“Mess? What Mess?” Welcome to Functional Chaos!

The plight of a recovering neat freak mom vs. her ADHD teen tornado, where laundry baskets are decorative and rogue LEGOs are weapons of war.

The Teen Tornado Living His Best Life Surrounded By...Everything.

The battleground: Our Home.

On one side, we have Team “Everything Has a Place.”

On the other, Team “The Floor Is That Place.”

I’ll let you guess who’s who—but let’s just say one of us owns a label maker, and the other thinks a sock pile is a filing system. Keep reading. The truth (and probably a half-eaten granola bar) will reveal itself.

The Scene of the Grime

I run a color-coded, label-loving household. Not quite the Container Store catalog, but close enough to keep me from burning it all down and starting over on a reality show called "The Real Neat Freaks of Suburbia."

Kei, on the other hand, is a 13-year-old Tasmanian tornado who believes floors are horizontal closets and tables are fidget graveyards. His interior design aesthetic? Post-apocalyptic sleepover. Any flat surface is fair game: Pokémon cards, rogue LEGO pieces, fidget spinners, hoodie strings, and at least one sock that may or may not be alive.

Give him 13 seconds and he’ll redecorate a room with an avant-garde installation of crushed saltine sleeves, unhinged snack wrappers, and that hoodie he swore he didn’t lose (it's under the chair, next to the drumstick, of course).

Is it a boy thing?

An ADHD thing?

Or the horrifying Venn diagram crossover known as Boy-With-ADHD?

Yes. All of the above.

With a bonus round of selective hearing. And while I dreamed of routines and structure, Kei had other plans...

My Master Plan (a.k.a. The Weekly Comedy Routine)

The second Kei moved in, I had a plan. A mission. A dream. He would grow up knowing how to survive on his own—laundry, cleaning, basic hygiene, not dying in a pile of his own socks. You know, life skills. Also, full disclosure: I am a recovering neat freak. Clutter gives me anxiety, dirt gives me the ick, and a messy house makes me feel like I’m starring in a slow-motion episode of "Hoarders."

So at 4½, Kei got his first lesson in “We clean up what we play with.” Simple. Structured. Sensible. We progressed to: make your bed (interpret loosely), put your shoes away, and—my personal favorite—learning to fold laundry like a civilized human.

And here’s where the plan should have worked.

I’ve demonstrated how to fold a T-shirt more times than I’ve renewed my car registration. Face down. Sleeves in. Fold up. Flip. Boom. Retail-worthy perfection. Kei? Kei looks me dead in the eyes. Nods like he just cracked the Da Vinci Code, and proceeds to burrito every shirt into a soft, wrinkly ball and fastball it into the drawer like he’s trying out for the MLB.

Hangers? Don’t get me started. Shirt: vertical. Hanger: horizontal. It’s like performance art. Picasso would weep.

And then... the toilet bowl. Oh, the toilet bowl. It is his forever-forgotten chore. Like the grocery list you leave on the kitchen counter every time you go to Trader Joe’s. Step one in bathroom cleaning: add the blue toilet bowl cleaner. And then forget about it. For hours. Like it’s a simmering stew that needs to marinate for three lunar cycles.

Every Sunday, Kei drags his feet through the house, gathering cleaning supplies like he’s prepping for war, muttering “This isn’t fair” like a tiny, pubescent union rep. He starts with gusto—sprays the toilet, the seat, the lid, the floor—possibly the neighbor’s dog—but then vanishes. One hour later:

Me: “Progress check!”

Kei: “Almost done!”

Lies. Nothing is done. Not even close.

Eventually, he reemerges, looking like he’s survived battle. Claims it’s finished.

Me: “Did you clean the tub?”

Kei: “Why do I have to clean the tub?”

Me: “Did you vacuum?”

Kei: “Uggghhh. WHY do I have to vacuum???”

(Repeat weekly. Add dramatic sighs and bathroom opera.)

And just when I think it’s over, hours later I hear it…

Kei: “Oh crap.”

Me: “Forgot the toilet bowl again, didn’t you?”

Kei: “Sure did!”

It’s our little ritual. He forgets. I scream. We bond.

Total chore time: 4.5 hours.

Total chore value: 45 minutes max.

ADHD time warp: undefeated.

Then he moves on to his room. Aka: Ground Zero. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a baby and it was raised by a raccoon in a glitter factory, that’s Kei’s room.

He knows my expectations. He just disagrees with them entirely.

My vision: Toys live in the toy closet, not on every horizontal surface. Shoes go in the rack, not shoved under his bed like they’re in witness protection. Clothes go in drawers or closets, not layered on the floor like some chaotic textile collage.

Kei’s version of “clean”: Move 90% of the chaos from the floor to the bed. Bonus points if it looks like he just kicked everything into his closet and hoped for the best.

Me: “Kei, how’s it going?”

Kei: “90% done.”

Reality check: That 90% is now just strategically relocated, not cleaned. I open his closet and I swear I hear it whisper, “Send help.”

So here we are—me with my color-coded cleaning checklists and emotional support vacuum, and Kei with his “close enough” chaos theory approach to hygiene. Our Sundays are less “tidy home, tidy mind” and more “domestic standoff meets stand-up comedy.”

Which brings us to the deeper issue at hand…

The Philosophy of Filth vs. Feng Shui

Even though Kei and I share the same mailing address, we operate under very different belief systems when it comes to what qualifies as “clean.”

We coexist in the same space like two cults with opposing doctrines.

Kei’s Creed:“It’s not messy, it’s efficient. I know exactly where everything is—just don’t move anything or I’ll forget it exists.”

My Creed:“If I step on one more rogue LEGO barefoot, someone’s FedExing me a tetanus shot. Also, I can’t think when my eyeballs see clutter. Yes, that’s a thing.”

But here's the real kicker: Kei thrives in mess. Like, it’s his comfort zone. The mess is his emotional weighted blanket. His nervous system needs the visual chaos like some kids need a nightlight.

His room? Disaster.

His desk? Avalanche.

His backpack? A time capsule of crumbs, broken pencils, and something I swear growled at me last week.

Even the car seat he rides in looks like he’s been living there since 2022.

He doesn’t see mess. He sees a cozy memory palace made entirely of candy wrappers, hoodie strings, and eraser remnants.

I, on the other hand, worship order. Cleanliness is my oxygen—medicinal-grade, lavender-infused, life-sustaining oxygen. My dream is to live inside a Pinterest board come to life: throw pillows perfectly fluffed, spice rack alphabetized and labeled, and not a single mystery stain lurking in the shadows. I need my environment to spark joy, not activate my fight-or-flight response. Being in sync with my space? That's my heartbeat. Because when my surroundings spiral into chaos, so does my brain—like, “someone send help, I just got into a full-blown argument with a sock pile” levels of unhinged.

So somewhere between my Minimalist Mom Nervous Breakdown and Kei’s ADHD-styled art installation titled "Decay in Motion", we try to find common ground.

We call it: Functional Chaos.

It’s not my kind of clean, and definitely not my kind of peaceful—but it works. It’s ours. It’s where we live, coexist, and wage war against laundry. And since no one’s been impaled by a rogue paperclip this week, we’re counting it as a win.

Coping Mechanisms for Parents of Domestic Tornadoes

And after years of trial, error, and one incident involving a mop and mild screaming, I’ve developed a few survival strategies...

1. Label Everything: If it has a label, I can at least pretend it has a home—even if that “home” is just a plastic bin full of broken markers, mystery cords, and dreams.

2. Use Timers: 20-minute work sprints with phone-break bribes keep him from vanishing into YouTube purgatory. If I don’t time it, he’ll emerge four hours later fluent in beatboxing and conspiracy theories.

3. Gamify: He earns screen time for every chore properly done. Key word: properly. Ball-folds don’t count. If it looks like he wrestled the laundry into submission and stuffed it into a drawer as a hostage situation, the deal is off.

4. Pick Your Battles: Yes, the clothes hang crooked. No, I’m not refolding and re-hanging his entire wardrobe at midnight. Either he learns to iron or he shows up looking like a rayon shirt that fought a hurricane and lost—then got tumble-dried on lava mode.

5. Humor Over Helicoptering: Sarcasm keeps my sanity intact when the blue toilet-bowl cleaner strikes again. I don’t silently follow behind fixing things like some overwhelmed cleaning fairy. If it’s not done right, he re-does it. Welcome to the real world, son—there are no chore refunds.

So… To Clean or Not to Clean?

Answer: Both.

I’ll keep labeling drawers and chanting “a place for everything,” while Kei perfects the ancient art of Laundry Ball Origami. Someday, he might finally close that 3-centimeter gap between the floor and the hamper—and treat it like a destination instead of a vague suggestion from his mom (hi, it's me) that he's been ignoring since 2021. Until then, I choose humor—because otherwise I’m just one sock away from pulling the pin on a grenade and calling it a remodel.

Welcome to Neuro-Jammin’ life: one part order, one part chaos, stirred—never folded—into a perfectly skewed hanger.

Stay Neuro-jammin' with love, saltines, and toilet cleaner!

—Tara

CEO of Functional Chaos. Recovering Clean Freak. VP of One Rogue LEGO Away from Full-Blown Hissy-Fit