Organizational Overload

I am a moderately organized person in a swirl of chaos. The absence of organization can be a nuisance. As a wife, I have learned to compromise on the organization, as my husband was probably a born pile creator. It doesn't make me happy, but I survive. As a mother, I try to enforce organization and also encourage it. One son craves order and the other disassembles it before my very eyes.

As a teacher over the years, my classroom became my haven of order. I had a place for everything and before I left, everything was in its place. I was a marvel. My husband couldn't mess it up, nor could my children.

The tables have turned now that I travel to four and five schools a day. My trunk is my office and it has some order, but my school bags get filled with extraneous items, then there is the occasional stroller, the guitar, the box of musical instruments, charts, toys, soccer stuff. I am losing track of what all is in the trunk. I don't have a classroom or even a storage space for anything. That is okay and I'll figure out as I go, but so far, I haven't hit on a really great idea.

One school has a storage room that would make hyper-organized people faint. Today, I decided to rummage a bit looking for triangles. That turned into, "well, I'll just put all the jingle bells in a box and might as well do the guiros..." etc. The main music teacher came in after hearing me rattling around and was surprised to see organization brewing. Now...the state of the instruments includes 6 boxes of assorted mismatched instruments, an old lollipop stick, a Milky Way wrapper, several old pencils, paper clips, dust, torn book pages and so on. It was not only disorganized but also gross. The music teacher, who is a nice guy, actually told me that the boxes were already organized. Apparently, the organization system was "instruments get tossed in the box". I explained that in order for me to walk in with five minutes to get ready, I needed to have the like instruments in a box ready to pull off the shelf. He was fine with that and I felt a tiny bit badly about invading his chaos. But what I really wanted to do was take that room apart, clean and organize it from top to bottom.

My husband is similar, because if I appear to be organizing his stuff, he immediately goes into survival mode, trying to rescue anything that could possibly be reused or that I might toss without his consent. He spent a good hour with me tonight, helping sort and discard old papers and I think he is maybe a little more willing to part with the unnecessary stuff. We actually had a lot of fun talking while working. I am working on letting him have some of his piles without too much complaint.

Anyway, perhaps I feel a lack of space that is completely mine and that I can control what goes where and what gets pitched and what stays. I guess that place was always my classroom. But now that I am really displaced without a home base at any school, it makes me a bit mental organization-wise.