People Live Here

When I first got married and we got our first house, I had a really specific idea of what the house should look like.  It had to have this wallpaper and that shade of paint, and the furniture had to be arranged this certain way.  These particular pictures had to be on the wall and I was never happy, or satisfied, because I always saw room for improvement.

I can honestly say I have lost that point of view.  Completely.  When we moved to the house we're in now, it was stuck in a mid-70's time warp.  The rooms were all closed off from each other, there was paneling lining the walls of the family room, and the carpet was, to put it delicately, freakin' nasty.  I had Nathan and Sarah when we moved in here and Logan was just a baby...his autism had not begun to emerge yet.  I can say that the biggest things we did were put a fresh coat of paint in some rooms, replace the carpet with bamboo due to Nathan's allergies, and knock down a wall between the family room and dining room.  I removed part of the paneling (and now I wish I hadn't), and then things sort of creaked to a standstill.  Logan grew.  His autism emerged.  We were caught up in everything that life threw at us...figuring out what was wrong with our youngest son, parenting all three kids...we were busy.  I slowly let go of the need to have coordinating curtains and throw pillows.  I tolerated the half-finished walls in the family room.  It just wasn't a priority anymore.

The other thing I struggled with was just keeping the house clean.  I thrive on order. When the housework goes downhill, my mood goes with it.  My children were like three little Tasmanian devils, whirling through the day, leaving toys and candy wrappers in their wake.  Clutter piled up.  Dirty dishes and rank laundry seemed to breed out of control and my frustration grew.

Until.

Until one day when my friend Caroline came over for a visit. Caroline...I've mentioned her before.  She lives around the corner from me and she is an honest to gosh child of the 60's.  I love her.  She's sassy and funny and cuts through BS like a katana through butter.  She sat in my living room and we talked about whatever...I don't remember now.  What I do remember is complaining to her that I was stressed, and apologizing for the house being in a mess. I also remember her looking at me like I had lost all my marbles:

"Don't apologize for that!" she said.

"Well, it's really messy,"  I said.

"Who cares?  Listen, this is just how it is!  You're busy!  You've got kids!  Hell, people LIVE here!!"

Oh.  People live here??  You mean I am not trapped in a magazine spread, where every surface has to be kept free of dust, where dishes are meant to be admired and not eaten off of, where the sofa and loveseat and even the gosh darn curtains had better be crisp and clean and smell like roses??

I know, it's stupid. Of course, it's not a magazine spread.  But I had had that mind-set for so long.  That everything had to be perfect.  Listening to her say that, I felt this weight just lift off of me.  And I learned to forgive myself for one more human thing I was doing...trying to raise three kids, one of them a very needy child, and keep things as normal as possible at the same time.

Now we have a baby in the house.  And the clutter and the laundry are piling up again...because Miss Abby, my newest little one...she demands attention.  She likes to be held.  She likes to be paid attention to.  Who doesn't?  So.  I look at the random things scattered and stacked throughout the house...papers and laundry and books and t-shirts.  Empty cups, a package of cookies.  Shoes, not on the shoe rack.  Candy wrappers and random doo-dads.  Our lives, strewn throughout the house in all their glory.  I look at these things and my bad self, the one who likes to give me a hard time and tell me I'm not doing a great job...she stands there with her hands on her hips and says, "What are you doing?"  And I glance at all these things on the floor and the countertops, these things that can wait another day, they aren't going anywhere, and then I smile.  "I'm living, baby.  We all are."