I was six months pregnant and nesting had finally kicked in. My toddler was napping and I was in the kitchen, tackling some of the cleaning projects that had been put to the side since the pregnancy exhaustion hit, like cleaning the microwave, descaling the keurig, and one of my least favorite tasks, deep cleaning our gas stove.
I filled the sink with hot soapy water and started putting the grills and other pieces in there, spraying down the surface to soak some of the hardened on grime that never just wiped off, and moving onto another task while I waited for everything to soak.
After half an hour of scraping and scrubbing, the stove was almost glowing, and I was thrilled – and exhausted. But it was truly clean for the first time in six months, not just surface clean.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I walked into the kitchen that night to find that while making dinner, my husband had decided to brown a couple pounds of ground beef.
It was the first time in almost two very busy weeks that we’d cooked anything on the stove, being reduced to microwaving leftovers that we brought home from work during a busy kidding season on the farm.
My stove had been clean for less than six hours.
As I took in the grease that had splattered across the entire stove and half of the kitchen, I chose to laugh instead of crying. I took a paper towel to the worst of it, then swiped it down with my sponge, getting 98% of the small chunks of beef that had flown out of the pan. I found the remaining 2% the next morning, when I looked at the stove that had been so shiny the day before and was now streaked once again from my “better than nothing” evening cleaning.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed, as a wife and mom. It’s easy to look at the greasy stove and see a giant mess that was made. It’s easy to look at the pile of laundry and see the fact that no one other than you bothers to fold it and put it away. It’s easy to look at the crumbs in a three foot circle around the high chair and think that no one but you cares to clean the floor so you don’t get ants.
But what if you flipped the thinking?
What if, instead, you saw the dirty stove as a sign that your husband loved you enough to make dinner, and to brown enough meat for you to have easy lunch for the toddler for the next few days?
What if you saw the pile of clean laundry as a sign that your family had all that they needed, and were able to wear clean clothes every day?
What if you saw the toddler’s messy high chair as a reminder of the joy that he showed when you brought him his favorite snack, and how he eagerly cleared off the rest of the food on the tray to make room for it?
What would your life be like if none of those messes existed?
If the stove wasn’t messy because you were only cooking for yourself? If there was no laundry to do because your husband was gone? If there was no messy high chair because your toddler wasn’t there?
I’d rather have the mess.
Life comes and goes in phases. This phase, the messy house and the dirty stove and the OMG-I-need-a-shower phase? It’s messy. It’s dirty. It’s greasy stoves and dirty diapers and finding a sippy cup of spoiled milk under the couch and snacks ground into every bit of carpet you have no matter how much you try to keep all food in the kitchen.
But you’d miss the mess if it was no longer there.
Because the people who make the mess, make the mess worth having.