The Never Ending Mess

It's the mess again.

It's driving me crazy.

I am picking up toys, and broken crayons, and scraps of paper, when I realize, Wait, I just cleaned this room. This morning. Or maybe it was yesterday morning. Or, well, it could have been last week. But whatever. I just cleaned it. And now I'm cleaning it again.

I want to be the kind of mom who drops everything and runs outside to play hide and seek with her children. I have the second part down. I do play hide and seek with my children. But I'm not good at the dropping everything part. In fact, there are certain things that must get done before I'm playing hide and seek or anything else.

The dishes, for one.

And the laundry. At least some of it.

And the toys must be out of middle of the living room floor.

Yes, sometimes this means moving them to the perimeter of the living room floor.

But the thing is, by the time I do the dishes, and some of the laundry, and move the toys to the perimeter of the living room floor, it's time to feed someone again. So there are more dishes. And someone spills something and needs a new shirt, so there's more laundry. And while I'm doing the dishes and the laundry, they pull out all the toys that I just put away, and move them all back to the middle of the living room floor.

So then I have to decide to just play hide and seek anyway, but there, in the back of my mind, are the dishes, and the laundry, and the toys. Piling up, higher and higher inside my head, until I want to go hide in the kitchen to do the dishes while they are seeking me outside.

Lately, B has been working on cutting and pasting in preschool. These are important skills to have, because you never know when you'll need to cut and/or paste in adulthood. And no, I'm not talking about the little tabs on your computer. This is REAL cutting and pasting. And apparently, if you don't practice cutting and pasting, you'll never be any good at it. So B's teachers suggested that I encourage him to practice cutting and pasting. And I think they may have suggested to him that he practice cutting and pasting, because that's what he's been doing for some part of every day. In spite of the fact that I did not, in fact, encourage cutting and pasting.

Way, way too messy.

So he sits at the kitchen table, and he cuts. And then he colors. And then he pastes. And then he cuts some more. Colors some more. Pastes some more. I think he must be really, really good at it by now. So good, in fact, that maybe we could even stop all this practicing.

But he's not ready to stop. He's into it, this cutting and pasting.

And so each day, he cuts and pastes and cuts and pastes, so that he can become really good at it and not have to practice anymore. And so that, two or three times a day, I can spend three hours picking up pieces of paper off the floor under the kitchen table.

I was recently doing this for 5,427th time when I realized that some of these weren't just scraps of paper, but very small drawings which he had colored and cut out, and for whatever reason decided not to paste. Drawings of people. And boats. And dogs. And trees.

And that's when it hit me.

He's not a cutter and a paster.

He's an artist.

And this, I realized, is just what life is when you live with an artist. Or three.

Those aren't scraps of paper on the floor. They're masterpieces.

Or, you know, at least by-products of masterpieces.

And the other pieces of paper that I find myself picking up frequently throughout the day--the ones with random letters, or words, or occasionally even sentences written on them, well they are masterpieces in their own right.

There are some amazing sentences, too, like I love my sister, and My brother is my bro, and Stop calling me a stupid robot.

And of course, there are the toys. Always so many toys. Is it possible that they, too, could be more than just small, plastic, annoying pieces of crap for me to trip over, step over, and generally lose my mind over?

Maybe our home is more than just the place where we raise our children, and the place that I find myself constantly having to clean.

Maybe it's an artists' colony.

A writer's retreat.

A theater.

An imaginary world of kings, and queens, and dragon slayers. Of explorers, and pirates, and superheros. A world where princesses work as veterinarians, as they wait for a prince to save them. Or maybe Spider man. Or maybe no one, since princess veterinarians can take care of themselves just fine, thank you very much. It's a world where pirates live on mountain tops next to kings of foreign lands, and where their ships are taken over by mermaids.

It's a world where pictures of sea creatures are painted, and pictures of our family are sketched, and pictures of their futures begin to grow somewhere in the back of their minds. It's their canvas, and their blank page, and their stage.

All in one.

So there's a little paint on the walls of their castle, a little paper on the floor of their ship, and a few toys scattered around their secret island.

You can call it a mess if you want.

But me?

I'll be playing hide and seek.