Confession: I’m a total neat freak. Freshly vacuumed carpet and stacks of neatly folded towels make my heart skip a beat. After a long day at work, there is nothing better in my world than coming home to a sparkling sink and a perfectly made bed. I’m that annoying girl who prefers to keep all TV remotes inconveniently hidden in a drawer. The crazy girl who has been known, on occasion, to vacuum entire rooms TWICE.
I’m sick.
It’s really hard to keep a house clean all the time. Especially when you have a full-time job and a husband and friends and hobbies and a silly little blog. It can make you crazy. Not Charlie Sheen crazy, but crazy enough to pull your hair out and yell at the spider that somehow managed to weasel his way into your kitchen after you JUST VACUUMED FIVE SECONDS AGO.
(Deep breaths. Count to ten.)
The funny thing about a clean house is that nobody else cares. Nobody else cares if I vacuum a room once or twice or (gasp) not at all. Nobody else cares if there are crumbs under the refrigerator. In my experience, most people don’t even look there. So, what’s all the fuss about? I tend to turn into my most crazy cleaning self prior to having company over. As if my friends (I repeat, MY FRIENDS) would judge me for leaving a cereal bowl in the sink. Of course they wouldn’t.
Oddly enough, I’ve come to the conclusion that I spend a lot of time covering up the fact that we live in our house. Say what? It’s like those pretty rooms in the Pottery Barn catalog that have no dishes in the sink, no toothbrushes in the bathroom, and no clothes in the laundry basket. They are perfectly staged and perfectly un-lived in. Yet, a very real (and very ridiculous) part of me wishes our house looked like that.
So, I’ve decided to take a stand. I am going to choose joy in the mess. Because there is a whole lot of life happening inside my house and it would be a downright shame to hide that. There are stories told over the stove as pots and pans are strewn about. Late nights laughing with friends as dirty dishes sit untouched. A bathroom covered in makeup after primping before a much-needed date. This house is where life happens. Where we tease each other and occasionally fight and have spontaneous dance parties in the bathroom almost every morning. Where we watch movies on the couch and chase each other up the stairs and wrap gifts on the floor and fold socks on the bed. This is our house, and we live here.
It’s not always clean.
Sometimes when life gets busy, our house is a complete mess. But it’s our beautiful mess and I’m choosing to love it. So take that, spiders.
