The children are in bed, and I am lying in the bath on a Friday night after a frazzling week. I have added bath oil and a slug of Dead Sea salt. I have a cup of tea. I close my eyes and try to relax, but a niggling unease forces them open again. There is a fork lying by the side of the bath, just in my eyeline. Beyond the fork, there is an upturned bowl, a length of raffia, a joke ice cube with a plastic fly inside, an unidentifiable green substance in a small plastic tub that I believe was once homemade hair gel, a plush Stormtrooper and a very, very tiny plastic dinosaur. We haven't even reached the taps yet.

This is not unusual: my house is full of clutter. Four of us live here and we are not, to say the least, minimalists. My elder son wanders around oblivious, shedding an easy-to-follow trail behind him: scribbled notes, biscuit wrappers, interesting leaves he has found, balled-up socks. My younger son hoards his precious things carefully, privately, in drawers and boxes and padlocked tins. My desk is a disgraceful jumble of business cards and leaflets, neglected communications from HMRC and long-defunct Biros, and my boyfriend has given up on his mail and leaves it in extravagant, perilous heaps on every surface. Wherever I allow my eye to travel, there are piles of stuff that have no business being there: pipe cleaners and receipts, lengths of mysterious cable, marbles and lip salves and shoelaces.

Clutter gets a very bad rap. We are constantly exhorted to declutter and simplify, as if to do so is a shortcut to contentment: you can follow an Oprah-approved programme or pay someone to come round and do the hard lifting, filing and throwing away for you. Mess has become a moral issue: the mindless accumulation of stuff is seen as thoughtless and materialistic, a symptom of western decadence. It weighs us down mentally; there are studies linking a chaotic home environment to behavioural problems in children. Clutter, too, is all too easily confused with hoarding, a genuinely pernicious phenomenon that often disguises profound psychological troubles. The recent conviction of Duncan Scott and Claire Anderson for child cruelty when their accumulation of car-boot-sale junk made living conditions for their young family unbearable, has cast a new and unpalatable light on the issue.

I am not a hoarder, but in the short, dark days towards the end of last year, I began to collect all the objects that were left in our washing machine after a wash. Coins, sweet wrappers, plastic bottletops, rubber-band bracelets, Lego figures. Some would fall out of pockets as I pulled the heavy tangle of wet fabric out, or I would find them in the drum; the majority got trapped between the rubber door seals and I took a perverse pleasure in prising them apart to discover what had washed up there each time. I put all my discoveries in plastic sandwich bags – a bag per wash – on a shelf in the kitchen, and when anyone looked quizzically at my hoard, or tried to retrieve their toys or money, I would rush, protectively, to my sandwich bags.

'When people come round, I see the house with new eyes: the mess looks worse, somehow, through the prism of an external gaze, and I'm ashamed.' Photograph: Tim Hall/Mood Board/Rex Feat

"No," I would say, defensively, "it's for a project. A work project." I had a vague idea that someone collecting household rubbish might make an interesting basis for a short story. There was, however, a veiled insinuation from my family (and indeed, I felt it myself) that the "project" was actually a form of barely disguised nervous breakdown, which would end with me barricaded in the attic, surrounded by jam jars full of toenail clippings and urine, colour coding my junk mail. It was a difficult time. After a long period of emotional upheaval, money worries and career stalemate, I felt genuinely frightened for the future, and there was something oddly reassuring in cataloguing the perennial clutter of family life; the evidence that on some level, things were still as they had always been.

I stopped collecting washing-machine junk, to the relief of my family, and never managed to write anything about it, but my interest in the significance of the flotsam of family life didn't recede. I began to look with fresh eyes at the piles and heaps and bundles that dotted our house, as familiar and easy to ignore as the walls.

It is not that I actively seek to acquire more stuff: the creeping, incremental expansion of our footprint on the planet makes me uncomfortable and I am intermittently maddened by our accumulation of domestic rubble. When people come round, I see the house with new eyes: the mess looks worse, somehow, through the prism of an external gaze, and I'm ashamed. I whirl around with a bin bag and shove what I can't dispose of out of sight.

Every time I have moved house, those first few days – when the space is empty but for the absolute bare essentials – are intoxicating. Perhaps, I think to myself, looking around the uninterrupted expanse of floor and wall, I can live like this?

But I can't: the clutter returns with all the vigour of a virulent strain of mould. Families can't live in the pristine spaces lampooned on the satirical website Unhappy Hipsters: they shed and discard and nest, they lose and find. The archaeological record of family life lies in our kitchen drawers, bathroom cupboards and hall tables, in our pockets and on our bedside cabinets and, actually, I have realised I'm glad of it.

It is wrong to imagine it is a new phenomenon. I grew up in York, a city marked by the daily lives of more than 2,000 years of human existence, and their clutter – the shoes and belts and dice, Saxon cups and Georgian plate fragments that we looked at in museum cases, dug up in the backyard and wrote about at school – is very like ours. I see the mysterious metal flotsam that my stepfather keeps in a bowl on his mantelpiece when I look at the Viking keys in the Jorvik Viking centre; a Roman bangle made from Whitby jet was very like the ones you can buy in souvenir shops there now. Life was ever messy, these artefacts say, and we leave our mark in tiny, inadvertent ways.

Emma Beddington with her sons: 'The depressing piles of paper that I resentfully sort through every now and then usually conceal a drawing or two from one of my sons; drawings that trace the evolution of their enthusiasms and raise a smile.'

I would argue that there is something quite touching about the accumulation of even the most modern stuff, if you can bring yourself to look at it more tenderly and at a sedimentary level. The depressing piles of paper that I resentfully sort through every now and then usually conceal a drawing or two from one of my sons; drawings that trace the evolution of their enthusiasms and raise a smile: from pictures of shaky dragons and approximate Pokémons to scenes of elaborate cartoon slaughter, or a cobra swallowing a happy, picnicking family.

Each one is a snapshot of a moment that I would otherwise struggle to remember. Recently, I uncovered my eldest's first figurative drawing, inspired by the arrival of our dog, an event so memorable that it was marked by untypically painstaking felt-tip work.

Or take my slatternly desk: the boring-looking stone almost hidden under an avalanche of press releases is in fact a sea-urchin fossil, a seamed star pattern just visible on the top side. We found it on the Isle of Wight one summer, on a rapidly disappearing stretch of shingle (we had miscalculated the tide) under a blackening, ominous sky. My friend and I tried to build a sort of pebble windbreak, then gave up and huddled together drinking tea in polystyrene cups, our four children rioting in the haphazard, bored, occasionally violent manner of small boys. She died three years later, and when I hold the smooth heft of that stone in my palm, I think of that silly outing, the pair of us in our cagoules, our mild grousing at what seems in retrospect a rather perfect holiday.

Then there is the green tin box that followed me home from my last job. Inside there are scissors and sachets of pepper, a roll of yellowing sticky tape and seven packets of coloured document flags, relics from the final weeks of that job when I thought that the shock of redundancy could be attenuated by stealing stationery. In the lower substrate of coloured drawing pins, single staples and escaped pepper, I recently found the handwritten pink paper and plastic hospital wrist tag issued to my sister when she was born. "Baby of Sarah Baldwin," it reads, though no one ever called my mother Sarah, and then the date and time of her birth. When I take both cut ends and hold them together, the circumference is comically, unimaginably tiny: my sister is 28 this year.

I don't know how it got there, but I know where it came from: the small raffia box that lived on the chest of drawers in our mother's bedroom, where she kept both our hospital bracelets, and a selection of our baby teeth – tiny bloodied shards like voodoo accessories. We keep these things as a primitive act of love, I suppose: the milk teeth, the pregnancy tests, a lopped-off curl from a first haircut. When we cleared out Mum's bedroom after she died, my sister's bracelet must have landed accidentally in my pile. I keep what I inherited from my mother (scarves, jumpers, her first engagement ring) very carefully, but this tiny thing that was so precious to her has washed up in my green box. It feels like an odd privilege to be the one to preserve the ephemera of my sister's arrival now.

I wonder, perhaps, if we warm to our clutter more when we understand how fragile and impermanent the states it records can be? I'm not suggesting everyone should have a fork on the side of the bath (I very much do not recommend that), or that we should simply surrender to the drifting accumulation of dross, but I do think it deserves a kinder eye, occasionally. Our clutter tells the story of how we live and have lived. Now and then, that is a story we all want to hear.