If you ever come to my house, please wear socks. Not because I don’t like your feet, I’m sure they’re just fine, but because I want to spare you the feeling of walking across my dirty floors.
I wish my floors were clean, I really do. But that would take a thorough sweeping AND mopping three times a day, and that’s not something I’m willing to commit my life to, to be honest.
We live in the forest, but for some reason there’s so. much. sand. It seems at least one small bucketful of it is tracked inside our house each day.
If I wanted to live near sand, I would’ve moved to a beach where I could at least enjoy some ocean sounds, but I don’t live anywhere near the ocean… and still, sand, everywhere
I’m in a moment of life right now where I keep going back-and-forth between being totally okay with the fact that I don’t have everything under control, and feeling totally unequipped for this current job of running household and trying to raise tiny humans, while I love God and try to teach them the same.
Of course, the days when I feel like I have it together (my house is decently clean, my dishes are unloaded, my laundry isn’t behind) I feel like somehow… somehow, I’m going to be able to be the mom these boys deserve and the wife I want to be and also the best caretaker for this home.
And on the days when laundry is behind (which is nearly every day) and there are dishes to be done, because I haven’t unloaded, and my bathroom sink could really be wiped out, I despair a bit… wow, I don’t have this, and I am not equipped for this. Does this come more naturally for some people than it does for me?
On the good days, I remember that how I keep my household in a single minute is not a picture of how I keep my household as a whole. I’m allowed to have a Tuesday afternoon where everything is a wreck and that’s okay, because I will get back to it, the reset will happen.
But, on the not great days, it feels like this exact moment - of my dishes piled up and being behind on laundry again - it feels like this is my whole life, and like that somehow means I’m a failure.
I find when I’m really on top of the household - spotless floors, perfect systems - my children get a bit neglected.
But if I spend all my time with my children and don’t take the appropriate amount of care of our important household chores, then we all suffer; because who wants to have to wash a fork every time you need one?
I have to be okay with living in the middle.
In the middle of the process,
because it’s always a process and our home is as alive as we are.
The middle is…
an okay place to be.
And actually, the middle is the only place I can be.
So I’m learning to be okay with being in the middle of my own life. And I’m learning not to judge myself so harshly when the middle isn’t the perfect representation of who I want to be, or what I want our home to be, as a whole.
