This messy life

I have a confession to make: I have major league basement envy. That’s right: I envy your basements. I live in a place where basements are not practical and attics are too hot to be finished in most cases. Instead, I have a house that is exactly how many square feet it says it is: no more, no less. All our living is done in that square footage. There’s no bonus room, no stairwell down to a nice, contained kid area; my children do all their toy-dragging and playing right in my paneled living room in full view of every single visitor to our home. I am fully convinced that a  finished basement would be like having two houses in one.

Despite my best efforts and even a fair amount of closet storage, my daily battle is with clutter. I feel like we have toys and shoes and plates and art paper coming out of our very ears. I berate myself for having a cluttered, almost always messy house. I wish that I could have one of those big, airy houses that never sees a stray crumb or a year-old bill stub wafting through the air whenever a door is slammed. I wish that I could allow guests to look under my sofas without fear that they might find actual (petrified) food or cat vomit lying in wait. I spend some part of every day not just cleaning the daily messes — the toys, the disassembled sofa/fort, the beds, the wrappers and dirty dishes and waffle bits — but I am also forever trying to make a dent, however small, in the clutter.

The clutter laughs at me. It chuckles. It snickers. It guffaws. I can never tell that I did anything at all when the end of the day comes around. There are still toys strewn across the hardwood floors. There are always, always pencils and crayons and markers peeking from beneath the sofas, under the kitchen table, and in the hallways. Clean laundry sits on the stairwell in stacks waiting to be put away, dirty laundry lies on the floor of my laundry room, threatening to rise up and overtake us all. When every head is on a pillow but mine, I walk the house, gingerly tripping over stray Legos, to find  school papers and bills conjugating on the kitchen island, rogue little boy underwear lounging on chairs, wet towels huddled in the corners of the bathrooms. I go to sleep with a defeated sigh, because I feel something like a failure. Shouldn’t I be able to get things under control at some point? I feel like I am in one of those cartoons — “Roadrunner,” maybe? — where I am hanging onto the dam, and water keeps busting through holes, and I am stretched, Twister-like, trying to cover each new spout with various body parts. I’m out of body parts. The mess is winning.

One of my very favorite artists is Norman Rockwell. His pictures feel safe and familiar to me. I know those people. I love those scenes. He drew everyday life, but he also had something to say about his country, and I love that the life he depicted in his pictures was distinctly American. This time of year, I love to see the seasonal Rockwell prints — the Thanksgiving dinners, the scenes of New England life in fall and winter. Recently, I was looking through some Rockwell prints when I realized that the wonderful slices of American life that he captured were familiar to me in part because they are messy. They are cluttered. They don’t show perfect, airy houses without crumbs or overflowing bookshelves. These pictures that I love show homes not sparkling nor spotless. They are real, and they are messy.

I love Norman Rockwell’s messy, cluttered American houses. Why can’t I give myself and my family the permission to live in the same? Six people live here, along with a very large, somewhat clumsy dog and a dainty and persistent white cat. My kitchen counters are not spotless like the ones in magazines. They are cluttered with the stand mixer I use to bake the kids cookies and pumpkin bread, three lunchboxes for three little boys, an electric pencil sharpener that only works occasionally, and the brush and detangler I use every morning to tame the children’s cowlicks. My sofa is forever in disarray, but it’s because three pajama-clad children pad down the stairs and cuddle there every morning while they wake up, kicking the cushions off in the process, and collapse there every afternoon in sweaty exhaustion after the school day is over. The bathroom is often a hazmat zone, and I bemoan the fact that my house never smells clean, but at this point, I just thank the universe that I only have one child in diapers. My kitchen table is sticky and the patio is littered with old play-doh and a billion plastic superheroes. But I can forgive myself for all this. I can even forgive myself for having an X-wing fighter in my shower. I have three little boys and a baby and a husband with a demanding job, and this is their home, and this is our life. Norman Rockwell? I think he would dig my house.