There is one dirty little secret of motherhood that nobody tells you, and it has nothing to do with saggy breasts.

It has to do with orderliness. Once you have children, there will be none.

My children are 11, 16 and 20, which means my refrigerator has had a catsup/egg or milk spill in it for two decades. I have for 20 years not been able to find the scissors, the tape or the AAA batteries. The dust bunnies under the bed are dust hippos. And my basement looks like Kmart the day after Thanksgiving.

Ah, the basement.

It is an easy receptacle for what doesn’t fit in the rest of the house, n’est-ce pas? The baby clothes you can’t bring yourself to throw away. The broken dining room chair your late mother once sat in. A collection of Goodwill blankets the kids used to make forts with. Hundreds of photographs waiting to be sorted and put into PhotoWorks. Those “vintage” Christmas decorations that your mother-in-law didn’t want because they were so kitschy 1970s, that she couldn’t bear to throw away, and so she gave them to you.

Our basement happens also to double as the office, the ping-pong room and the TV room, which means that I actually have to go down there sometimes. I have wished it clean. I have certainly wanted it clean and organized, all the Christmas decorations in one place, all the kids’ first-grade drawings properly labeled and filed.

But I could never get to it because as the mother of young children, there was always something else to do, like making sure one child or the other wasn’t falling off the changing table.

Now suddenly, my youngest child is a pre-teen, 11 years old, which means I no longer feel compelled to follow after him with a bucket of Band-Aids, wash cloths and graham crackers. My husband and I feel like a couple of Rip Van Winkles, waking up after 20 years.

“You know we could actually clean the basement tonight,” my husband said last Saturday at 8 p.m.

I looked at him for a full minute, wondering who twisted his thinking and on date night to boot.

“Argh. Let’s just do it,” I said.

We worked until midnight, hardly breathing in our determination and freedom. We moved and reorganized about 42,000 boxes and swept up that many pounds in dirt and dust. He threw out his back. My allergies were worse than they’ve been since I was pregnant and producing enough mucous for an army of noses.

But we got it done. Four hours later, and the baby clothes were sorted and stacked in bins and waiting for an unwitting grandchild to wear. The photos at least got organized and stacked in their own personal corner in the basement, even if they aren’t actually in photo albums.

As for the Christmas decorations, they are boxed and ready in an accessible corner of the basement, waiting to be pulled out in just a couple of weeks. All but those decorations from Grandma Peg. They found a special new home, too: The landfill.

- Debra-Lynn