Bless This Mess
I clean up my house every morning and come back to it trashed after work, and I couldn’t be happier because of it. Don’t get me wrong, I hate cleaning the house, sometimes I enjoy getting in the groove to some music, but mostly it’s just tedious and I don’t get any help with it. But when my now wife and I first moved in together, she was going through a bout of depression, and for a few years I would go to bed with her, wake up and go to work, and come back home most days to her still sleeping.
If she was awake she had yet to leave the bed, with her only really being up when I was home. So every day, the living room was the same way it was the moment I left, sometimes going weeks being untouched, and it started to make me feel lonely because it was like I lived by myself all over again. As if nothing happens when I wasn’t looking.
Growing up in a family of six, with many pets and a lot of stray acquaintances—my folks allow friends and family to bum off us when going through tough times as a sort of halfway home—there was never a dull moment in the house, for better or worse, which made it feel like it was home. After no small amount of therapy and constant love, care, and commitment, she’s been slowly cracking through her depression with only occasional bad days.
Plus, we have recently had our lovely daughter join our life. We just moved to a new area and a new house. My wife plays with the kid in the living room, gets her changed in the child’s bedroom, makes herself and the little one some food in the kitchen now that she’s eating more solids, and our little one destroys whatever she can get her hands on.
Now I’m coming home to see my daughter crawling over mommy as they watch PBS, my wife laughing and playing, my house in a lovely mess of activity and life, and I couldn’t be any happier. Well, if I could get a hand with the dishes, that’d be nice, but with such a big victory, I’m not going to complain too much just yet.