Freezing the Mess

a blog hop featuring A Moment in Time, with the ladies of Exhale Creativity

He tucked himself in between navy blue cushions and the couch no one uses regularly. He grabbed his headphones and from the kitchen I heard him singing to himself. I looked over and the smile that’s missing a few front teeth is stretched across his face,

“It’s raining tacos! On Christmas Eve. Tacos, you better believe!”

He’s lost in his own little world. A day off from school. A couch cushion fort. Jamming to his music.

Four of the five of our tribe are home, compliments of a teacher in service day (in September! The second one! But I digress…) Only the four-year-old is away for a couple hours of preschool. He donned his older brother’s oversized Transformers rain jacket, and the alligator umbrella I bought on clearance at Hobby Lobby last summer. He immediately jumps into a puddle the moment his feet leave the minivan and land on the parking lot. That’s why we wear the rainboots, I think to myself. And why I packed extra clothes in his backpack today.

When I get home from preschool drop off, my six-year-old is sitting at the kitchen table with LEGOs, scraps of cut out paper, and crayons covering the entire surface. This is the child who scatters his treasures on any open space—crayons across the dining room table, his collection of favorite stuffed animals everywhere (on his bed, the bottom of the stairs, the living room floor, the basement couch), LEGOs on the floor at the top of the stairs, coins not tucked in his piggy bank but instead stacked in neat rows of dollar increments on his dresser. Everywhere he goes, his treasures leave a trail behind him. “Please take your things to your room!” is my most repeated, *ahem* shouted, phrase around the house.

***

The arrival of fall brought a change for our family. For the first time in seven years, all three boys are in school, overlapping a few hours a week. I’ve fantasized about this day since my oldest started kindergarten three years ago, imagining which coffee shop I would visit, which specialty drink I would order, and which thrift store I would browse, basing the decision on the proximity to my kids’ school so I would minimize the amount of travel I would waste in the car.

What I pictured was a frozen moment of bliss: an extra hot spicy chai tea latte at my side while I vigorously tap, tap, tapped the keyboard and filled a Google doc with essay drafts upon essay drafts.

But on the first Monday when all three children were in school, I was laid up in bed sicker than I had been in years. Because of food poisoning (or perhaps a serendipitous reminder to rest) I needed to stay within ten feet of a bathroom and remain horizontal lest my insides regurgitated with Hulk force. If we were freezing a snapshot of my own motherhood, this isn’t a photograph I want to remember. 

I emerged from my forced 24 hour shut down and jumped right back into carpool lines, karate practices, homework worksheets, church commitments, and classroom volunteering. If you took a picture of me this week, it would most assuredly be blurry.

***

If you froze a snapshot of me on any other given afternoon, you’d see bookmarked pages of my library read in the carpool line (currently Maggie Smith’s stunning memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful) and a front seat littered with beef jerky wrappers and Graham cracker crumbs. (Glamourous, I know. ) I’m an Uber driver in an ancient always-needs-to-be-cleaned-minivan and no one is filming me for the cover of a magazine.

***

The week after the couch fort and LEGO explosion, I was listening to a daily devotion in the Lectio 365 app when a phrase jumped out at me.

“…at its heart creativity is about communication.”, the speaker continued, “It is about how we respond imaginatively to our circumstances in order to forge connections and bring ideas to life.” (Izwe Nkosi)

I paused for a moment, frustrated—again— by the mess I was already anticipating from my kids. I had to leap over LEGOs at the top of the stairs to go down for my cup of coffee. There were books lining the stairs from a game of The Floor is Lava the night before. There were giant Bluey coloring pages sticky with maple syrup at the breakfast table. Mess after mess after mess.

But instead of immediately rage cleaning, I remembered that phrase: creativity is communication. And while forgotten books and sticky coloring sheets don’t outright look like creativity, they do communicate something.

I want to make time for this.

My kids are communicating through their messes that which brings them delight. Forgotten forts are imaginary castles. Books on a staircase are an evening of adventure. Sticky coloring pages tell us that the act of creating is as necessary to them as eating pancakes before school. The art cart next to our kitchen table is regularly overflowing and used multiple times a day by each of my three children. I’ve spent years praying that I would be able to foster creativity in them. That they would choose to make something out of seemingly nothing. Praying that they would see beauty in the mundane. Beauty in the everyday. Beauty in the mess.

I used to be embarrassed by the mess. Mostly I worried that it was a refection of poor housekeeping. And while I’m generally a proponent of rhythms that help keep a tidy home like Saturday morning chores, I’m no longer bound by some archaic notion that a mostly stay-at-home mom should have a house that doesn’t look lived in. (Or any home with children for that matter. )

You won’t find that here.

Instead you’ll see that the seven-year-old sandwiched between his elaborate fort is growing bigger than the cushions. He used to nap only in my arms, his tiny, chunky legs poking out from a baby wrap for his mid afternoon snooze. Now when he sits, his knees are full up to his chin and his body length takes up half the couch when he snuggles up to watch a movie with me.

That six-year-old with his piles of treasures across the house, he’s communicating: these are important to me. The pile of coins he earned from a lemonade stand and pulling weeds? He told me he keeps them on display to remind him of his hard work. His LEGO creations– currently a space station, a five piece band, and a one room schoolhouse–carried back and forth from his room to the kitchen table communicates his imagination brought to life. His box of neon and glitter crayons often remain dumped out across the table because he likes arranging things in rainbow order, all the reds, then oranges, then yellows, and so on. He drags his blanket with him all over the house communicating what makes him comfortable. He’s communicating what he sees as beautiful and important in his life.

The four-year-old is mostly communicating through laughter and screams, but when I catch a glimpse of him actively creating– lining up every single one of his action figures in a row, pulling an entire stack of books from the bookshelf, always asking to scramble the eggs to help with breakfast, he’s communicating: I want everything that is possibly available to me. I want it all. In the most brilliant “the world is your oyster” type of way.

***

It’s taken nearly 8 years of parenting to realize that these messes, these unruly, cluttered, sometimes headache inducing, beautiful messes, are communication. Its forging connection and bringing ideas to life. What a gift.

These messes are their childhood.

Freezing these messes for a moment in time, remind me that we are creating a life here. From the messy minivan with endless cracker crumbs and forgotten uniforms to a kitchen table full of crayons and LEGOs, we are communicating: life is good here. What a messy, beautiful, wonderful life.

***

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Moment in Time".