Messies, rejoice! Marie Kondo now says you're OK!

Are you fighting a futile battle against clutter at your house?

Is there a room (or more than one) that becomes a catch-all for things that don't have a permanent home — or do, but never seem to get there?

Do you routinely have to move a week's accumulation of "stuff" from your kitchen counter to prepare a meal?

Does your bedroom look like a bomb exploded in it?

Have you cleaned out your coat closet this century?

And do you spend an inordinate amount of time reminding yourself that you really need to make time to tackle these things — and feeling guilty because you never seem to get around to it?

Well, here's your get-out-of-jail card, straight from Marie Kondo — the declutter queen herself.

Seems she's figured out we can't really do it all, after all.

For the uninitiated, Kondo is a Japanese lifestyle guru who specializes in tidying and organizing and, through books and Netflix programs since publishing "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" in 2014, encouraging us to "discard anything that doesn't spark joy."

I don't know about you, but my washer doesn't exactly spark joy. And yet I am hesitant to discard it.

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When she said there were only two reasons we can't let something go — an attachment to the past or a fear for the future — it almost felt like being shamed for keeping stuff.

That being said, considering the washer, I suppose there is both an attachment to the past (clean laundry) and a fear for the future (dirty laundry) involved. Maybe I should just let those go. Or not.

And when she said we shouldn't hang on to more than 30 books at any given time, some of us figured she'd done gone ta' meddlin'.

But now, apparently, Kondo is backtracking.

In her latest book, "Marie Kondo's Kurashi at Home" ("kurashi" being Japanese for "way of life"), she has apparently confessed that these days her home is "messy" and she's not tidying 24/7.

And the culprit, it seems, is being a mom to three small children.

Well, that'll do it.

I ran into a couple of former co-workers and their toddler at a function last weekend. "This is my life now," said Dad as he tailed his energetic tot across the room.

They'd recently sold their half of a duplex and moved to a larger home. Their original plan, Mom said, had been to hang onto the honeymoon cottage for a while but move into a larger home by the time the baby was 5.

But within months of his arrival, they, and their home, were overwhelmed with baby stuff. They just weren't going to last there until kindergarten.

Even if you don't have children but you do have a pet, you can expect a similar experience: squeak toys on the stairway, kibbles strewn across the kitchen floor, evidence of chewing where there shouldn't be.

And sometimes worse.

My dog rarely has accidents in the house, but she recently left a small gift in the living room that I didn't find before the robo-vacuum did.

If you've never had the pleasure of cleaning tracks of doggie droppings from a hardwood floor, well, let's just say there were lots of things going through my mind, but "Ode to Joy" was not one of them.

Anyway, now that Kondo has finally let us off the hook for our collective disorganization, she's even redefined "tidying up" as "dealing with all the 'things' in your life."

Not sure where that "thing" on the floor would rank, but it surely needed to be dealt with. And by golly, I did.

Still waiting for that "joy" to spark.

Tamela Baker is a Herald-Mail feature writer.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Decluttering queen says clutter is OK, and the slobs say 'Amen!'