It really is kind of funny how you can make such a drastic shift within a 24 hour period, and go from being over the top with your Motherhood Christmas Home OCD
to suddenly sitting in a pile of paper, scraps, candy wrappers, and used plates,
and you can feel perfectly comfortable with letting your house now be a Pit of Despair for the entire after-Christmas week.
Before bed on Christmas night, long after the rest of the family had gone to sleep, leaving behind their snail trails of paper and gifts, my mom looked at the mound of dishes large enough to shelter a small family, and she said,
“I really don’t feel like doing these. Do you think they can wait?”
I responded by wiggling the stack of dishes as if I was checking it for earthquake code compliance, and replied,
“Honey, I think we could even go TWO more full days, honestly.”
Who even WAS I?
Wasn’t I the one that, just last night, had seriously considered writing a note for the family that read the super cheery Christmas blessing:
“You had better not leave one SINGLE dish in this freshly emptied sink.”
Whereas just a couple of days ago I was picking lint out of our living room area rug with my fingertips poised like fine-tipped tweezers, my family cowering in their separate rooms for fear I’d spot them and make them do some new wild-hair thing.
The veins in my neck were popping out as if they thought they were specifically designed to be clutter indicators,
but that night, mere hours from my counter scrubbing, Perfect Christmas Home Mania,
Our living room could have been mistaken for some inner-city street.
For the days leading to Christmas, it was all glimmer and sparkle.
But tonight, now on night three of our continued squalor?
If a stranger popped up from behind my credenza and asked me in a gravely voice if they could bum a smoke, I wouldn’t even blink.
I don’t know where stuff is, we now have a “paintbrush section” of our kitchen counter, and our idea of what constitutes a meal is now pretty weak.
That perfect, cleaned-up life is not really sustainable for our type of family, I guess.
No one is calling us from Gap to pose us in all white matching pajamas in front of a pampas grass Christmas tree.
We can do it for a little while, but then we crash and burn and need things like potato chip bags as couch pillows, and sweats with grass-stained holes in the knees.
I smiled at the People of Walmart coloring book my sister-in-law had given me, and suddenly wondered if she was trying to tell us something;
But this year, fresh off of our entire family catching Covid, and multiple plans getting canceled,
I was forced to give up early on a perfect looking holiday,
and I found myself just ready for it to be over, to move on, and try again next year.
The freedom I felt in releasing it was a surprise to me.
I looked around at the aftermath of all that planning, prepping, and doing, and saw that even with all the effort, we hadn’t escaped ourselves.
We were right back to where we started.
Our motto:
The Greens – As chaotic as we can be.
So, this specific Christmas hadn’t been what I had wanted it to be,
and I decided that was OK.
It was just one Christmas,
not a whole life.
I want to always see the sum of the years, not pin it all on one thing.
So what if we never drank the peppermint hot cocoa, or went driving to see the lights.
So what if the exterior of our house never got the outdoor lights put up.
There will be other years, full, no doubt, of other unexpected things;
Other surprises,
other gifts,
other nights when it’s just me.
Maybe next year our house will glow for a mile.
We will just have to wait and see.
What is “perfect” anyway?
On Christmas night I sat up late alone in a mound of trash that I could have used as a great background for a Hoarders audition tape:
Unfinished paper chains, discarded bows, pets scattered sleeping on smashed shirt boxes, like they’d been given their top dream.
I contemplated how far I’d fallen from the way I had expected it all to stay magazine-worthy at all moments just yesterday, and I realized that maybe the release of it all had actually freed me in the end, because on this Christmas night I didn’t even feel my usual downward-spiral,
“What NOW” kind of way.
The after-Christmas crash is usually pretty epic here.
I keep waiting for the sadness to start, and it hasn’t yet.
I’m still doing snow angels in bits of wrapping paper and it feels pretty great.
I stopped trying to control it all so much, and the stress also got released.
I’m ending the year as a Sweat-Wearing Trash Goblin now, and you know what –
It actually feels OK.
Getting it all right all the time feels exhausting anyway.
Maybe this next year I’ll continue in this manner and learn to have grace for all of my life messes.
New year, same perfectly acceptable me.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
