When Marie Kondo revealed to the world last January that she had “kind of given up” on tidying now that she’s a mother of three, the quotes went viral—and understandably so. For a cleaning guru, whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and subsequent Netflix shows have given rise to a decluttering empire, the confession was pretty divisive. Some were left perplexed and even outraged by the admission, while others were frankly relieved. After all, if Marie Kondo couldn’t even live up to her own shipshape expectations, then surely the rest of us could be forgiven for our messiness?
Admittedly, the reality of parenthood was, Kondo tells Vogue via a translator, something of a shock; she didn’t realize quite how much it would impact her lifestyle, to say nothing of her work. Over the course of the last few years, she’s been trying to find alternative ways to operate while dealing with the reality of raising two beloved daughters and a son with her husband of 12 years, TV producer Takumi Kawahara. “Many people, they had families, and they would tell me: once you have children, everything is going to change… it’s going to be much harder. But hearing about this [versus] actually going through the process, I think, was quite different for me,” she explains. “Part of myself was like, ‘Wow, the change is this significant.’ It’s the extent to which we have to change our lifestyles. There’s so many components that you don’t have control over.”
For the most part, this realization has only made Kondo simultaneously more relatable and aspirational for her 4.1 million Instagram followers. “I think it almost feels like there’s a stronger connection there, perhaps, and that we are walking through this together.” And yet Kondo is clear that, when it comes to her work, there’s been less of a shift in her ethos than many people realize; her goal, she stresses, has always been to refocus people’s minds on what brings them happiness by eliminating the obstacles, physical or mental, preventing them from sparking joy. “Since having children, I think there’s this message that I’ve perhaps lowered the priority of tidying, but I want to say that’s not necessarily the case,” she clarifies. Rather, she’s recognized that spending time en famille “is now what sparks joy” rather than neat kitchen drawers, and decluttered her life of the things that distract her from her kids as much as possible.
“Nothing has changed with respect to my passion towards my job and what I do—assisting people, tidying up,” she continues. “I think more so than ever I feel this need to help each individual find the style of life and the type of life they want to live.” Her commitment to the KonMari method, in other words, remains as strong as ever, even if she approaches it with “more flexibility” now.