Excuse the Mess, but We Live Here

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Excuse the Mess, but We Live Here | Duluth Moms Blog

“Excuse the mess, but we live here.”  –Rosanne Barr

So, back when my kids were little…wait.  Is anyone still with me?  Back in the mid-90s when we had three kids under five, I remember my husband Jeff coming home from work in the middle of the day with a new friend he wanted me to meet.  In the middle of the day.  That never, ever happened.  Also, in the mid-90s, Martha Stewart’s media empire was taking over cable TV, publishing and peoples’ minds.

For me, Martha’s media expansion felt like the death star and I, and a very small contingent of rebel forces (read: normal people), refused to give into the home and culinary perfection that Martha’s very precise and polished kingdom represented.  There is only one thing that can fight such exquisite recipes and extremely intricate fall front door décor, and that is children.  They have no problem defeating her insistent propaganda.  Like, it’s no problem.  They blew all of her tips and tricks out of the water and revealed them for what they really were:  impossible.

For the longest time, I dreamed of having my own TV show.  I would call it Bad Martha, and it would be a small show in our often disheveled house where my assistant (Wait! Can I still have one?!) and I would make normal meals and I would spill on my shirt while trying to pour milk into the pot of macaroni and cheese that sat on our slightly bespattered stove and we would laugh about it.  Honestly, I thought it would go!  Moms need a good laugh in the midst of raising kids and working outside the home along with the countless details we’re responsible for.  

I dreamed of holiday episodes with presents wrapped normally—the way we actually wrapped them:  fast on Christmas Eve, enclosed in our crazy wrap-infested bedroom with ribbons I had saved from the previous year.  I wanted t-shirts with Bad Martha in a cute little print so we rebels could recognize each other and feel some camaraderie as we grocery shopped at 10pm where the best item purchased was freedom.

Then Martha went to jail and my dream died.  Bad Martha the show just sounded bad.  I am not one to kick another soul, no matter how perfect her brownies are, when she is down.  Thus, my dream of a regular girl cracking jokes and doing normal stuff on TV elevating everyday people out of the darkness of their show-shame and back into the light of day, evaporated.

 The day my husband came home unannounced with his friend was a day of epic mess!  Not even to this day am I aware of how the chaos happened!  I only remembered the look on Jeff’s face and the large deer in the headlight eyes of the new guy, the visitor, who, despite the mess, looked past all that into the future and became one of our dearest friends.

But, at that particular moment, my own eyes, previously blind to the obvious laundry blight that resided in our home, were quickly and painfully opened.  Pants, shirts, underwear strewn all across our stairs like dirty, bright flags on a ship that had been out to sea too long.  It was a terrifying, growing heap taller than my six-foot husband in the laundry room with the door agape in full view of the landing where the guys stood in our split level house wondering if they needed to draw Excalibur from the stone and vanquish the hulking mess from our midst.  (Yes, please do.  Put it in the washer for me.  Thank you.)  I, in good form I might add, acted as if nothing at all was wrong.  “Hi!  Come in, come in!  Nice to meet you.  Can I get you anything?”  “Yes,” I’m sure they wanted to respond.  “Hazmat suits.” Perfect.  They’re right downstairs, next to the mound of death.

Needless to say, after they exited and no, they did not come in, I cried.  I was no Martha wanna-be, but even this level of dishevelment was not normal for me.  I felt like a failure.  My happy kids played all around me and Jeff’s boxers on the stairs while tears ran down my face.  My kids were happy?  Yes, they were.  And though my personal sense of failure wouldn’t allow me at the time to note it, it came up later as I processed my thoughts with Jeff.  We had a home—not a television studio set, and home is where families live—not a TV crew.  Jeff didn’t marry me to do his laundry and keep up the house.  We did those jobs together.  Jeff married me because he loves me.  We have created a loving and mostly peace-filled home over the years precisely because we have not made mountains out of molehills and kept our hearts and minds focused on what is really important.  And we remind each other of those truths when we lose our way in the crowded laundry rooms of life where real adversaries can grow if we’re not vigilant in fighting them off.

Shame and failure (real or imagined) along with the foe of comparison can get in the way of our relationships with one another and cause us to isolate in our homes and friendships instead of working together to overcome challenges.  Stick with it, my friend!  Let’s stop comparing ourselves to people on TV, Facebook and Pinterest.  We can celebrate those DIY projects without getting our identity from them, right?  As we keep living out what is important, as we continue daily to re-route our hearts toward priorities of caring for and loving one another, we’ll be able to navigate the ocean of life in all weather and maybe even have the clean flags of confidence blowing in the breeze as well.

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Michele
“You’re eccentric, Mom.” A short evaluation of Michele from her awesome daughter at age eleven. Hannah is twenty three now and Michele happily reports (not without a wry smile) that all three of her offspring inherited a bit of eccentricity all their own! Success! Her children grew to be fun individuals with delightful quirks that allow them to have more grace for their parents. Michele is mom to Hannah, Caleb (27) and Josh (25). Michele works in radio and best friend/hubby Jeff, still can’t figure out how she hasn’t used up all her words yet! She lives on twenty acres and feels slightly ashamed that she doesn’t garden or pickle anything. She tried knitting once. Simply put: scarf shame. Instead she reads books, writes in her journal, meets with friends, sings in church, acts sometimes in plays and plows their driveway in winter. She volunteers at Essentia Health and enjoys mentoring others.

9 COMMENTS

  1. Oh Michele I can so relate, just the other day I was sharing with a friend that my husband didn’t marry me for my cooking, had that been his greatest need he would have starved to death many years ago. Housekeeping skills naturally fall in that same category

  2. AMAZING! I do feel enough time has passed that we could absolutely rep “Bad Martha” without an ounce of guilt!

  3. YESSSS!!! Bad Martha is a brilliant idea! Too bad you didn’t do it before jail.
    You so nailed this blog with feeling and hilarity! It happened to me as a young mom too, only it was Kent’s boss 🙁
    He never came back.

  4. …i have a mound of laundry staring me in the face at this very moment…clothes all over my house!..and yet, here i sit, reading your blog, children napping, and some of that “mom guilt” thrown out the window…thanks for that reality check! Momming is hard work, but my kids ARE happy..mess and all! ….But seriously, I really should go and do some laundry! 😉 Love you, Michele!!

  5. Loved this post! How important it is to stay real. I think Bad Martha was a brilliant idea… I would have been part of the club for sure.

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