Coming Clean: Dirty Confessions from Mom
Know what one of the biggest things I’m looking forward to when the kids go back to school in a couple weeks? Restoring order to my house. I am up to my ears in clutter and I am nearing the end of my tolerance level with it all.
I have found myself fantasizing lately about dragging a large garbage can from room to room and purging. Dressers, closets, toy chests, you name it. And what makes the fantasy all the more enjoyable is knowing that I’ll be doing it behind my kids’ backs. Is that bad?
Why is it that life never looks like the Pottery Barn Kids catalogs? I set up this wonderful playroom for the girls, with a retro pink stove and refrigerator, oodles of play food and dishes, a book case full of books and a cozy chair to sit in with those books, and I pictured beribboned girls serenely playing house, serving each other fake tea and cookies on their pretty plastic dishes.
Although they do play house, it usually involves climbing inside the play refrigerator, turning all the little chairs from the little table upside down and draping the covers they tear from their beds over the chairs to make a fort, and strewing the 2,964 pieces of play food from one end of the house to the other.
My kids, for some reason, do not play with toys. They disassemble them. They do not play board games. They scatter them. They do not play serenely. They run through the house screaming like lunatics, leaving in their wake flotsam and jetsam that makes me all clenchy.
Before I had kids, I prided myself on the motto “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” A few friends would get their kicks by moving a single knickknack on a shelf in my living room when I wasn’t looking and then waiting to see if I would notice (I would). When my husband and I worked together before we were married, he thought it was funny to mess with things on my very organized desk.
Obviously, I’ve been forced to relax my standards a little more with each baby I’ve had (six to date), and a husband who isn’t a neat freak by any stretch of the imagination. The kids trash the house, scattering toys, books, games, and clothes from one end of the house to the other every day. There is an area of the kitchen counter that has become the clutter pile. The cedar chest at the foot of our bed almost always holds a pile of my husband’s un-put-away clothes. So I let them make their messes (although it does set my teeth on edge), although I demand that most everything be cleaned up at the end of the day. There’s nothing worse than waking up in the morning to yesterday’s mess.
The beds get made every morning. The dishes get done after every meal. The floor gets swept several times a day, because the kids are constantly dropping crumbs and whatnot wherever they tread. I do a few loads of laundry nearly every day, although I’ve started slacking a bit on folding it and putting it away right away.
It’s sort of therapy to me. It’s like, if I can keep some order in the midst of disorder, I feel a little less out of control. This has followed me around for most of my life, stemming from a childhood steeped in chaos. So under normal circumstances, I’m a bit anal retentive, but man, if I get really stressed out or upset, watch out! You’ll likely find me cleaning out closets, reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, steam cleaning the carpet, and scrubbing things I don’t usually scrub.
I need to restore order for my own mental health. My chi is off, I tell you. Purge, reorganize, scrub. The kids have had their fun, and time is running out. It’s almost my turn.
Lisa is a 40-something married SAHM of six children, ranging in age from one to twelve years old, including a set of twins and a baby with Down syndrome.
