Audio version of the blog (read by yours truly) -
It's been a little while! For these past two weeks, our small apartment was a bustling carousel while family was visiting from New York. As I write this, my two parents, sister, brother-in-law, and their two kids have just left, while my other sister and her husband are now boarding a plane to take their place.
The house hasn't been properly cleaned in over a week, ants are marching into our home to feast on all the crumbs, and everything seems to be in slightly different spots than when they first arrived.
I just love it.
When I was wee, my sisters and I lived with our parents in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens. There was no room to run, only two good hiding spots for a (very quick) game of hide-and-seek, and we three sisters made all kinds of messes upon those five hundred square feet of linoleum flooring in our Lilliputian home.
We ate there, played there, fought there, and - in spite of my Umma's desperate cleaning efforts - whatever toys we had were often strewn about like some kind of poor man's minefield. To wit, Appa's howls after stepping on a Lego became like a nighttime routine. Doors were never closed, space was always shared, and messes were always made.
It was utter madness. If the five of us tried to do that today, I'm sure we'd be at each other's necks in a hot second (since forcing four women to share a bathroom is a surefire way to savagery).
But I miss it all the time.
When James and I got married seven years ago, we moved into an apartment that was twice the size of that Astoria apartment. In Texas, where the comparative rental prices were jaw-droppingly low, I suddenly found space for all my clothes in a walk-in closet. There was kitchen cabinet space so we didn't have to stack pans, shoes, and cutting boards in the oven. And now in Georgia, we've joked about getting walkie-talkies so we can keep track of each other in a two-bedroom apartment. We've been swimming in square footage and, since I seem to have inherited my Umma's compulsivity, I tend to terrorize all pests that dare flout my rules of cleanliness. For a little while, it felt like a grand life upgrade. But I've since come to find that bigger - and cleaner - isn't always better.
There's a funny verse in the Bible that I came across many years ago. It's in a book called Proverbs, and as the name suggests, it's an anthology of sayings and instructions that were meant to provide life guidance for the reader. In it, a king named Solomon, once renown for his great wisdom, wrote this -
I thought about that verse a lot at the end of many teaching days, as I tiredly traipsed around the room, tucking in chairs, reorganizing materials, and wondering how on earth these children got hot glue under the desks.
The cleanest mangers are the ox-less ones. The cleanest classrooms are always the childless ones. My science classroom never looked better than it did on the first day of school. But as soon as the first child came through the door, I knew to expect havoc because it's a fact of life - children mess things up. They tussle, they demolish, they rebuild, and they spill...so much that each year, I run a secret contest for Greatest Mess Ever. Each consecutive year, I find a child who tops the last year's greatest classroom mess (most recently, the award went to the boy who knocked over a cup of vegetable oil and a vial of glitter into a bin of books).
You'd think all those messes would drive my inner Queen Clean batty, but as the proverb suggests, I've come to find the most abundant crops of learning in those messes. A few years ago, my student broke a wind-up toy (for which he apologized). After, he asked question after question. Why was this spring there? How did that rod twist? How did it move the wheels of the car? Eventually, there was a gorgeous aha moment and he not only put the toy back together, but he reverse engineered his own wind-up toy. That was an abundant crop.
Another student once pulled up an entire bag of soil from the wrong side, leaving the carpet covered with garden soil. She was contrite, offered to help me clean, and then we had the best discussion about "all the little white thing in the dirt" she noticed. Why was it there? What was it made of? Why would they help plants? All her questions and observations made for the the most fascinating discussion I've ever had on vermiculite. It was another abundant crop.
This weekend, my niece found all the sticky notes we owned and used it to decorate every square inch of our apartment. It's been days since they left, and I'm still finding her artwork everywhere - dresser drawers, under the sofa, and even inside a sofa cushion. Every time I find another one, I'm floored by how much I both miss and love this little one. Truly, it's a crop that keeps on giving.
The wisdom of this verse has not only upended my penchant for the pristine; it's made me understand and embrace the beauty of messes - not just in classrooms and living rooms, but also in life. The most fruitful times of my forty-ish years of life weren't the peaceful ones, but the tumult of relationships gone wrong. The temptations I gave into. In all the trials and toil, there were often precious and abundant lessons learned.
I wouldn't trade any of that wisdom for all the placid moments in the world.
So as I'm gearing up for another sister and brother-in-law to stay over and probably make all kinds of messes in our home, I'm more than ready for it all. Time with family is the most abundant crop I've found on this earth, and I'm perfectly contented to bless any resulting mess.
