There’s a book somewhere in my house containing instructions on how to stay calm. It contains nice quotes and ways to instil harmony to your home and life.
One quote stands out for me. It’s that one’s personal space is a reflection of one’s mind. It should be orderly, beautiful, and presentable. If I could find that book amongst the mess in my home I could dazzle you with inspiration.
I thought about this ‘tidy house, tidy mind’ ethos when I surveyed my living room last night at 9.30pm, just after by children retired for the evening. Readers, I would have taken a picture of the scene if I thought your delicate eyes could handle the terror. My offspring had left what looked like the horrific aftermath of a fabric and spaghetti-based tornado.
Bits of debris, in the shape of hooded tops and t-shirts were strewn all over the floor. The Christmas tree had been bombarded with worn socks and there was a selection of underwear hanging from frames and ornaments on the fireplace.
The baby’s highchair had a two-meter zone of discarded spaghetti bolognaise around it and two of my lovely sofa throws lay on the rug disguising a milk/cereal puddle. The floor was a minefield of plastic toys and guns that kill not with bullets but by causing you to slip and fracture your skull on tiled floors.
And for comedy effect there was a pair of boy’s trousers dangling from the light fitting.
Every evening when my offspring go to bed I have a ritual.
1. I stand at the door of my living room and I survey the damage. I sigh dramatically. On alternate days I place my hand on my head in a theatrical fashion.
2. I ask the husband what could have possibly happened to create such an awful mess. He shrugs his shoulders and extends bottom lip, flops on sofa and takes ownership of the remote.
3. I begin a clean up operation, which lasts 20 minutes (approx), stand back and admire my work. I sigh contentedly.
4. I walk to the kitchen and repeat instructions from number 1.
I do the same ritual three or four times a day.
I spend far too many hours cleaning and tidying my house and it never seems to make any sort of impact.
I’m not a total clean freak but when I tidy one room another messes itself in my absence. My children are incapable of moving anything from A to B without spilling some manner of liquid or substance all over the floor – the aftermath of fashioning a bowl of cereal requires industrial cleaning.
I now work from home all day. I’ve started a 24/7 news website for Derry www.newswireni.com, if you’re interested. That means I work for up to 16 hours a day. In between working I clean and answer the many whims of my many children. There seems to be very little time for trivialities such as sleeping or eating. In reality it’s not the mess that is driving me crazy, it’s the constant cleaning.
I visited a woman’s house recently I didn’t know very well. She has five boys. As we went into her living room I saw the familiar writing on the wall, smudges on the window, TV bolted to the unit for safety, door handles broken, light switches coloured in with multi-coloured markers. I wanted to hug her, tell her I was a fellow mother of unruly, although quite impressively artistic, children. Over the sound of her youngest son clanging the remote control on a heater I wanted to swap stories of children breaking windows with projected shoes or plugging sinks and turning on the tap to see what happened. But she seemed oblivious to the noise, content in the chaos. I wanted to know her secret but I couldn’t hear her over the sound of one of her sons roaring into the karaoke microphone he had received as a gift from Santa.
I left that house vowing to be more like her in 2012 – content, accepting of the mess my children create, calm in the chaos.
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