About
The messy one.
That was my label growing up.
In my family, among my friends, in my own head — I was the messy one (or “bordélique”, as we say in French). The disorganised one. The woman who froze when the doorbell rang because the apartment wasn’t fit to be seen.
My bedroom was always a disaster. My student apartments were places I couldn’t bring people to. I lived with a constant, low hum of shame about the state of my space. And underneath it, a deeper shame about what that seemed to say about me as a woman.
When I had my first baby, it got worse. There was simply more — more to clean, more to manage, more to keep on top of. And I had no system.
I would wake up and the first thing I’d see were the clothes I’d peeled off the night before, still in a pile at the foot of the bed. I’d shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee, and the sink would be full of dishes from the past few days. Last night’s dinner pan still on the stove. Crumbs across the counter. I’d push something aside just to set down my mug.
And I would feel — though I didn’t have the words for it then — like a complete failure of a woman.
I tried everything. The big Sunday resets. The Pinterest routines I screenshotted at midnight. The apps, the planners, the bullet journals. The Amazon gadgets that promised to simplify my life and just added more clutter to surfaces I couldn’t keep clear. None of it stuck. And each failure made me feel more certain that something was simply wrong with me.
I had a sister.
Four children. A beautiful home. She made homemaking look like the most natural thing in the world. I would visit her and feel this quiet ache I didn’t know how to name. I’d look at her kitchen — calm, tended, beautiful — and tell myself she was simply built differently. That she’d been born with something I was missing. That I was not that kind of woman.
And then one evening — I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember the moment — I was on the couch after my second baby was finally down for the night. Scrolling. I stopped on a video. A woman. Just a regular woman. Not a polished influencer. A tired woman who looked like she could have been me. She was saying she kept her home calm and tidy with twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening. That was it. Twenty and twenty.
Something in me went still.
If she could do it — maybe it wasn’t about being a different kind of woman. Maybe it was about having a different kind of system.
So I built my own.
I tried her method. It didn’t work exactly — but for the first time, the bones of something made sense. Twenty minutes was something I could believe in. Twenty minutes was something a tired woman with two small children could actually do. It wasn’t the seven-hour Sunday reset that had broken me a hundred times. It was small enough to be real.
So I started adjusting. Moving things around. Figuring out which tasks actually mattered and letting the rest go. Building, slowly, week by week, a rhythm that was mine — not borrowed from a stranger on the internet, not copied from my sister, not lifted from a Pinterest board. Mine.
The CALM Home Method was born in my kitchen, in the south of France, with two small children and a husband and a life that is full and real and not at all perfect — but peaceful. Which, it turns out, was the thing I was actually looking for all along.
“It’s seven in the morning. The house is still asleep. My coffee is hot in my hands. And the only thing on the island is a bouquet of peonies I bought at the market yesterday.”
This is what a designed life looks like on an ordinary Tuesday.
What I believe.
Your home is not a backdrop. It is the foundation.
The place you wake up in. The place you return to. The place that either supports the woman you are becoming — or quietly works against her.
A disordered home is not evidence of a disordered woman.
It is evidence of a woman who was never given the right tools. That is all it ever was.
Homemaking is not a domestic chore.
It is one of the oldest forms of self-expression that has ever existed. The women who came before us knew this. We are simply remembering.
You are not less than the women who seem to have it figured out.
You simply weren’t given the tools. No one taught you. There is nothing wrong with you — there is something missing for you, and it can be built.
One day you will become the woman you have always wanted to be. And the very things that feel like failures right now will be the things that allow you to help other women who are exactly where you are now.
That is what everything here is. The tools no one gave me. The rhythm I built, in this kitchen, with this life, for women like us.
Now — yours.
In case you were wondering.
I live in the south of France, which is exactly as beautiful as it sounds and significantly more demanding to maintain.
I have two small children who undo most of what I carefully tend — and I have made peace with this.
I bake sourdough every Saturday. Not because I’m disciplined. Because it makes the house smell like a home.
I buy flowers every week. A single variety. One vase. Either peonies or hydrangeas, when they’re in season.
I believe deeply in the table — in setting it properly, even on a Tuesday, even when no one is coming. Especially when no one is coming.
I drink my coffee before the children wake up and consider those thirty minutes the most important investment I make in the quality of my entire day.
And I built all of this because I was the last woman anyone would have predicted to do it. Which is exactly why I know it can work for you.
The things that guide everything here.
Your home is not a backdrop. It is the foundation.
The place you wake up in. The place you return to. The place that either supports the woman you are becoming — or quietly works against her.
A disordered home is not evidence of a disordered woman.
It is evidence of a woman who was never given the right tools. That is all it ever was.
Homemaking is not a domestic chore.
It is one of the oldest forms of self-expression that has ever existed. The women who came before us knew this. We are simply remembering.
You are not less than the women who seem to have it figured out.
You simply weren't given the tools. No one taught you. There is nothing wrong with you — there is something missing for you, and it can be built.
That is what everything here is. The tools no one gave me. The rhythm I built, in this kitchen, with this life, for women like us.
Now — yours.In case you were wondering.
I live in the south of France, which is exactly as beautiful as it sounds and significantly more demanding to maintain.
I have two small children who undo most of what I carefully tend — and I have made peace with this.
I bake sourdough every Saturday. Not because I'm disciplined. Because it makes the house smell like a home.
I buy flowers every week. A single variety. One vase. Almost always peonies, when they're in season.
I believe deeply in the table — in setting it properly, even on a Tuesday, even when no one is coming. Especially when no one is coming.
I drink my coffee before the children wake up and consider those thirty minutes the most important investment I make in the quality of my entire day.
And I built all of this because I was the last woman anyone would have predicted to do it. Which is exactly why I know it can work for you.