Living On Three Continents: A Professional Organiser
“Mum attacked our house every morning, duster in one hand, carpet sweeper in the other, polishing or binning everything in her path. Unfolded clothes, dropped toys, ashes, crumbs and loose papers were an anathema to her…’’ Susan Siddeley pays a wonderful tribute to her mother, a lady whose organizational talents should have been more widely used and recognized.
“Where’s my floor cloth and get that thing shifted!”
Mum attacked our house every morning, duster in one hand, carpet sweeper in the other, polishing or binning everything in her path. Unfolded clothes, dropped toys, ashes, crumbs and loose papers were an anathema to her. She liked things Tidy. Shoes lined up behind the door, mantelpiece clear of dad’s pocket stuff, clock in the middle, souvenir egg cups from Blackpool an inch away either side, cushions straight, piano closed. Nothing slant. Furniture and ornament; lined up, square on, parallel. She’d have lacquered things in place with a spray if there’d been one, just as she did her newly-permed hair before the Chapel anniversary each spring.
During the rampage Mum delivered fierce monologues about idle folk with matching hands and life in pigsties. Dad foresaw she was mis-employed. ‘You should’ve been a bus conductor’ he’d say, lifting his feet so that she could vacuum under his chair. When she asked why, he’d duck and mutter, ‘you’re good at telling people where to get off!’
In the 1950’s, in coal-fired, fog-bound West Yorkshire, two-up, one-down row houses like ours quickly filled with stuff: coats, caps, scarves, coal scuttles, cushions, car parts, slippers, shovels, soot …
‘I’ll soon have this lot sorted’ was Mum’s mantra. No pile survived long in our house. No dirty dishes sullied our table. Plates were whipped away before we’d finishing mopping up the gravy. Dirty clothes disappeared before they hit the floor. An under-bed fluff ball brought on a migraine.
‘Who’s moved this vase?’ I’d crouch behind the sofa sniggering. If we turned a photo or hid a china dog to test her scanners, her hunter eye spotted the misplace instantly.
‘Wait ‘til I catch you!’ she’d cry, finding a heart and some initials drawn in the morning dust on the sideboard. The fact that the same ground had to be gone over day after day, that a family of four shared just a half a dozen drawers, one wardrobe and a three-prong coat rack never seemed to bother her.
In a recent article, a Professional Organizer claimed that today’s fastest growing businesses are those run by closet doctors, acrylic nail technicians and grief consultants; people who capitalise on what used to be carried out, unremarked, by my mum and others of her ilk. Mum anticipated the Organization Industry by sixty years. She’d have taken to it like a tot to strawberry toothpaste.
Nowadays, when storage problems are sorted with colour-coded plastic boxes and functional shelving, she’d be a P.O. par excellence. She’d cash in by bottling elbow grease and selling franchises. She’d raise the humble yellow duster to an international symbol and elevate words like scour, scrub and sling, to the status of option, profile and multi-task.
Benefiting from a school curriculum that stresses self-worth, a system that hands out certificates for showing up - instead of demanding memorized lists of world capitals and irregular French verbs - Mum would graduate with honours.
Instead of being an under-appreciated housewife, she’d be CEO of a Multi-national Company - the Bill Gates of Housewifery - employed for her sheer enthusiasm and receiving a six-figure salary for doing what half a century ago, she did through sheer necessity, for free.
And, the world would be a better place.
