What's on Your Fridge Door?

Did anyone else read this New York Times article from sometime last Fall?

Titled "What Does Your Fridge Door Say About Your Family" it refers to a book called Life in the 21st Century which focuses on the "material saturation" of our Western lives and how we manage to live with all our...well...stuff.

As if you as a parent didn't have enough to stress you out, like whether your children have enough grit, or if you are sharing too much about their lives online, here is an article about what dark aspects of your personality and lifestyle you have unwittingly projected onto your fridge door. Their extensive research has unearthed...

"a tendency for high counts of objects on refrigerator panels to co-occur with large numbers of objects in the house as a whole. Put another way, a family’s tolerance for a “messy” refrigerator may be associated with a fairly relaxed attitude about high density or clutter in public rooms of the house … Perhaps a place as seemingly unassuming as the refrigerator signals overall family tendencies regarding consumerism and household organization."

(Insert defeated sigh here).

One look at mainstream American media (other than, perhaps, the TV show Hoarders) would seem to indicate that many peoples' homes look like pristine pages out of a home decorating magazine, or one of those home organizing shows on cable, which seem to only exist to keep makers of stacking plastic bins in business. Not so, people, not so. Anyone with children who has that sterile a life certainly either has kids in college, kids in boarding school, or, any minute now, are expecting a visit from their in-laws -- in which case they have swept all the clutter off their fridge an into a box which has been thrown into the coat closet.

Our fridge is one surface in our home that does indeed tell the story of who we are as a family. Posted there are a rotating series of school lunch menus, calendars, the artwork of our children, triumphant spelling tests, notes from friends, snapshots of great memories together, our agreement about family rules, fun magnets and other ephemera of our daily lives. I like to think of it as a collage of our life.

Yes, we have clutter from art projects in process, school books, and too many coats and shoes in the hallway that haven't been put away properly because, frankly, usually the first thing one of us does upon entering is the "drop everything and hug" thing we all do around here. There will be time to clean and organize -- it's not always now. Like the late comedienne Phyllis Diller famously said,

“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it stops snowing.” 

It is literally snowing as I type this!

After I read the article I did indeed do an organizational sweep of the fridge doors, I won't deny that the article gave me pause. But though initially it felt like a breath of fresh air had swept through the kitchen, after I'd cleared some fridge scraps away, soon my little people were making adorable drawings and handing them to me like jewels. They are jewels to me. Up they went on the fridge, the childhood equivalent of an exhibition space. Then came a few more snapshots. The fridge is crowded again -- but I love it.