Loose Ends
Sorting socks
Susan Nienow

It's hard being a perfectionist. My other half just pretended to choke on his sandwich. He mumbled something about "impossible," but it's easy for him to put two different color blue socks together and then actually wear them. My socks have to match. Exactly. I have to wait until daylight to check the colors of socks before putting them away.

I keep the odd ones for years sometimes, waiting for the right shade of brown to show up. My other half would say I keep the odd ones because I don't clean out my sock drawer. Sometimes January is a very long month.

Anyone looking at my desk would know that I am a perfectionist. Perfectionism doesn't mean "neat." I know where everything is. I just file by layer. Next to my desk and my bed are baskets with magazines, newspapers and catalogs. I fill them, then start stacking. Eventually they become nice rounded piles. Perfect.

I want the mail in the same place every day - on my office chair. My mail, that is. My other half can put his mail wherever he wants.

When I clean, doing a once-over isn't possible. I want the fringe on the rugs to be straight and the baseboards to be dust-free. I can get stuck in a corner cleaning for hours, but when I am finished, it is perfect. The problem is that 95 percent of the house still needs cleaning.

So, to get the house clean, I wait until the afternoon before we are having company for dinner and then spend over half of the available time cleaning my way. My other half points out the time, and I panic. Only an hour and 15 minutes left. So I clean the bathroom - what else? Then I give the worst dust-collecting spots the once-over, change clothes and listen for the doorbell.

It requires incredible self-control to switch from dusting with an artist's brush to using a soft fluffy hand duster that can reach under the fridge or clean a bookshelf with just a few swishes. But panic can accomplish what years of therapy to eradicate perfectionist obsessions couldn't touch - a presentable house, not a perfect one.

My other half doesn't understand how a "perfectionist" can still have bins of Christmas decorations in the guest bedroom. That is easy to explain. A perfectionist needs to go through all of the decorations before they are stashed in the attic so she can write in the calendar for November: need six silver balls, two strands indoor/outdoor mini-lights and one box of cards.

When I came home from shopping yesterday, I discovered my other half has already moved it all to the attic. The perfectionist in me needs to go through those bins. The realist in the house knows we are having guests next week, and he mentions something about the bins not getting done no matter how long they sit in the guest room. January is definitely a long month.