Troll in my bedroom

Monday, April 23, 2007 4:00 PM by lauranen

My bedroom has always been messy. Ever since I had enough clothes to cover the floor with, you would think under my bed lived a 3-foot troll that came out during the night and ransacked my drawers while I was asleep. When I was a teenager, my mother took a picture of my room at the height of its messiness, and threatened to show it to my future boyfriend every time I protested about tidying it.

Since I became a Responsible Person™ (for those wondering when was it that this happened, if ever, by this I mean when I found I was going to become a parent), I started to pay more attention to tidiness of my room. Don't get me wrong, my house is always clean and I try to keep all the other rooms in relatively good shape, but somehow I just can't get myself to keep all those clothes off the floor.

I have come to the conclusion that the reason for this is a combination of two things. I believe in washing clothes only when they are dirty or smelly, and I refuse to throw a jumper of a pair of jeans into the washing basket if I have only worn them once for a couple of hours. However, I kind of think that all the clothes in my wardrobe should be clean, and as a result the bedroom floor becomes a sort of purgatory for half-clean, half-worn clothes.

Since we moved to the new house, I have let my standards drop a little bit and the clothes have somehow started to pile up at the end of the bed. Nothing like the old days when the only bit of floor you could see in my room was the path going from the door to the bed, just a few things that I had tried on and rejected in the morning.

This morning when I woke up, I was terrified and embarrassed to see that the situation had gotten completely out of hand. Terrified, because I know Ronan hates the pile-up and religiously puts all his clothes into the washing bin after one use, embarrassed because I had no idea I'd let myself slip that badly. I got up and started clearing the pile, and after a while I just couldn't remember trying any of that stuff on lately. Turns the 3-foot little creature ransacking my drawers wasn't just a figment of my imagination, only he doesn't live under the bed: he sleeps in the bed with us and takes up most of the room. He gets up early before us, makes sure that we drift off back to sleep again and gets to work.