"Nesting" Turned Me Into A Neat Freak

I have never been this organized in my life.

I was a messy desk kid. I was a messy room kid. My lunchbox was messy. My gym locker was messy. I always got straight A's and teachers liked me because I was a hand-raising try-hard, except when it came to keeping my space neat. The only time I ever got detention in elementary school was because I couldn't find my homework in my catastrophically messy locker (I found it weeks later during one of the mandatory gradewide locker-cleanouts). I'm sure there's a corner of armchair psychology social media that would diagnose me with a childhood personality disorder based on this.

My sloppiness continued through high school, and into college, and beyond. I knew how to clean; my parents were big on instilling prairie life skills in their kids, most of which I don't use very often (wood splitting, making biscuits from scratch) and some that I do (popcorn on the stovetop). But my messiness was not a matter of lacking the skill, it was lacking the drive to clean. I couldn't make myself care beyond doing an okay job keeping common spaces in shared apartments free of food waste. My room, on the other hand, was always a disgusting mess.

And then, after more than 30 years of being a slob, I started caring about cleanliness. This coincided with a couple of things: first, I started traveling back and forth a lot between New York City (where I lived at the time) and Los Angeles (where I would eventually move), and realized what a bummer it was to come home to a messy apartment after a full day of travel. Eventually I applied this lesson to coming home from work-- it feels better to come home to a clean house than a messy one.

The second thing that happened was: I came into the possession of a piece of furniture that was once owned by my late grandmother, a woman who I adored desperately, was as pathologically clean (as in: I find the smell of bleach diluted in hot water comforting, because it reminds me of her hands) as I had once been pathologically messy. I don't believe in ghosts in the horror movie sense of the word, but it is kind of fun to tell people that I became a person with a clean house in part to appease the spirit of my dead neat-freak grandma that lives in an armchair.

Still, keeping my space clean wasn't something that came naturally to me. I had to intentionally stand back and look around and force myself to see mess. Cleaning was like speaking a foreign language.

At least, until I got pregnant.

One of my pregnancy's many, many weird side effects has been something known as "nesting," or an uptick in the urge to decorate one's "nest." All of the books I read told me that this would happen, but framed the instinct as cute and charming, like having a primal urge to decorate the nursery in various shades of beige and eggshell.

"Nesting" is too cute a word for what has happened to me. I am not a mother bird festooning her nest with shiny objects; I am a one-woman cleaning crew constantly brainstorming what we should throw or give away next.

I make the bed every morning. I change the sheets every week. I love a laundry day. I disinfect the toilet and sinks more than is necessary. There are no clothes on the floor of my bedroom, or even piled on top of the dresser waiting to be put away. I have created a system for how we are organizing the diaper changing area that involves custom shelving. I am on something called "CleanTok." I am a person who wipes down the baseboards and has opinions about vacuum cleaner brands. I organized our freezer. They know me at the Container Store in Pasadena now. Before this, I'd never even set foot in a Container Store.

Josh hasn't been spared the nesting instinct, either. We used to trade off doing dishes; now, Josh is the primary dishwasher because he enjoys it-- the other day he told me that hand washing all of our dishes felt meditative. On weekends we go through our stuff and throw things away. He recently reorganized the garage and as he was showing off his handiwork I thought about how attracted I was to him at that moment, and then I thought: I am losing my mind.

I'm so pregnant right now that my body isn't really gestating a human as it readies itself for the world as much as my body is storing a human too lazy to come out; this baby is, as they say, cooked. I am a simian kangaroo carrying another whole person in an enclosed pouch made of my own body. I am uncomfortable. The baby is doing a headstand on every part of my body that waste must pass through in order to exit; my pelvis feels like a rack of bowling balls.

And still, I "nest." I got a lot done today. I have spreadsheets to keep track of things, and there are no crumpled up candy wrappers stuffed in the door pockets in my car. For the first time in my life, I know where everything is supposed to be put away, and everything that can be put away is put away. Given my pigpen past, this is nothing short of a miracle.

I'd take a pill that would make me this way permanently, but I fear that the postpartum hormone crash will take this away, along pregnancy's many less desirable side effects.

At least grandma's ghost is probably proud of me.

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