There's No Place Like Home

I sighed as I looked around the room. I had cleaned, to perfection, our itty bitty living space in its tiny entirety, twenty four hours prior and yet it already looked like I should be donning a hazmat suit and braving the trenches of some nuclear disaster. In its defense, it might regularly be classified as such, only referred to by its close friends as my living room. Laundry had, undoubtedly overnight, regrown on the ottoman. From what source, I didn’t know but it was, or so it seemed, oozing off of the sides in a manner that was clearly meant to confuse any onlooker who tried to determine whether the mass was clean or dirty. I could have sworn that a warren of half emptied glasses had been bunched together, plotting and then scattered when I walked into the room. The baby’s toys, carefully arranged on low shelves when I took my leave for the bedroom the night before had marched right back out, clearly undaunted by their set back.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, I thought, bitterly. I was never a card-carrying member of the A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place Club but I did wonder why at 26 I still couldn’t manage to keep my house, my home, clean for more than five minutes. I just knew that most of America used things like cubbies and shelves and clever Tupperware containers that shrunk down to pocket sized compartments stacked neatly on shelves somewhere out of sight. If I could only get my house to look like Pottery Barn, or at least like Pottery Barn Kids, I might be able to classify myself as a true adult.
As things stood, I had backed myself into the corner by our front door in order to better assess the situation. Upon further surveillance, I groaned and dropped tightly to the floor, my head resting on my knees. My fourteen month old son wandered over to me, looked straight at my buried face, a soggy cheerio stuck to his cheek, grinning. He thrust his hands toward my face and said "uh" which translates roughly to "up".
"No, sweetie, no 'uh'. Mommy is down," I said, making the sign for the reverse of 'uh'.
A fit of giggles and a repeated attempt at "up" followed. I kept my head down, half hoping, half fearing that he'd move on to the next room. When I looked up, the floor was still unrecognizable as a living space, covered in blocks, books, blankets and, I promise, a few things I had never seen before. There was, however, no child. I panicked. I struggled as quickly as possible, up from my funk and tried to remember if I had, at any point made an audible wish for goblins to take Kai away. My Labyrinth fears vanished a second later as my heretofore missing son reappeared brandishing the duster component of the vacuum.
I wasn't sure if I should take it as a sign or irony but I scooped him up, sheathed the duster and started bumbling around the room, picking up the pieces.
Individually, each item I was picking up was harmless. A two-inch tall, cherubic farmer, a cartoonishly green wooden snake, myriad Eric Carle books I now know by heart. I could see why someone only a year and change old would find each assault on my cleanliness so enticing as to drag it across the house and plop it into someone’s lap.
After the majority of the mess had been collected and placed on its very temporary storage places around the house, I ran the previously undustered vacuum cleaner and lay prone in the middle of the now uncluttered floor, eyes closed.
Suddenly my calm and accomplishment were assaulted, not by an exuberant toddler, this time but by the two beings responsible for my daily need to vacuum. Donnie and Teddy, or Shed One and Shed Two, were hovering over me, a combined weight of 90lbs, slobbering in my eyes.
I flailed dramatically until they both backed away cautiously wondering why their cleaning services were rather unceremoniously disbanded. In backing away they backed into Kai who was upended and despite being uninjured was now, no longer giggling. I rolled over onto my side and enveloped the tiny wailing thing into a bad excuse for an embrace. The dogs, deciding that their services were back in demand came to lay on either side of us. As I stared up at the ceiling, flanked by fuzziness, topped by baby, I realized, belatedly but perhaps not too late, that this was home. This was not a page in a catalog; it was better. I may not have sparkling floors or even tidy ones. My dogs may shed and my son my occasionally take up the habit of storing his breakfast on his face rather than in his belly. Certainly, though, none of these things can make my house any less a home. In fact, one might argue, if one is dozing off in the midmorning sunlight, under three of her family members, that it makes it more of a home.