This is my living room/office/dining room/main living area. I know…hush.
I will not lie and say that it usually never looks like this. Actually, I won’t insult either of our highly intelligent minds by saying anything other than: it looks like this most days. Truth. In fact, I’ll go so far as to add that when my home is clean and tidy, we almost don’t know what to do or where to sit. For real. As in “don’t you dare sit there, I just fluffed all those couch pillows” or “don’t even think about taking crackers out of this kitchen!” Look, keeping it super real over here - I don’t have a very good gauge for how to have a happy-medium in all this. I just know that my house runs two temps and two temps only: Company Ready or Hazmat Zone. Ok? Ok.
I keep reading a lot of blogs and articles about this very topic. Lately I’ve seen a lot of people gently massaging various ideas into our heads about homemaker/motherhood stuff. The clean house vs. spending time with your kids vs. free play vs. organized structured life living. It’s all very sweet. Nice thoughts about how the motherhood struggles are “holy ground” or that it's a holy experience raising kids and keeping house and all that. How “chores can wait because blink and your children will be gone”. I’ve read posts meant to placate your guilty mothers hearts out of the kitchen and onto the floor for a game of Twister. Want to bond with your kids? Garden together. Bake together. Pinterest 5,000 ideas to make you feel inferior and then do none of them and feel even worse. I’ve read articles claiming that if I would just organize a chart into four even sections and assign duties accordingly, reward judiciously, and praise abundantly – then I would find my home tidy, my children obedient, and my heart happier.
