Why I Love My Messes (Rambling, Really)

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm particular - especially when it comes to my closet. Particular hangers for particular items (spaced equal distances apart, of course), every shirt folded in the same direction, shoes still in the boxes that I bought them in - that's me.  I was the girl who stored my rollerblades and my basketball and my outdoorsy things in my bedroom so that they wouldn't get the usual nasty on them from being stored in the garage. I was also the girl who vacuumed out my car every afternoon when I was in high school. And I was the girl who cleaned my siblings' rooms in my spare time - because I enjoyed it.

I was proud of the order - I was proud of the clean.

It goes without saying that, once I had children, I realized that my life was going to get a lot messier. (And it did.) This afternoon, though, it was really bad. Having been sick for the past three days, the messes had accumulated - I had a pile of dishes that needed to be washed, bathrooms needed to be cleaned, linens that needed laundering, floors that needed to be vacuumed and mopped, and, on top of it, I had a series of small Madelyn messes that needed to be picked up.

Three illustrations (just because Madelyn's messes are cute to me):

[She raided my bathroom cabinet - her favorite cabinet.

I'll be picking up bottles of nail polish from random spots 

in the house for the next several days.]

[She left me a pile of toilet paper in the half-bath.

This is really a daily thing at this point.]

[And because there's no toy cooler than trash, 

she left several little piles of trash like this one

 all over the living room.]

But today I did something that always makes me feel good -  I ignored the mess. I ignored it, not in the I'm-gonna-become-a-hoarder sense but in the I'm-gonna-enjoy-the-afternoon sense. Because today was the first day in three days that I wasn't miserably sick, Taylor and I made cookies, and I sewed Madelyn a pair of pants - and that was it. And what about tonight? Richard and I will inevitably watch a couple of hours of television together and offer pointless commentary to each other like we always do when we watch television - and that will be it.

All the things I didn't do today? I'll wake up to them tomorrow.

But I'll be proud of the chaos. I'll be proud of the mess. 

I'm Megan, and I'm a reformed clean-a-holic. :-)