Earlier today, when my son went into the den to pick out a movie, I grabbed a few of his creations—construction paper topped with dried, crumbling Play-dough ‘sculptures’—and dumped them in the trash. They had been sitting on the coffee table for weeks, and every time I looked at them I fought off the urge to toss them.
Does that sound mean?
Let me explain further: Also in the living room, where I’m working, the sofa is festooned with (wonderful, whimsical) drawings of spaceships and astronauts, along with Star Wars figures, all affixed with tape.
Strewn across the floor: blocks, drawings, art supplies, toys, scraps of paper, Legos. Two large cardboard boxes have been half-transformed into rocket ships (or something) and stand in the corner. Beside them towers a Mega Bloks structure, nearly as tall as my kid.
And I haven’t mentioned the state of his room. Or the den.
I have never been what anyone would call fastidious and I most definitely do not want to spend all my free time cleaning and tidying up. Beyond my very real limitations when it comes to tidiness and organization, I have made conscious choices to focus on things other than keeping house. I’d much rather take my kid on an outing than spend the day sweeping and scrubbing and doing laundry, but there comes a time when the need to sweep, scrub, and launder can no longer be ignored.
Of late, though, I’ve reached a crossroads. The level of disorganization in my house is far too much even for me and yet, while it may sound weak, fawning, or co-dependent to some, I don’t want to curtail my child’s lunatic creativity.
Before becoming a mom, I took mental notes on the way my sister- and brother-in-law—both highly organized people—had trained their daughters to pick up after themselves. “That’s what I should do when I have a child,” I told myself, long before having one. But I’m not constitutionally designed to train anyone else to organize, so I of course failed miserably.
I myself was a messy kid with a room so full of stuff it looked as though it might burst through the windows in a mad escape attempt. But even my childhood self wouldn’t hold a candle to my child’s tendency to express his creativity in an crazed and expansive way.
And he is fundamentally opposed to returning his things to their rightful places.
This morning, while he was pretending to be a Hogwarts student changing beetles into firewood, I asked him to finish the job I’d started: putting his pastel crayons into their box. He grumbled but took the box from me, unearthed a cache of pastels, and began putting them away… until he decided to use them instead to make a picture.
“Jonah, you are not supposed to be drawing right now. You’re supposed to be putting things away.”
I don’t remember saying much more than that. But soon after, he presented me with a picture of himself beneath a broken heart, tears streaming from his eyes. This was followed by a note:
You Dote Luv me ene more.
He placed the note at my feet (I was, of course, tidying up) and left the room. I read the note, looked at my husband, and began to laugh, a guilty, chuckle-y sort of laugh that was silent but shook my shoulders in a telltale way. That’s when the little guy returned to the room. He saw me laughing, so there was no use trying to pretend otherwise.
“You know that’s not true, Jonah,” I told him. “You know I love you.”
He ran upstairs to his room.
It took a couple of tries before he consented to let me in. I sat beside him on the bed and swept him into my arms, telling him again that I love him. “You know that, Sweetie. C’mon.”
“I felt like you didn’t love me because you got so angry.”
“Did I? I thought I was just annoyed. I’ve been a lot angrier at you than that.”
He walked to the bookcase, sat on the floor in front of it, and pulled a book into his lap. “I only like to clean up one thing at a time.”
“Then take out one thing at a time,” I said. It was a wise but entirely futile suggestion. This will never, ever happen. We both know it.
I did my best explaining that cleaning up after him is exhausting and no fun for Papa and me.
“It’s all my fault,” Jonah said, “I’m stupid.”
“You are not stupid.”
“Then I guess I’m selfish.”
“I’m not calling you names, Jonah. Can you stop calling yourself names? I’m just trying to get you to see things in a different way.”
He nodded and then took another couple of books from the bookshelf. He was creating yet another pile, and I could already picture myself cleaning it up.
Photos: Top to Bottom: SofART; Wall Art; Lamp Art. (All © Jonah)