Ikea surveyed couples in the UK, it found that on average, fights about mess and clutter occurred twice weekly (the research effort did not probe too deeply into the question of how much clutter actually came from Ikea).
Further pushing people into the red zone is the onslaught of flotsam that comes with kids—the sports equipment, the piles of grimy shoes, the homework. And let’s not forget the cavalcade of Beanie Babies: sociology professor Juliet Schor found that American children receive an average of seventy new toys a year.
Many families are drowning in stuff, so much so that the Self Storage Association estimates that nearly one in ten families stashes their excess in a storage unit. The UCLA Center on Everyday Lives of Families study cited earlier found homes that were piled to the rafters with possessions: three-quarters of the garages they studied were so crammed with junk, the homeowners couldn’t store cars (at least Rob can still squeeze his Honda into the remaining crevasse).
And all that clutter, the UCLA team discovered, was particularly stressful to mothers. When moms described their spaces to the researchers during a home visit (using semi-apologetic phrases like “very chaotic”), their levels of the stress hormone cortisol, measured in saliva samples, spiked. Meanwhile, when the fathers conducted a similar house tour, the mess didn’t bother them—for most, the excess stuff (or, in researchers’ parlance, “artifacts”) was a source of pleasure, and even pride.
“Clutter is a nagging reminder of things that are left undone, and contributes to a sense of overload,” says Darby Saxbe, one of the researchers on the UCLA project (who nonetheless genially admits that she’s a “total slob”). “Another reason why we potentially got this result from women and not the men in our sample is something called the social evaluative threat,” or fear of being judged, mentioned earlier as a persistent anxiety among women.
Compounding the chaos is this: according to the US Census Bureau, nearly 10 percent of all employees work from home at least one day a week. In our case, Tom and I both work at home full time, so sitting down to dinner often requires clearing the table-that-is-also-a-communal-desk of a variety of laptops and files. “We now live in this kind of hybrid space, where the clutter from your workspace can enter into your domestic space,” Saxbe tells me. “It’s not like the old days where you’d work at the office for eight hours, and home was a sanctuary.”
As I take the train back to my Brooklyn apartment after my visit with Heather, I keep picturing her unhappy, exhausted face. Then it hits me: I write for women’s magazines, for God’s sake—decluttering is an “evergreen” story that readers never tire of. I know plenty of professional organizers. I promptly place a call to a green tea–powered human typhoon named Barbara Reich.
Reich, author of Secrets of an Organized Mom, streamlines the capacious multiple abodes of New York’s one percenters, tidying purse closets in Manhattan (yes, a closet just for purses) and arranging pool maintenance in the Hamptons. Reich began her career as a management consultant (she has an MBA from NYU). When she downscaled to part-time work after having twins, she found herself getting antsy on playdates and straightening up other families’ toys. A new career was born: now she’s one of the country’s best-known professional organizers.
A month after my call, Reich, so intent on bringing order to my sister’s house that she picks up a speeding ticket along the way, strides purposefully into the hallway with her now-teenage neatnik son, Matthew (“He’s my intern”). She stands, hands on hips, a chic fairy godmother in immaculate white pants, gold-edged T-shirt, and gold Prada espadrilles. “Right,” she announces, glancing around briskly. Then she and her son march back to the car and swiftly unload it: containers, label maker, contractor bags. “Do you want me to take off my shoes?” she asks Heather. “Because I keep socks in my bag.” Of course she does.
My parents, never one to miss a show, arrive at Heather’s early in the morning, virtually tailgating in the driveway—all that is missing is the popcorn and the foldable stadium chairs. My mother, getting into the spirit of maximum productivity, volunteers to take notes, while my father says he will join the men in whisking the kids away to the community pool.
“I often joke that in my next life, I’d like to come back as my husband… married to me,” says Reich. “I was just reminding him to get passports for a trip, and on the third time I asked, he said he didn’t like my, quote unquote, tone of voice. I said, ‘I asked you nicely the first two times.’” She threw up her hands. “Then I did it! Because women do five things at once, whereas men can do one and a half things at a time! And if your husband has an important deadline and all hell breaks loose, he’ll say, ‘Sorry, deadline.’ But if a woman has an important deadline, she’s still up at 2 a.m. checking her kids’ homework. Am I right?” All the females raise hallelujah hands.
She begins, as she customarily does, by asking Heather to show her the “hot spot” in the house—the area that drives her the most insane. Deal with that first, Reich says, and your anxiety levels will drop; with this domestic triage out of the way, you’ll be motivated to continue.
Heather, trailed by me and my mother, leads Reich to her chaotic coat closet in the front hallway. Reich adheres to a simple four-step system: purge, design (create infrastructure), organize (have a home for everything), and maintain. “Once you’ve done the purge and have infrastructure like bins or files in place, it literally takes three minutes to keep up,” Reich said. “Routines work.”
She charges into the purge, sorting Heather’s things into three piles: keep, toss, donate. The criteria are simple: Is it useful or beautiful? Would it help someone more than me? Does it make me happy? Am I saving this for some imaginary life I’ll live in the future, or the life I’m living right now?
While she flings old shoes into a contractor bag, she reels off rapid-fire tips to train the family to lighten Mom’s load. Consider hanging a second rod from the higher rod in the front closet, so your kids can hang up their own jackets, or install a row of hooks on the back of the closet door. “In school they hang their coats on hooks,” she says, “but then there’s no hook at home. So they throw it on the floor.”
My mother and I nod and murmur That’s right and So true. Reich points to the front door. Instruct your children, she continues, to do just two things when they get home: First, when they take off their coats, stuff their hat in their sleeves and gloves in their pockets, then hang the coat on the hook you are going to install. Second, take all shoes but foul weather boots to their bedroom, so the entryway isn’t piled with stuff. (“Hang a sign if you have to.”) Leave the boys’ backpacks by the front door every day, she goes on, so everyone knows exactly where they are. “And remind them to put their homework into their backpack right when it’s done, so this behavior becomes ingrained.”
My mother unearths a large box out of the depths of the closet. “It’s filled with electronic doodads,” she says, rummaging through it. “Are these chargers?”
Reich gives it a quick perusal. “Okay, I find this in every home,” she says. “Everyone has a dusty box or a bag filled with electric cords and chargers. No one knows what they’re for, but everybody is very afraid to throw them away.” (Especially men, she says, who like to hold on to the previous technology of any consumer category.) Heather cringes, but doesn’t protest, as Reich tosses it. “In the highly unlikely event that you need another cord, go to an electronics store,” she says.
My mother nods. “My husband has a box of that stuff with VHS cords in it,” she says. “I’m putting it on the curb tomorrow. To hell with it.”
Pulling out a random hockey stick, Reich tells Heather to keep sporting equipment in the bags the boys carry to the activities, and to store out-of-season gear under the beds. “And this is very important,” she says. “Print out f
our copies of the kids’ annual doctor’s report so you have medical forms for sports and camp ready to go.”
Heather nods. “I’ve made three trips to the doctor this year already to pick up copies.”
Taking a three-second break, Reich zooms into the kitchen to grab a green tea, flushing out my father and Tom. “We are the clutter,” says my father as they herd the kids out the door. On to Heather’s bedroom. The contractor bags multiply as Reich banishes the pernicious offenders she sees in almost every family home: freebies such as mugs and T-shirts (“Almost none are useful or attractive”), catalogs (“Bad for the environment, they litter the house, and encourage unnecessary spending”), and old sheets and towels (“You only need two towels per person, and two sets of sheets per bed—one to keep and one to wash”). Heather holds up a square of green cloth. “I don’t know what this is,” she says.
“Then it has to go,” snaps Reich, rocketing it into a contractor bag.
There is something remarkably freeing about viewing objects through her merciless eye. Heather holds up a flowered duvet cover. “I’ll allow that,” says Reich. “It’s cute.” We all grow giddy and slightly unhinged, having clearly reached the ketosis stage of decluttering. If only they made a house-size contractor bag, we could just stuff the entire dwelling in there!
My mother slides open one of Heather’s now-half-empty dresser drawers and gloats. “Oooh, this is nice,” she says.
“Right?” says Reich. “You want to open up a drawer and feel happy.”