real Real Simple

I used to subscribe to Real Simple magazine. With each month’s new issue, I would vow to start living the Real Simple way. I would scour the detritus of my life! Ban clutter! As Edie from AbFab would say, “Surfaces, darling! Surfaces!” For years now, I’ve made the same to-do list over and over, including:

• Buy big glass jars to store grains and beans. (Because storing your food in the package in which it came is so not Real Simple.) 
• Find the article that dictated how long to keep various documents, then purge our bursting files of unnecessary bank statements and other junk. (Because nor are filing cabinets in your living room Real Simple.) 
• Make my own cleaning products out of common household substances. (Tried this one, gave up, because it's too much work to scrub your bathtub with baking soda and then redo it with Soft Scrub when you actually want it to be clean.)

Now, I’ve entered a new REAL Simple phase, having realized that it takes hours upon hours each week to achieve the kind of aesthetic “simplicity” that is prized in today’s sleek, overly-influenced-by-media world. For the first few months of this phase--can you guess when it started?--I was ashamed and apologetic for the state of our house. Now, I’m ashamed to think about how I used to judge people who lived amid clutter or even--gasp!--dirty dishes. Now, I have made peace with the state of our house, which is unlikely to change anytime soon:

• A ten-pound bag of brown rice sits on the kitchen counter permanently, next to the rice cooker, even though we have cabinet space for both. Because the only way to cook rice while holding a baby is if everything is already on the counter.
• Piles of paper are everywhere, but they are meaningful. If a bill needs to be paid, it better get let in the middle of the dining room table. 
• While once I’d imagine tasteful woven-reed baskets housing Gracie’s toys discreetly amid our objets d’art and stacks of books proving our intellectualism, we now have a system of toy piles: the pile next to the sink needs to be washed, the pile on the kitchen island is there to divert Gracie long enough for me to gobble down a few Dove promises (whose wrappers I sometimes leave in the bowl), and the other piles are where they are because what’s the point? 
• When a kind friend asks, “Where’s your vacuum?” (hint, hint), the answer is, “wherever you last vacuumed” 
• In fact, everything is kept out wherever it is used. If something is in a cabinet, or a clever objet d’art disguised as a storage container, we’ll forget to use it. Like dental floss.

In other words, every household task is neglected (save those essential to not living in utter filth and squalor) if it will allow one second more to nuzzle with/dance for/ensure the survival of Gracie, or to be spent in pursuit of sweet, elusive sleep. That, to me, is the REAL Real Simple. And for now, it's kind of refreshing.