Somedays I don’t know where to begin. There’s the pile of dishes in the sink, the laundry in the dryer, the dinner meat still sitting in the freezer, the beds that need to be stripped and changed, oh and the article deadlines that loom over my head. They’re all waiting for me. All hanging onto my ankles, begging for attention. At times it feels like I’m in a Steeler’s Wheels song, “Cobwebs to the left of me, dustballs to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with a grimy floor.”
I’d like to note that I’m not a sloppy person, per say. I clean a room everyday, are constantly at the mercy of the washer and dryer, and run a fairly “surface” clean home.
However, somedays I’m taped out. I’m so bored and overwhelmed from it all that each miniscule task feels like I’m dragging a boulder down the street. I know it needs to be done, but I’d much rather be curled up with my book, or a good show, decompressing.
So, instead I reluctantly drag myself around the house starting to clean one room, before heading into another-only to give each one a quick pick up before flopping myself on the couch in defeat.
On one evening in particular, after I sat through two hours of 1 & 2’s baseball game, and chased 3 all around the premises of the outlining field, I came home to a house that had vomited all over itself. Shiny breakfast, lunch, or dinner remains shone from the dining room table, dirt from the boys cleats clung to my living room floor, handprints covered the upstairs banister, sweaty socks and jockey shorts with cups spilled over the full hamper, shreds of the dog’s bed lay all around my house-a warm welcome to a dog who was clearly as tired of being in her crate for 3 hours as I was of being on another sports field, and pieces of the puzzle #3 started before we left, as well as the toys he played with, were everywhere. Just looking at the mess was overwhelming. And that is exactly why I refused to touch it.
I simply stepped over the legos, kicked the empty water bottle out of my way, walked into my room and shut the door on it all.
I’d like to think that I should have put the kids to bed and immediately started cleaning up. But I was too tired to be that person. I was too defeated, and overwhelmed with the house, the 3 kids, the husband’s late schedule, and time spent as a: mom/wife/housekeeper/taxi/pto member/household finance manager/sister/daughter.
So my mess stayed exactly as I found it until I was ready to address it in the morning. Luckily for me no one popped in or visited my home, because it took me a day and a half to fix the mess that probably took less time to create.
The truth is, while I want that clean house, the time and energy it takes to get there is sometimes overwhelming. I’d much rather put that time into reading, watching tv, or lounging with the kids. And I worry that those expectations make me a lazy person. But then I search my Pinterest account for motivational quotes or “quick cleaning methods,” while I sit and ignore my angry overloaded dishwasher, and finally listen to what Pinterest has been trying to tell me.
“A good mom has dirty dishes, dirty floors, dirty laundry, and happy children,” it tells me.
And if Pinterest wants to tell me that, over how to make my floors look like I’ve washed them, that I’m going to accept it and bask in my dirty house. The only question I wonder is, does this equation have a time association? I mean, does this statement only apply for one day, or an hour, or is it everlasting-like the life span of the toddler/grade school/teenage years?
