Is the Clutter Bug Inherited?

I know she’s my daughter, I mean I was there when she was born. Though, now that I think about it, I was asleep at the time. We never made our acquaintance until later, when the anaesthesia had worn off.

I just don’t know where this uber-organized, neat freak, minimalist came from. How I ended up with a daughter who doesn’t like to read and has no interest in sewing, painting or needlework is beyond me.

 

Being so very different we’ve had our issues through the years and have settled into a mature Mother/Daughter relationship. But we do have one major area of contention between us, namely clutter.

She hates clutter and I am constantly surrounded with it. I call it crafts in progress, what she calls it I won’t repeat.

She’s not entirely clutter free, I mean, who could be with three kids in the house? The good thing for her is her clutter makers will eventually leave home taking their clutter with them. As long as I can write, paint, sew or crochet, my clutter is here to stay.

Maybe this clutter or no clutter thing is inherited. You know; some hereditary trait passed down from one generation to the next.

Take sex. Females are XX, and males are XY. You remember this from biology class right? Basically the possibilities are XX, XY, XX and XY, so there’s a 50% chance any embryo will be a boy, as the Y is dominant.

We inherit any number of traits based on the combination of our parents’ chromosomes or alleles (to keep it simple). If any dominant allele is present, we will have that trait. For a person to inherit a recessive trait both recessive alleles must be present. Curly hair is dominant, straight is recessive. Then there are blue eyes or brown, and hair colour, so why can’t we inherit the clutter chromosome?

That would explain so many things. Like why my sister and my daughter are so much alike, in their clutter free minimalist ways.

Let’s break it down, like the XX, XY thing. M is the messy allele, and N is the neat.

If N is the dominant trait, and messy the recessive, I would have to be MM.

My mother was also MM, but for my sister to be MN; my dad had to be MN, as the N is dominant.

On to the next generation. If I am MM, both recessive traits, and my daughter so obviously a MN, her dad had to be MN, to pass on that dominant N trait. See, I knew it was all his fault, god rest his soul. Just kidding.

I feel so much better now that I’ve rationalized the whole thing. There has to be a reason for everything.

At any rate, my daughter will be glad to hear, I can only live with my own clutter for so long before it gets on my nerves. So, as my space is limited, I bought myself a pantry type cupboard to store my clutter.

But that’s a story for another day.