You wouldn't think it

If you look around our home, you'll hardly believe it, but I can't stand clutter. I have a deep longing for structure and creases - but I can't manage it. My own inability is compounded by envy of people who master with ease what I fail at miserably. When I see a friend's neatly organised cosmetics, I want to sink to my knees in despair and scream at God. When I peer into other people's linen cupboards and see folded fitted sheets, it plunges me into a Kafkaesque crisis of meaning. Part of me believes that everything, really everything, will be fine if I just learn to keep things tidy.
It is one of the many inconsistencies of my life that I would always prefer a meticulously precise environment to a creatively chaotic one, but as soon as I go to a tidy place - a hotel room, for example - I start to deconstruct the order. It's always the same pattern: I look around reverently, as if I'm entering the interior of a church, and vow not to disturb the sacred order. Then I pick up a magazine, leaf through it and leave it somewhere. I take off my shirt, but instead of hanging it on the hanger, I throw it over a chair, from which it slowly slides off. I briefly think about picking it up, but don't. It takes less than three minutes and I am shocked to realise: A typhoon has raged in the room I had just tidied up. At times like this, I have to think of my parents, both rather structured people on this side of the borderline of compulsive tidiness, and of the abysmal resignation they felt when they entered my untidy room and had to wade through the ankle-deep chaos. They scolded, they threatened, they reprimanded. I couldn't help but agree with them. I promised to do better. And misplaced the promise in the chaos. It was shameful.

«You have to be allowed to demand things from others that you fail at yourself - a person without mistakes is not perfect.»

Mikael Krogerus

I soon left my parents' house and lived in sparsely furnished shared flats for years. My credo: the less I own, the smaller the target area for chaos. I didn't even need household contents insurance, that's how unpropertied I was. But everything is changing. The biggest change when starting a family is the exponential increase in possessions. Suddenly I was the organiser and lost control at the same time. And so I ended up preaching something to my children that I didn't practise myself. I think that's okay. You have to be allowed to demand things from others that you fail at yourself - a person without faults is not perfect. In our case, my unprecedented parenting practices worked fifty per cent of the time: My daughter copies me, the chaos in her room impresses me. My son rebelled against me by asking for a handheld hoover and cleaning our floors with scientific meticulousness.

Mikael Krogerus

Mikael Krogerus is an author and journalist. The Finn, father of a daughter and a son, now lives in Biel and writes regularly for the Swiss parenting magazine Fritz+Fränzi and other Swiss media.