I’ve tried everything I can think of. Lids with straws. Hermetically sealed sippy cups. Holding them over the sink. Dexterity training. Tarps. But no matter what I put the liquid in, and no matter how little liquid I give them—often just a thimble full—the contents of the cup will always impressively find its way onto the rug and, in so doing, somehow multiply in mass.
Their cups seem to always run over.
Keeping the house clean—well, screw clean—orderly, is a huge source of stress for me. Every room, every corner, every little nook and cranny is completely overrun. Overrun with toys, doll clothes, books, balls, blankets, headbands, and beads. How are there beads everywhere? And that says nothing of the ways in which my children manage to spill food and beverages. I make them almost exclusively eat at the dining room table and yet, when they finish, somehow bits of pasta and the tops of strawberries find themselves magically wedged in the cushions of the couch.
Now, I realize I can’t have my house looking like a catalogue, we actually have to live in it. But I find keeping up with the clutter and the crumbs to be a tedious, frustrating, and seemingly endless task. And it leads to a regular, though in my opinion, necessary, reaction from me: an adult temper tantrum of epic proportions. Even my toddler watches me rage in wonder. And admiration.
But my meltdowns are only because nothing is ever in its place. Even for a moment. The house is completely overrun.
About a year ago I noticed a small splatter stain—suspiciously the color of Capri Sun—on the dining room wall. It wasn’t noticeable to anyone but me, but I saw it every time I walked into the room.
Eventually, after months of it taunting me, I set to getting the stain off the wall. But when I began to scrub it with water, paint came off a little on the sponge. Not knowing any better, I put a little dab of dish soap on the sponge, but the paint kept right on smudging while mounding bubbles climbed up the wall and down my wrist. After a few other cleaners and then finally a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (about which nothing was all that magical or erased) the stain was close enough to gone.
Unfortunately, the wall now had a very prominent smudge where the area looked a few shades lighter than the rest of the wall. I felt defeated. How careless are my children that they run wildly through the house spilling their drink on the wall? And how, how, did they get it on the wall but not the floor? And which kid was it? Which blonde is responsible for the stain-turned-paint-smudge that was now staring at me every night while we ate dinner?
A few more months went by. Maybe six of them. And one Sunday, after my weekly tantrum began to wane, I tore out of the house and off to the hardware store for replacement paint and supplies. Back at home I poured the paint into a pan and began rolling over the smudge. As I rolled I began to see other minor imperfections on the wall—curiously in the shape of tiny, sticky hands—and I rolled over those as well. And because I already had the paint out, I inspected all four walls, rolling over little smudges and stains and dings in the paint.
Some would call me a hero.
But really I was just a woman taking her life back.
After I was done, I proudly looked around the dining room, marveling at the wet paint patches covering all four walls; damp signs of progress. Perhaps I had been overly dramatic earlier when I was yelling about our house being ruined. Clearly every problem has a solution.
But a few hours later, when the paint had dried, I made a startling realization: the paint didn’t match. The new patches were two, maybe three shades darker than the original wall color. So now, our dining room looks like the Golden Girls set because the walls are covered with tonal palm tree patterns where I rolled on paint in fan-like strokes.
But I didn’t really have time to get the dining room walls fixed again because I’d been busy on the kitchen.
Even though I hate cooking, I sure do it a lot. Which means I spend the majority of my life in our kitchen. The two kids, like hungry lions, keep me trapped in there, cornering me near the stove and demanding more snacks while I use a barstool to fend them off.
Our pantry is always a cluttered mess of three different loaves of bread, two-and-a-half of which are moldy. The shelves are overrun with snacks I promised myself before children I would never give any kid of mine. And, as Jim pointed out recently, I have a tendency to buy the same jar of pizza sauce every time I’m at the store—whether or not we are actually out of pizza sauce—and so there’s an entire shelf completely devoted to my brand of choice.
So, after another one of my infamous tantrums on a Sunday afternoon, I told my disgusting family to leave me alone for an hour so I could rearrange the kitchen cabinets. Three hours later I was thrilled to have all the green bread in the trash, all the pizza sauce boxed up for donation, and everything back in order.
A month or so later, while preparing yet another meal for my lion cubs, Jim walked into the kitchen with a quizzical look on his face.
“You aren’t using this, are you?” His tone was full of concern.
“It’s called pepper,” I remarked. “And, yes. I am.”
“Um…where did this come from?”
“I found it a few weeks ago while I was rearranging the kitchen,” I said. “I assumed you had bought it.”
“Yeah, no. This is the pepper I had in graduate school.”
“The same brand?”
“The same shaker.”
For reference, Jim went to graduate school in the late nineties. And, apparently, for the last 20 years, he has moved this same damn container of pepper with him to every place he has lived. And, worst of all, he’s made me an accomplice in his hoarding.
I had to turn to the computer to make sure I hadn’t been slowly poisoning, though perfectly spicing, our family the last few weeks. The internet assured me that while our pepper was teetering on 18 years past its prime, it also wouldn’t cause us any harm. Or, more specifically, any accidental poisoning wasn’t punishable by law.
But it did lead to perhaps one of my bigger hissy fits thus far.
And when I begin to kick and scream about the house, Jim does what he always does to calm the storm: he starts a load of laundry.
His olive branch.
For the past six months, Jim has taken over doing everyone’s laundry. But only because the kids can’t reach the start button on the washer. One Sunday night, after I had whined about a wall stain, or expired spices—who can remember—we sat down and devised a more strategic plan for the household chores. Jim always handles the trash, changing light bulbs, and the yard. I do the picking up, the cooking and the bed making. Further, I birth the children. He walks the dog. But regardless of all the equity, laundry has always been done last minute on Sunday night by whomever got paper to cover rock.
So in this new plan, Jim would handle all the laundry. But he was having a problem: we needed more laundry baskets. I already had one in everyone’s closets, but that wasn’t enough for him to separate loads into, or change out after the dryer cycle, so I bought three new baskets in hopes of solving the problem.
But it made the problem worse.
With so many baskets the line between “to be washed” and “washed” became a little blurry. He would take the basket out of my closet and run it downstairs to clean. Once it was clean he would take it upstairs and leave it outside my closet door. Not realizing it was clean (it hadn’t yet been folded), I would put it back in my closet, piling more dirty clothes on top. Meanwhile, he would combine Lowery and London’s baskets because their clothes are so small, and then he would try to separate the clothes according to size after. But you can’t do that with the Morgan sisters, because London wears pants a size larger and tops a size smaller than her age, and Lowery is the reverse. So then there would be a screaming fight every morning as each girl desperately looked for the clothes she wanted to wear only to find them in the other’s dresser.
Last week, I mentioned to Jim that I was tired of playing chicken over the laundry basket at the top of the stairs. He looked at me quizzically. I explained that it had been sitting on the landing for a little over three weeks, and I wasn’t sure if it was clean or dirty, but it was clear neither of us wanted to make the first move. I felt a tantrum rising up in me.
“That’s the basket you started for clothes donations,” Jim said.
Apparently I had taken liberties with the use of laundry baskets. And before my tantrum bubbled up and over, I went off to the donation center to hand over the clothes. Basket and all.
Two big fallacies I live with are that 1) I can actually get the house clean and orderly enough to my liking, and 2) that it will stay that way longer than it takes to pour a child a cup of any red liquid of their choosing. But in my mind I believe both are so possible that I refuse to give up trying.
For a long time I thought my life would be a little different if I had an orderly house. Like maybe I wouldn’t be stressed when people showed up, always awkwardly apologizing that a stack of my clean underwear was on the staircase for no apparent reason. I could just show my guests into my sparkling house, where my children would be playing quietly in the corner with a tiny strip of cloth—the only toy they insist they need—and I would pour my guests a perfectly chilled glass of wine and bat my hand when they praised how clean my house is.
But for that plan to work, it would also require me to get out of my pjs before noon on the weekend, and possibly even shower. And that’s just not something to which I ever plan to commit.
So I think the real reason I want the house to be orderly, and to stay that way, is because when it isn’t—when the house is in its typical state of disarray—it means there is always something to be done.
A stain to scrub, a cabinet to organize, a pile of laundry to fold. And when there’s always something to be done, there’s never time to peacefully relax.
Resting hasn’t been earned.
But the kids need clean clothes. They need toys and books to spark their imagination. They need food to eat.
And they need something to drink.
Last weekend, while Jim was doing laundry and I was picking up a trail of Legos, the girls were wildly running through the house squealing with laughter. Suddenly, I heard the footsteps, and the laughter, stop. I knew what was coming. I had made a large glass of ice water for myself and put the glass far back on the kitchen counter so they couldn’t possibly knock it over.
But as they approached me, quietly, carefully, their beautiful blue eyes blinking up at me, their little lips downturned, I knew that’s what had happened. I stared back in amazement as my oldest wove a creative and impressive tale of the incident, my youngest nodding eagerly beside her. The girls held hands, standing in unison, refusing to place blame on the other. I told them it was no big deal and got up to get a towel. As I heard the squeals of laughter resume and the sound of our washing machine being started by my husband, I got down on my hands and knees to sop up all the contents of my glass.
And I was suddenly very aware there’s only one reason the house is overrun:
Because my own cup has run over.
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I can still hear my dad say, "And now dinner can begin," just as soon as the first cup had been spilled. We were usually at a restaurant, not because my parents had enough money to eat out every night, but because they had memorized every Kids Eat Free place in Tulsa and surrounding areas. And, I imagine my mom hated to cook with three kids pulling at her shirt. I will try to close my eyes and remember that my cup is running over the next time this happens in my house!
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