This morning, as I stood in the kitchen making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Grant yelled from upstairs, “Mommy! I dropped my toothbrush and the toothpaste got all over the wall!”
“Well, just wipe it off the wall and put it back on your toothbrush,” I said, spreading jam on bread. It didn’t even occur to me until later in the morning that a few years ago, I’d never have thought that, much less said it.
Do I know which wall had the toothpaste smeared upon it?
No.
Do I care?
Not particularly.
Whenever I do see it, I’ll clean it up. And yes, we do clean the house. But “clean” is a relative term when you’re harboring six-year-old twins and an elderly and often incontinent bichon frisé.
I’m not a bad mom or a careless one, and my kids aren’t hellions. They’re delightful, normal children. I’ve just been a mom for a while now. Six and a half years of spills, smears, messes, and broken stuff (usually lamps). I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore because there’s none of it left.
When the kids are old enough to end a meal with all the food either in their stomachs or on their plates (what’s that, 13 or so?) and our dog shuffles off the mortal coil, I figure we’ll replace the furniture and be able to have people over. And we’ll invest in new lamps so we won’t walk into every other room and be like, “Oh, yeah, this is one of the rooms where the lamps don’t work.”
Until then, I marvel at those of you whose houses aren’t slightly sticky all over and covered with goldfish crumbs, broken crayons, and chalk dust. Where do you keep the kids?
It’s not that I’m not obsessive about things. My kids wear sunscreen almost every day. And I’ve trained them pretty darn well about the whole hand-washing bit. We read. A LOT. But I also hear them fighting upstairs and have gotten to the point where I yell, “Work it out or you’re both headed to time-out!”
Do I know how it works out?
No. But it almost always does.
Mark and I re-watched Shakespeare in Love the other day. Throughout the movie, different, freaked-out characters kept asking “How will it all work out?” and the theater manager says, “It will. I don’t know how, but it will. It’s a mystery.”
For me right now, that kind of sums up parenting. Messy, and a mystery.
I have definitely become so much more lax since becoming a mom. I had a brief moment where I became the obsessive mom about messes when we moved into a new house this summer… but that quickly passed.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I was so obsessive about things as a new mom…for about a month.
It would be nice to have a pristine house, but I’d have no life and the kids would hate me. Glad to know I’m not the only one!
There’s only so much you can worry about is what I say!
And, by the way, I love your header!
Parenting is SO messy. Sometimes I look at my house and think it will never be clean again, but it will be, and then I’ll be sad that my kids aren’t 8 and 5 and making messes everywhere.
I let the crumbs sit there until they’re both in bed.
Then I break out the cleaning materials. 😉
And, we’ve pretty much given up on our fabric couch. Note to self: buy leather, easier to clean.
This is so perfect. My kitchen tile was starting to look like it was taking on a different design before I mopped it the other day. I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that our house will be ours again someday.
Thank you for this post. I needed it today!
Giggling because we have a room where the lamps don’t work. And you’re right; it is messy and mysterious, intriguing and teaching, but it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. Also, I am so not cleaning that.
We are living, temporarily, with my parents. I am losing my mind because my mom is so OCD about cleaning, and my tongue is half gone from biting it when she insists that the kids pick up every.single.thing. before leaving the house.
Yes. This. Exactly.
My house is sticky and full of love and books. Also, “Shakespeare in Love” is one of my favorite movies.