mess

Dear Daughters,

I cleaned the house a little bit last weekend before your grandparents arrived.

(I hope that sentence doesn’t startle you in a HOLD THE PHONE, YOU DID WHAT? sort of way, because I’d like to believe that by the time you read this letter we are back in a season of regular cleaning and you are able to do your part in that. I spent lots of Saturdays in my teen years cleaning the bathroom and mopping the floors, and I expect you’ll have those chores, too. But yes, for right now, it’s VERY unusual for me to spend time cleaning.)

In fact, I overheard a conversation between the two of you playing make-believe family not that long ago:

Youngest: I have the purse, so I’ll be the mommy.

Oldest: Okay, I’m cleaning, so I’ll be the daddy.

Truth spoken like no other. If the cleaning happens in our house, it’s usually your dad who does it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at picking up and putting away—that I do regularly—but I am not the move-the-furniture-deep-clean parent. Not in this season.

And let’s be honest, this weekend, I didn’t clean thoroughly. There was no mopping involved. But I did vacuum the rugs on the main floor and in the bedrooms upstairs, which is a little tricky since our vacuum is prone to overheating and shuts itself off after about 1.5 rooms. I also moved the chairs out from under the table and swept up all the crumbs with a broom. Same in the kitchen. I did a quick wipedown in the bathrooms. I looked around for dust bunnies in the corners and wiped them up with a rag. I didn’t venture to look under the furniture though.

And of course I had a much longer list that I didn’t get to: dusting, dry mopping, wet mopping, cleaning the laundry room.

It’s not that I feel pressure to clean when we have company coming—okay, I do, but not a lot of pressure—it’s mostly that I use company as an occasion to do the things I should probably be doing anyway.

As your Dad’s grandmother reportedly says, “If you’re coming to see me, come on over. If you’re coming to see my house, let me know in advance so I can clean it.”

The thing is, I just don’t clean very much.

There are lots of reasons for this.

One is that I have other priorities for my limited waking hours. I have friends who prioritize cleaning and I’m all for that for them. But if I prioritized cleaning, something would need to give: my time hands-on with you, my hands-on art time, my writing, my reading, my keeping up with community, my volunteering, my sleep, my sanity. I’ve prioritized all of these things over have a clean home.

Knowing all of this, my mom has asked in the past about gifting me with a cleaning service. (I also have lots of friends who pay for someone to clean their homes in order to maintain a standard of clean in the midst of very busy schedules. That’s totally fine.) But girls, I just don’t feel comfortable with that in this season of our life either. I have a hard time articulating why, and I’m hesitant to say this because I don’t want it to sound judgy, especially if you someday have a cleaning service, but the truth is, I really feel like if having a clean house were a priority for me, then I could make time for it in my own schedule. And if I’m not willing to sacrifice reading a novel or painting a canvas (that is, the time I make for doing things I love) for a clean house, then it isn’t important enough to pay someone else to do it. So no. Not in this season.

But there’s something else going on here, too: I really want to be okay with a lived-in, messy house. I don’t want my house to be put-together and clean all the time because that is not real life. I want toys on the floor when someone unexpectedly knocks on the door.

Yeah, okay, I’d rather there not be dishes in the sink and crumbs on the counter and the toilet unflushed, but that’s because I’m prideful. I don’t want others to think I’m messy.

A messy house keeps me humble. On my best days. (On my worst days, it’s a different story.)

Girls, most of the time, I wish it didn’t bother me at all. I wish I could look around and see how amazing our space is, how fortunate we are to have a house that feels like home. It’s quirky and eclectic. It’s comfy and welcoming. It has room for guests. It’s got most of the important things spot on, and who cares about the green, sticky linoleum, right? (Okay, I do. My socks were totally sticking to the floor while I made dinner last night.)

Yes, I wish the mess and the dirt didn’t bother me.

And some days, I even wish I could learn to love the dirt itself.

I wish the smeared yogurt on the table from breakfast, the dried piece of playdoh, the determined old-house spiders that keep making a thin web in the corner by the front door—I wish I could look at all of those things and say,

We live here.

We eat here.

We play here.

We love here.

This is us.

Love,

Your Momma

Dear Daughters,

When I was a little girl, I spent a few days each summer at Grandma and Pappy Lehman’s house. I walked in the morning with my grandma and her TOPS friends, learned how to weed a garden, played UNO in the evenings. Each summer, we’d spend a few hours cleaning her spoon collection. I slept in the purple bedroom at the end of the hall.

One of the best things about visiting Gram and Pap’s was getting to go to work with Gram because Gram was a cleaning lady.

I loved going into those big empty houses. They were never very messy or dirty, but that’s probably because Gram cleaned them regularly. My favorites were the ones that seemed like mansions to me at the time, the biggish homes in upper-middle class suburbia. The master bedroom beds were all incredibly high, which always seemed so fancy to me. I have friends who live in those kinds of houses now.

I don’t know if visiting Gram is when I learned to clean or not, but I sure did learn to clean early on. Cleaning—vacuuming, mopping, dusting, toilets, sinks—and doing dishes and sorting laundry and stripping the bed and remaking it: I don’t remember not knowing how to do these things.

Of course, I still know how to do them.

But I rarely do them. Only when absolutely necessary.

Or so it seems.

We bought this house in 2010, so we’re in our fifth year here, and I’m pretty sure it’s only been cleaned thoroughly twice—both times by your grandma, immediately following one of your births. By “thoroughly,” I mean that the baseboards were wiped down, the windows shined up, the closets sorted through.

It just isn’t a priority for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I don’t prefer a clean house. I like things to be picked up, and I don’t like the mess. I hate feeling the dirt under my bare feet and it annoys me when I find the shirt I want to wear in the dirty laundry basket.

In fact, having the house a wreck really does bother me and stresses me out. Just ask your dad. I especially freak out about the house being a mess when we are about to have people over.

Part of this is because I was raised in an exceptionally clean house with a bathroom that got scrubbed down every week, and this set the standard a bit too high for my own mental health.

And part of this is because I’m embarrassed to let people see my mess.

I wish the latter weren’t the case, but there you have it.

I distinctly remember visiting a friend of mine in Texas and walking into her kitchen to get something to drink. The sink was piled so full of dirty dishes that I couldn’t use the faucet to fill my water glass. I thought to myself, Wow, I really wish I was relaxed enough to have people over with this big of a mess in my kitchen. And then I thought, No, I don’t.

That was before I had children.

Girls, having you in my space perpetually disrupting things and making a mess—for example, pulling the books off a bookshelf I’ve just restocked—has chilled me out a little bit. A very little bit.

If I know people are coming over, I tend to do a quick once-over of wiping up crumbs, throwing all the loose toys into the nearest box or bin, putting the dirty dishes into the sink, if there is room in the sink. Sometimes I even look into the toilet bowl just to make sure it’s been flushed. Sometimes.

But you know what?

Sometimes people stop by unexpectedly. And the house is a mess.

That is life.

Recently, our friends stopped in with their new baby. Of course, I invited them in. I had to step out of the room for a minute when the nine-month-old woke from her nap, and when I came back in, our friend said, “I was just saying that I really love that your house isn’t picked up. It makes me feel so much better.”

That, girls, is profound. People need to know that life isn’t perfect. That it’s messy sometimes, maybe even most of the time.

If your friends—and heck, strangers—only ever see you with your hair done, with your car clean, your books in alphabetical order on our bookshelf, your life all put together, then they’ll never be able to be real with you. And real life is so messy.

So go ahead and disinfect that toilet bowl and throw your dirty clothes in the washing machine. I’m not saying you should be a bum. But I am saying you should be real.

And sometimes the ring inside the toilet bowl is what’s real.

Love,

Your Momma