June 2, 2022
There’s beautiful silence for a little while. The kids are off somewhere playing contentedly, and in the space this creates, I become absorbed with something of my own. This feels like a down payment on the promise of future free time as we evolve out of this all-consuming stage of three kids so young and dependent. So tantalizing. For a moment I feel like I got this–no tablets, no fights, just kids and mom, each blissfully at play on their own.
But in the wake of silence, there’s carnage. While I was sneaking solitude, the kids were destroying their bedroom. A predictable tax on the good business of leaving them alone.
Legos left out in the den. Kids’ dirty laundry on the floor of their bedroom, our own washed laundry clean, in a pile, in ours. Crumbs on the counter. Drips on the cupboards. Half the baby’s breakfast at the foot of the chair where she ate it this morning.
It’s a typical scene in our family life: someone has made a mess, someone leaves the mess, the mess bothers me. Often I start to clean it up with a willing heart, content if not happy to serve. But I’m hard pressed to tell where my love for the mess-maker ends and my own desire for beauty and order begins. The story I tell myself is that cleaning is a my work on their behalf. In this story, I become the martyr, suffering unfairly for their good. I recognize a part of it is for me, to create the space I desire. But shouldn’t they all want this too? Isn’t a clean, orderly home, a haven of beauty and calm, a reasonable expectation to place on them? Shouldn’t they share the burden of making it reality, even if the dream is often of my making?
And so, while I may start from a place of service freely given, inevitably there comes a time when the joyful offering evaporates and my heart seethes with resentment. The mess becomes more than just an unsightly interruption, but an insult, a sign that someone so disrespects me that they would dare to leave things strewn across the house, leave crumbs and smudges and spills, leave clothes on the floor inches from the laundry basket and books in a tumble inches from the bookshelf and expect that someone, whose time is obviously less important, will follow and magically make it go away.
The problem is, they’re often right. It bothers me more than any other member of the household, so most of the time, it’s me coming behind and cleaning up someone else’s mess. The expectation keeps being validated, and the mess keeps being made.
I hate it. I hate the messes, and I hate how unfair it feels.
I don’t treat people this way. I bend over backward to avoid being a burden. I profusely apologize (that’s probably unhealthy) and sincerely thank (healthier) people who step in to fix a mess of my making. I have little sense of what others owe me, or even what I might expect to receive as a gift. I press on when I’m sick, or if I’m truly bed-ridden, like, appendicitis, excessively sorry and grateful for the work it causes someone else (again, probably unhealthy). When others’ messes get pushed onto me, and I’m not afforded the chance to choose to offer my service, but am pressed into with all the entitlement of a toddler, I rage against it in my order and justice-loving little heart. I drop passive aggressive comments until the rage overflows and I snap at the mess-makers. The house gets clean-ish, and everyone knows I’m pissed about it.
In the back of my mind a quiet voice reminds me, of course I have a choice. Their mess left untouched doesn’t require my intervention. But it is so hard not to viscerally feel that it does, that the mess maker even intended it that way, that no one else will take care of it if I don’t. I feel like I’m pressed into unwilling service picking up after others, but at least some part of the labor is me, pursuing my own goal of a tidy house–however ineffectively.
Kids play happily without adult supervision, kids destroy their bedroom; it’s like a law of nature. Most of the time I can keep the door closed, remain unperturbed through avoidance. But come bedtime, I’m forced to navigate my way through the floor studded with Peppa Pig camper van parts, trip over stacks of books so tall they’ve slid across the carpet. There’s nowhere to walk, nowhere to sit. My heart sinks, then revolts. I don’t want to be in a space that looks like this.
The bluntest of tools in the mom toolkit finds me snapping at my kids, picking it it up myself and all the while letting them know how annoyed I am. Same old story. No one will be surprised to hear this generates exactly zero change in behavior.
But over the past year, I’ve been untangling a dynamic at work in me in all kinds of areas, surfacing in the burdens I take on ranging from the wayward stack of books to disgruntled co-workers’ emotions: enmeshment. Through some frustrating relational dynamics outside of my family, processed through the insightful and compassionate space of spiritual direction, this dynamic, usually buried deep below surface reactions, has risen to the top like cream, enabling me to see it in a fresh way. In the light, there’s a trend I can identify, and having named it, face it. I habitually take on a burden that isn’t mine. I try to fix and control things beyond me. I over-function to compensate. And while other people’s behavior instigates this drive, no one can change the underlying dynamic but me (or more accurately, God, working in me as a willing participant).
Apparently I can’t nag my way to the kids cleaning up their room. And cleaning it for them only ensures I’ll keep cleaning it for them. If they don’t desire the oasis of a nicely ordered space, I can’t make them. I could just accept it and let their mess become normal. But their mess corrodes my spirit, sending me into a pit of despair.
The thing I think of that I can control is choosing not to spend time in that kind of space.
One day I change my approach. At bed time I tell them, calmly and without judgment, I don’t like how it feels to be in a room that’s messy like this. I don’t want to spend a lot of time in this room when it is like this. I’ll put you to bed but I am not going to stick around and snuggle for a long time because the chaos doesn’t feel good to me.
It gets their attention. They protest and whine, but I hold firm. Good night my beautiful sweet children, I love you and I can’t wait to spend more time with you tomorrow, in a space that is not so messy!
The next time it’s a mess, I say the same thing. This time, they ask for my help in cleaning it up, which I offer. But they just stand there waiting for me to do it for them. I don’t nag. I just let them know that I can’t help if they aren’t helping too.
The next time, the cleaning goes faster; they do their part more willingly. It’s still a big lift from me to actually get it done, but they’re willingly pitching in and the room gets clean.
Last night, it was another huge mess, bigger than usual. It’s been an odd week, kids with stomach bugs, air conditioning being replaced, everything is out of order. No wonder their room is following suit. I repeat my usual line about not wanting to spend a lot of time in a messy space, and they snap into action. Each of them starts tackling an area they like to play with–the older one running around snapping up books and carefully assessing where they fit, the younger one meticulously replacing the tiny play ice cream pieces in her play ice cream shop. It’s painfully slow, but without complaining or dawdling.
“I notice you’re doing a great job picking up the book category,” I tell my son. “How can I help?”
“You take the dirty clothes category,” he tells me.
“No problem!” When I’m done with that, he assigns me another category.
“Where should this go?” he asks, showing me some of the books. “How about these?”
Together we talk through what belongs where, and put things back into places that make sense. He decides to clear the enormous stack of books creeping to cover the entire desk and put most of them back on the shelf. “There, that looks nice,” he says, stepping back.
He reconsiders, “Hmmm, maybe I’ll just put these few books there. That’s not too much.”
In a few minutes, we’re done, and the room is as clean as the room of a 3 and 5 year old whose parents don’t even dare to strive for Instagram perfection will be. We grab hands and do a silly dance to celebrate, then jump on the bed all at once, collapsing into giggles. They take turns jumping from the floor right on top of me, and the giggles continue. We lay back to survey our handiwork.
“It looks so nice!” I exclaim; “it is so fun to be in your room when there aren’t toys all over the floor!”
“Yeah!” they say, savoring their victory.
The five year old looks in my eyes and murmurs softly, “Mom, I liked when we were saying ‘how about if we put this there?’ and ‘where should this go?’ It was nice.”
Most of the time their passivity is enabled by my overfunctioning. If I finish the proverbial sentence, they never have to complete the thought. They get used to it. I don’t like how it feels but keep engaging in the behavior that perpetuates it. But now, I’ve disrupted the system. I stopped providing the service they became accustomed to, and they learned they could do it themselves. Later in the week my son becomes progressively ambitious in his cleaning, directing his sister in cleaning up categories, cleaning up without me present and asking for me to pause until he’s done to see the final product. It’s like he’s caught the vision!
I know this isn’t necessarily a permanent change–his dedication will ebb and flow, and depends to some extent on the signals I send. But for the time being, I savor the small victory. Not a clean room, per se, but withholding the impetus to do it myself, and making space for them to do it, in their own way.
A couple days later he’s carrying his dinner bowl from the table back to the kitchen and spills, giant sploshes of ricotta sauce spread like abstract art against the black floor. He looks up at me. “Uh oh.”
He’s paused, waiting for my reaction. It’s so easy to groan in exasperation “Why weren’t you more careful?” But some divine grace pulls it out of my throat before it can come out and instead what I say is “Oh no, the aliens have invaded! They’re all over the kitchen! We have to grab them with our intergalactic weapons!”
I grab the bottle of cleaning spray and hand it to him. “Get ‘em! Get ‘em! Before they get us!”
As he aims it at the spill, I make video game sound effects, “Pi-ow! Pi-ow!” egging him on, then swooping in with the paper towel.
“Another one! Over there! Get it! Pi-ow!” He turns and sprays another splash, and another, until we’ve cleaned it all up together.
He looks up at me, smiling and proud. “We got all the aliens!”
