Loud and Lived In

My house is a mess.

Once, from my spot in an office chair at a desk that I sat at for 5 years, I thought that stay at home moms must have the cleanest homes of all. I mean, they are home all day, right? Why wouldn't their houses be clean? The scary thing: I was thinking this even having been a Women's Studies minor. How un-feminist of me.

This is what I know after having been a stay at home mom for almost as long as I worked in that office: Our houses are not super clean. There are toys, boots and dress up clothes strewn everywhere.

This is not because we don't pick up a few times a day. We do.

This is not because we're lazy. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to be lazy when you can't even use the bathroom alone.

This is not because we don't care what our houses look like. We do. Just a lot less than we used to. As my husband knows, I like things neat and orderly, and usually by the end of the day, 85% of the house is put back that way. But in the mean time?

We're living here, every day, most of the day. We're playing here, inside and outside. We're learning. We're laughing. We're creating.

You know what I'm not doing? Using every spare minute to clean this house just so it can be cluttered the next minute. A little birdie once told me that cleaning with kids in the house is like brushing your teeth while eating Oreos. That little birdie is correct.

Another little birdie told me that I have years ahead of me when my house will be so clean... because no little ones will be living in it. No one will be pretending the dining room table is a secret fort or overturning the couch cushions in a frantic search for lost treasure. No one will be rummaging through the dress-up bin looking for a glass slipper or building elaborate walls and roadways in every room.

When I get discouraged about my messy house, I try to keep the above in mind. Someday my house will be clean, and it will be quiet. But right now it is loud and lived in, the way homes are meant to be.