Bless this mess

Finding freedom in truly inhabiting your space

A delicious dinner prepared for me in a very un aesthetic mud kitchen

I have often yearned for the kind of spaces I see on social media. The perfectly curated kids’ corners, nothing but wooden toys and felted sheep. One game at a time arranged on the rather expensive yet understated rug. In these moments I catch myself thinking, surely that rug is the key, and surely my children are old enough not to destroy it…I can, however, never stay in that fantasy for long, especially not as I glance at the couches that came with our rental which now sit on the ground after my husband was forced to remove broken legs from being jumped on one time too many times. The arms are slowly but surely, falling outwards, barely clinging to the cheap frame. Looking at the sad scene, the vision of a cosy, aesthetic and perpetually ordered space does not truly seem within my reach.

I believe that the energy of one’s home is important and I know that beauty is soothing to my eyes and my nervous system. I am forever attempting to create spaces around the house that I can look at and exhale contentedly at the sight of.

I believe in creating spaces where the whole family can feel at ease, calm and nurtured. But I also believe in letting children be children and a large part of that, I am realising, is creating a space where they are not expected to live on tippy toes and where I do not have to live with the constant anxiety of keeping things spotless and in one piece.

The state of our veranda on any given day, I will call this style…Lived in.

When our little ones are learning to crawl, we baby-proof our houses. Making sure that chords can’t be pulled, collapsing heavy items onto them. We put our precious things up high, we try to create spaces friendly to these little worms and they wiggle their way around the house. But then these creatures grow and before long they can reach the shelves or work out how to push chairs around the house so they can reach the shelves. And somewhere along the way ‘child proofing can get lost in the desire to reclaim ‘our’ space back.

My days are full enough as they are and I don’t want to spend precious time reminding them not to touch the expensive candle that I have put in their reach for decoration’s sake. Or not to open my lovely coffee table book and smear sticky mango fingers over it. I don’t want to feel anxious about them trailing mud over a beautiful rug. So I have to make a choice, and that choice is to give in to this season I am in and give up on having an aesthetically pleasing home, for now…

My children, as I have stated in ‘The Myth of the Whimsical Child’ are not of the whimsical persuasion. They do not tiptoe around like fairies, naturally cautious of man-made objects. Everything is currently a potential sword, ‘pew pew gun’, or projectile missile. So, as much as I crave having an orderly aesthetically pleasing house, I know that in this phase in life, I can only have tiny out-of-reach spaces that fulfill this urge.

However, it is not only chaos that my boys bring with their rambunctious play, my eldest sees himself as somewhat of an interior designer. He is forever rearranging the furniture with much pride, sometimes spending hours creating what in his head is a beautiful space. The little one is rarely allowed to be in these spaces, so another ‘cubby’ must be built for him. This means that at any given moment, every pillow and cushion in the house may be on the floor, every blanket and sarong draped over the table or spread across the tiles.

A very un-pinterest cubby house that took up the whole living room for 3 days

While reorganising the boys room the other day, my eldest insisted on helping. He decided that as well as a spring clean, he needed to switch things up. Draws were removed from the chest of draws and placed on top of and under his bedside table. A Silk scarf was pegged to the top of the said bedside table, flowing over the bookshelf I had just created by removing more draws (like mother like son). Shells were perched on top of books in the name of decoration. The space to me was a slight annoyance and not how I wanted to look, but the delight on his face when he talked me through his aesthetic choices was pure magic. It gave me a moment of pause and made me reflect; this house is theirs just as much as it is mine. Why should they not feel a right to create spaces that they themselves enjoy?

I had boundless freedom to assert my own style in my family home as a child. My memories of home are not of morning light spilling over a vintage coffee table with a freshly picked vase of flowers, my memories are the day my brothers and I cleared all the furniture from our long living/dining area and played roller hockey on the pine floorboard. Or the time we turned the whole back veranda into a series of skate ramps, forcing my parents to walk up and down just to get in the door. My memories are of holes dug in the backyard for makeshift pools and an ever-changing bedroom layout each time I felt like I needed a change.

I don’t ever remember being told off for this rearranging. In fact, the memories of my childhood home are of it being a house of fun. I know that my mother had style and taste and once all of the kids finally moved out she was able to have real couches but I don’t have memories of her being too precious about things.

The memories that were created in that house and backyard were those that have a sense of freedom about them. Our home was a blank slate with endless possibilities. But overwhelmingly there was a sense that it belonged to me personally, it was not just a place I resided.

I want my children to have that feeling, to feel that this space is theirs as much as mine. And of course, I say this with an element of common sense attached to it. It needs to be a space we can all enjoy and chaos cannot reign supreme, but I notice my attachment to a certain kind of beauty fading as I see the joy a window full of colourful drawings brings. When I see the creativity of my son’s cubby houses or the hours they have spent in the world's worst mud kitchen.

My impromptu mud kitchen created in 10 minutes

The children’s spaces that are so often sold to us are just not a reality. On one hand these spaces can be incredibly expensive and on the other just because they are visually appealing to an adult does not mean that a child cares for them.¹

Whilst I look at pictures in glossy home magazines or on scrolling feeds of perfect spaces and find a sense of calm within them, right now, what I want my house to represent even more is a sense of fun, playfulness and belonging. I didn’t want to miss out on adventures because I was resetting the house constantly throughout the day.²

With so many platforms boasting an endless stream of perfectly laid out spaces. Curated mud kitchens that have clearly not been played in by a small child and beige interiors that somehow defy the laws of children’s physics by not being stained, it becomes hard not to compare ourselves against the impossible standards that styled pictures create.

Let’s give ourselves a break, and permission to just live. To truly inhabit spaces. I still get a thrill each time the house has been cleaned and the beds made, everything in order, but this currently only happens once a fortnight. So instead of getting stressed about it, I am choosing to get my thrills from seeing my boys using the house and garden as their own, creating their own forms of beauty and feeling at home in their home.

My oldest was immensely proud of how he rearranged the living room the other day, so much so it had to stay like this all week.

And each time I start to spiral downwards, craving the simple beauty of a Pinterest home, I run the lyrics of a friend of mine’s song ³ through my head and take them incredibly literally…

“It’s this mess that I bless when I break free”

Our art gallery. It’s not fancy, but it’s theirs and they are endlessly proud.

How did you feel in your own house growing up? And does the mess make you feel insane or are you able to embrace it? I’m so interested to know how much our own experiences growing up have to do with how we cope with the unruliness of childhood now and also, do all kids cause this kind of chaos or are mine particular whirlwinds?

1. In a manic fit of energy that often happens when my husband is out, I decided we needed at that very moment, a mud kitchen. So, finding a random assortment of things around the house and yard and a quick trip to a local Toko (mini local shops that stock everything from cooking utensils to rice. I created a functional but not at all visually appealing mud kitchen that had so far provided hours of entertainment.

2. The cost of being a "good" parent

3. Bless This Mess - Lisa Mitchell