Channeling My Inner-Monica

When I was in college, every Thursday night, we put all schoolwork on hold for NBC's Must See TV. The living room in our dorm (and, later, around the TV in someone's room) was packed with young women, mostly in PJs, some knitting or snacking. We watched Friends, Seinfeld and ER, in that order. Both Friends and Seinfeld had their series finales during my last year of college--as though there were no reason for the shows to continue without all of us to watch. ER sort of jumped the shark after that, too (you know that term, right?).

One of the main characters on Friends was Monica Geller, who was organized to a fault. She had notebooks with color-tabbed sections, spices arranged in ABC order, perfectly clean bathrooms and bedrooms. She defined Type A.

Sometimes I want to be that way, too, but the reality is that my car hides French fries and cracker crumbs, my bathtub needs more than a little TLC and my closet quickly becomes a bottomless pit of things that have no other home in our home, no matter how often I put "Clean Closet" on my To-Do List. I have some of my family's tendencies toward hoarding--not like on that truly disturbing TV show, but the notion that I might need that again someday and you just never know...! So I fight that tendency with organization. If it's organized well and I can find it easily, I can justify keeping it. If it looks clean, it is clean, right?

We have a big dry erase board with a calendar grid hanging in the hallway to the garage. Each month I happily erase the days gone by and replace them with up-and-coming events. Each family member is a certain color, with one color reserved for the entire family. That way, anyone can look at the calendar and know what's coming up, which days are potentially free for planning other events, and where Mommy and Daddy are on any given day (office, clinic, hospital on-call, out of town). When I am on call, Peter can see that he needs to make sure Molly gets to Girl Scouts. When Peter is out of town, I'll remember that he has poker night on the day he gets back. Molly and Rebecca only buy lunch on certain days, depending on the school's menu, so we all look at the menu at the first of the month so we can mark which days Peter and I can avoid packing lunches. It's a beautiful thing. And it makes me feel like I have a teeny-tiny bit of control in an otherwise beautifully hectic life. Monica would be so proud.

P.S. "Jump the shark" is a term that refers to a moment or a season when a TV show took a turn for the worse. It originates with Happy Days, when they went to Hawaii and Fonzie performed a stunt when he jumped a shark. The show was not as good after that. Other famous jump the shark moments would be when that new little cousin moved in on The Brady Bunch, when a new baby brother was born on Family Ties or when that teenage girl cousin moved in on The Cosby Show (for the record, the Cosby Show survived the add-a-kid pitfall when they added little Olivia).