The older I get the messier my house gets and the less I seem to mind. And that’s saying a lot because I started out my young adulthood being one with the vacuum cleaner.  If I had a free moment I’d change the shelf paper in the pantry, alphabetize my spices, or reorganize my underwear drawer.  Now it’s a miracle if I can even find clean underwear, mainly because it’s been two weeks since I’ve done laundry, and that’s probably because we ran out of detergent somewhere around then and I keep forgetting to add it to my grocery list.

It’s not that I’ve given up on cleanliness, believe me, I draw the line at squalor (barely).  It’s just that since I’ve had kids I’ve made friends with the fact that having a family means living with clutter – as well as dust, dirt, mud, smooshed food where you’d least expect it, Legos® shoved down a drain, clogged toilets, non sequitur storage (By the way, who put the CD in the toaster?), broken knickknacks from Pottery Barn, and various human and pet stains that are too gross to describe.

Before I had kids I kept a house that would turn Martha Stewart chartreuse with envy.  The beds were always made.  My bathrooms were always clean.  And my kitchen was so spotless you could perform surgery on the counter tops (just in case I ever had to do an emergency appendectomy on one of my dinner guests – hey, you never know).   

At the time, I thought I was a hard wired neat freak, but later in life I realized that I simply learned to appreciate the beauty of a properly folded towel from my mother, who by the way, is the queen of anal housekeeping.   It took having my first child to understand that, like hair and eye color, a person’s messy factor is part of their DNA.  In other words, you come out of the womb either caring about heel marks on your white plush pile carpet or not.

It was such a relief for me to find out that I am firmly in the camp of not caring.  However, I did not go lightly into my sloppy liberation.  At first I thought there had to be something wrong with me if I didn’t follow my toddler around with a Dustbuster™ sucking up the stream of crumbs and other particulate matter he left in his wake. I mean, come on, what kind of loser was I if I couldn’t keep my house clean just because there was a kid around?  Never mind that I was so tired I was nodding off in the middle of the day like some old crone who’d just had her pudding.

By the time baby went down for his nap I was always at a crossroads.  Do I: A) Sleep? B) Write (and earn some money)?  Or C) Clean up the lunch mess.  Sleeping and writing always won out.  And you know what?  When I woke up (or put down the keyboard) I didn’t even see the lunch mess anymore – at least not until 5:00, when I had to clean up the lunch mess to make room for the dinner mess.

As time went on I increasingly ignored housework and as a result I became a much happier person.  It was as if a mop equaled stress and somehow I had found a way to let go of both. Who knew I was such an innate slouch? If my husband even looked at me funny about any impending mess, I’d just hand him the vacuum cleaner and say, “You know what to do with it, Skippy.” (Which was weird because his name is George.)  Suddenly cleaning the toilet paled in comparison to writing in my journal or hanging out with my kid (which gave me something to write about in my journal).  I remember we’d go to the park a lot, because good lord, who wants to sit around a messy house?

I’d completed my journey over to the dark side of housekeeping when my second son was six months old.  My sister (who had no children at the time) and I were having a lovely conversation when all of a sudden my little prince charming projectile vomited up the contents of his stomach, which included rice cereal, a saltine cracker, and the $8.99 per pound organic blueberries that hadn’t been in his body for more than five minutes.  The barf shot across the room like a bottle rocket and splattered on the back of a custom upholstered chair, where it then dribble down the chair leg and made a nice purple puddle on the white carpet.  It was spectacular. 

Stunned by the acrobatic properties of my baby’s bile, my sister and I stopped midsentence to witness this extravaganza, then turned our attention to my son, who was grinning from his high chair with purple goo oozing between his budding teeth.  He was obviously quite pleased with himself.  Nonplussed, I immediately picked up my conversation where I’d left off before I was so rudely interrupted by puke.

My sister graciously listened to me babble on, but then after a couple of minutes she couldn’t take it anymore, “Aren’t you going to clean that up?” She asked with so much confusion you’d think we were doing calculus crossword puzzles.

“Clean what up?” I replied. 

She made a disgusted noise that sounded like a train letting off steam, grabbed a towel, and started in on the baby puree.

“Oh.  That.  Yeah, I was getting to it.  By the way, since you’re down there, you don’t happen to see a couple of dust bunnies roaming around under the couch, do you?”

“Yep.  You want me to get rid of those, too?”

“No.  Leave them.  I’ve adopted them as pets.”

She looked at me like I didn’t have a brain cell left in my head.  “Parenthood has made you weird,” she touted, as she went off in search of another towel. Good luck with that, being that they’re all dirty.