I Am Not My Unmade Bed: Making Peace with a Messy Bed

We don’t make our bed. There are thousands of stories about women who struggle to do their laundry and put it away the same day, or before the clothes wrinkle. They say it sits for days, either in the dryer or in the laundry basket waiting to be folded and put into drawers. I don’t struggle in this area, but there is something large and noticeable in our bedroom which stays rumpled and unkempt most days: our bed.

It’s never been a priority in my morning to take the time to pull the sheets and covers up tight and tidy. A shiver traveled up my spine hearing a friend tell her story of getting a demerit in college for having an unmade bed. If that had been a rule at my college, I could have papered the walls with all my demerits.

One reason bed-making is a low priority: I don’t spend much time in our bedroom. A certain little boy pulls me past it quite often on the way back to his bedroom, which is adjacent to ours. He loves to play in his bedroom in the mornings, and each time I’m led by the hand I catch a quick glimpse of our room and the hastily drawn up covers.

Experimenting with Tidy

Before you leave this post thinking I’m a complete barbarian, I’ve gone through brief periods of starting my day making the bed, but they were all short-lived attempts. On the last experiment—during the Marie Kondo organizational craze and piles of joyless clothes on the floor—I tried to create the habit of beginning each morning with making the bed. I enjoyed seeing the clean, crisp look of the covers all pulled up into place, however messy the rest of the room may have looked in contrast.

There was also something satisfying about pulling back the covers at night before climbing inside, but the more I continued with it, I found that it simply didn’t affect my day very much to make the bed. It was energy I could focus on keeping other things clean that mattered more.

During this experiment, I also discovered that seeing the bed made brought the other areas that weren’t as clean more prominently to my mind. If the bed was made, the clutter was overwhelming. Rather than feel accomplished for beginning my day on the right foot, it seemed only to point out other areas where I struggled in my housekeeping.

I’ll admit I’m not the best housekeeper; our house is rarely without some tufts of pet hair clinging to the baseboard corners. As my grandmother reminds me, the mess will still be there when your kids are grown or when they go to school, but the time I have with my son while he’s little is precious and continues to drip away. I don’t need an immaculate house, I need to be present for my son.

It’s understood that the main living areas of the house will remain cluttered and junky until bedtime, when we all sit in the floor to ‘play clean-up.’ When our son was even younger, I tried to keep the house less cluttered, using naptime to straighten things up a little. The more I tried to keep things clean, the less time I spent doing what makes me come alive, writing, reading, playing, walking. Now we operate in and around the mess, stepping over toys and things our son considers toys until it’s time to go to bed at night (read as: until the one who creates the mess goes to bed.)

The Mess Contained

Even though the floor, the coffee table, and part of the couch are covered with toys and the big Legos, I need certain places where the mess is contained. In the bedroom, that’s my nightstand. It’s small, squat and round, with barely enough room for a book, a water bottle, and a lamp, but I know this spot will always be neat. It might only be because there’s no space for anything else on it, but it still works.

I need the physical reminder that the mess is not permanent, and I am capable of overcoming it, even if it’s not in the way you’d expect. Physical clutter can produce real anxiety. Little things around a room add up quickly to a big mess; a Lego here, a ball there, a dinosaur by the tv, a train by the coffee table, building blocks and puzzle pieces scattered haphazardly across the rug.

The clear spaces remind me that I am not my unmade bed or my cluttered living room. I am not in a permanent season of toy strewn living rooms and odd collections of toys in the bathroom. Like the complex and nuanced issues circling our communities today, my life is just as nuanced and complex, and it can’t be whittled down to a made or unmade bed.