When walking through the mall last week I saw something inspiring. A man was pushing a baby carriage inside of which was a baby wearing two different socks! One was pink, one was yellow, and they obviously did not come from the same pair.

Now perhaps this man is just clothing challenged when it comes to little girls. My husband, for instance, lives by the credo "girls’ buttons always go at the back", which led to some very odd placement of bows and front collars on the rare occasions I actually allowed him to dress our daughters. He now lets them dress themselves, which is a whole other horror story.

I prefer to think that this stranger was not creating an inadvertent fashion faux pas, but was instead being deliberate. I think he was trying to liberate himself from the stupidity of some of the customs we cling to. I currently have (I just checked) 4 pairs of socks in my drawer, 3 in each of the girls’ drawers, 8 in my husband’s, and 62 single socks in my stray sock drawer. If we were to mix and match, think of the money and frustration we could save!

That's not the only silly thing we do in our homes, though. Ironing has to rate high on that list, too. I stopped ironing a few years ago, as anyone who has ever seen my husband in dress shirts knows (he occasionally irons if we have to go somewhere fancy). When Rebecca was four, we were visiting the aunt who received the only neat genes in my family. She was compulsively ironing a skirt. Rebecca stared, wide-eyed, and finally asked, "what are you doing?" She had never seen an iron before, though I would have preferred that she had kept that information to herself. Nevertheless, I now only buy knits, and in the process save plenty of aggravation.

Then there’s dusting. Dusting does not actually take very much time if you have little to dust. Wiping a cloth over a clear surface is a breeze. Dusting around thirty trophies that you won in grade four for some softball championship when you spent seven innings on the bench takes much more effort. So does dusting all those knick knacks your in-laws bought you, the ones that cause you to wonder whether you have truly been accepted in the family yet or whether they’re still trying to test you. I, of course, don’t have any such knick-knacks, or at least I wouldn’t admit to it after the fallout from that column last year about the annoying toys my mother-in-law buys for my girls. Suffice it to say that knick-knacks make dusting hard.

In fact, we could apply this principle to almost everything in our homes: stuff is your enemy. The more stuff you have, the less room you have for all the new stuff you’re bringing into the house. Stuff soon piles up on your kitchen counter, your dining room table, your front stairs, and soon you have stuff everywhere and you don’t even know where to start cleaning. Throw stuff out and you have room for the important things in your life.

Much of the problem with wasted effort around our homes, though, stems from the fact that we’re aiming for the wrong thing. We want to have a perfect house to prove something to people. In the process, we end up compulsively dusting a living room no one ever sits in, to save it for company who, when they arrive, hang out in the kitchen anyway. Let’s reclaim that space and aim for a comfortable home instead. Don’t feel guilty if it’s not perfect. Your house, after all, is meant to be lived in. And besides, there’s no point getting stressed over housework that will never truly be finished anyway. I keep telling my kids that they can turn those matchless socks into sock puppets as soon as I’ve done all the laundry and I’m sure there’s no stray ones there. But we all know the laundry is never finished. At the rate I’m going, those sock puppets will never see the light of day. Maybe it’s time for some more liberation.

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