The secret lives of messes

Even before our waiter asks how he should split the bill, I can feel him eyeing us with each visit to our table—trying to suss out our relationships to one another. Our teenage girls had arrived at the restaurant with me and my husband; the four of us were seated at our table for seven about five or ten minutes before the girls’ dad, stepmom, and preschool-aged half brother joined us.

After our plates are cleared, my eldest daughter, whose birthday we’re celebrating, rests her head on her dad’s shoulder as I take a few photos of them, and my husband entertains the little guy, who is blonde like his big half-sisters. I lean toward my girls’ stepmom, who is sitting on my left, to show her the sweetest of the photos I’ve just taken. We “Awww…” together at the expression on the face of this girl we both mother.Version 2

“How would you like the check?” our server asks, his eyes darting around, not sure who exactly to address.

I look at my ex-husband and hesitate—we’ve been known to not gravitate toward the same answers to life’s questions.

“Should we each pay for one of the girls or just split it down the middle?”

“Down the middle seems easiest,” he replies.

When you’re co-parenting and blending families, easiest—when it’s available—is always the right choice.

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The real mess of divorce starts long before the divorce. Emotions become frayed and tangled, territories that used to be shared are sloppily divided and staked, and any path forward that once seemed clear becomes so overgrown with weeds and briars it can hardly be called a path.

Even before the decision is made that one of you has to go, the emotional seed of the mess begins sending out physical roots that can trip you up. But it’s when you actually begin dividing household items—pulling all the cooking utensils out of drawers and spreading them on the counter, attempting to make sure each person has a fairly complete set of tools to see them through the cooking of a meal—that the mess becomes tangible. It can’t be ignored.

There it is, all laid out there on the table before you—every drawer and cupboard emptied, each item evaluated, falling somewhere on the broad spectrum of worth: meaningful, useful, expensive, replaceable, and I-didn’t-even-remember-we-had-that. The process is repeated again and again, room by room. Now every book and CD you jointly own is spread across the living room rug. Then the artwork takes its turn and is divvied up.

Even after he has packed up and moved his share to an apartment he is renting, even after my things have been put away, I’m still faced with all of the things he didn’t bother taking but I don’t want, either.

What I do want is a Dumpster in the driveway. What could feel more decisive and freeing than filling a receptacle big enough to contain all your junk—literal and figurative? Because I realize part of my longing for a Dumpster stems from a desire to clear my life of certain memories and regrets, along with the boxes of odd books and knick-knacks my husband had a habit of picking up at garage sales, thinking they might one day be useful for something.

*   *   *   *   *

A decade later, I know there’s more to a mess than what meets the eye.

IMG_6029The pile of shoes perpetually cluttering our front entryway tells of a home where people feel welcomed and comfortable, of teenagers and their friends coming and going, of volleyball games and dog-walking in the rain.

Clothes all over the bed represent progress—they’re no longer stinky and stained, stuffed in the hamper, they’re clean and fresh, waiting to be folded. Soon enough they will make it to their rightful places in drawers and on hangers, and our bed will be ready to receive us at the end of a long day.

The more cluttered the garage gets with bags of leaves, the cleaner the yard is. It feels like a trade-off in the moment, but each time I navigate around the bags on my way through the garage, they speak of muscle-work done in fresh air, and multiple sets of hands making progress before the sun goes down.

And inside our front door, not far from the perpetual pile of shoes, hangs a painting my ex-husband made of our first house. It still has a place in my home today—not because he painted it or because it was our house, but because he is my daughters’ dad, and it was their first house. The painting hangs where it can help us acknowledge and honor a piece of our past.

Sometimes, I’ve learned, we get to decide what will be messy and what won’t—even without the help of a Dumpster.

Kristin bio YAH

The stories of things

One winter Monday, 15 or so years ago, I arrived at work to some devastating news: Over the weekend, a coworker had lost her home to a fire.

We all huddled around the coffee pot in the break room, trying to imagine—although we knew we couldn’t—what it would be like to lose almost all of your earthly possessions. A week later, when our colleague Chris returned to work, we began the slow process of bearing witness to her shock and grief. Then, months later, we were her empathic-yet-fascinated audience as she told stories of the new house rising from the ashes—not just being built, but also being populated with new things.

I was only in my late-20s and had accumulated relatively little, yet I couldn’t fathom what it would mean to start completely over. There would be the lack of pillowcases, cake pans, and familiar sweaters waiting for you as fall settles into winter, but also many harder-to-replace things: No rows of books with penciled notes and cardstock bookmarks identifying the shops where the books were bought. No wedding gifts that, each time you use them, bring to mind the great aunt or college friend who bestowed them. No outdated lamps from your childhood, handed down to you as you entered adulthood with so little.

Chris was in her late 50s, so the home she lost had contained decades of memories and treasures. While her new home was being built, Chris told us about the interior decorator, who specialized in “recreating meaning.” I was utterly fascinated by—and skeptical of—the process, which involved interviewing Chris and her husband to gather meaningful family stories and tales of travel adventures—references she would then bring into the new home through new objects.

I never would have dared to ask Chris, but I always wondered: Did it work? Can a home speak in retrospect of a life lived, or must the life be lived into the home?

*   *   *   *   *

I suppose the question needled me because it touched on an area I had dabbled in myself—but in reverse: I, as a newly married 22 year old, had attempted to use objects in my home to speak into my story. I didn’t know what my life would be like, but I knew what I wanted it to look like. If I built the stage, would the life follow?

Garage sales, thrift shops, and odd pieces of loaned and handed-down furniture created the kind of comfortable, quirky, space-with-a-history that I longed for. My husband was a painter, so the walls were filled with art (indicating that we were “creative” and “interesting,” of course!). A set of handmade pottery dishes, given to us as wedding gifts, conveyed that we were “down-to-earth” and “simple”—no fine china for us! And we rushed to buy books to fill the shelves—more books than we could possibly keep up with. It would take us years to actually read and absorb their stories and ideas, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to be instantly surrounded by these visual symbols of intellect and depth.

In short, I wanted everything in my home to tell a story about us, but I was too impatient to let the stories emerge on their own.

*   *   *   *   *

Now I know the answer to the question I wanted to ask Chris so many years ago: A life must be lived into the things that fill a home—it can’t be put on, like a costume.

My home today (the eighth of my adulthood homes) is filled with evidence of a life that’s been both beautiful and complex. Yes, the books, art, furniture, and dishes each have stories to tell, but they are not all happy stories. They tell stories of a broken marriage as well as stories of wholeness and healing. They bring to mind the struggles and triumphs of single motherhood, as well as the ongoing tales of blending two families into a new one.

My eyes scan the rooms visible from where I sit at my desk. There’s the dining room table—the same table my ex-husband and I sat at four homes ago, a highchair pulled up so we could spoon food into our daughter’s mouth. Now, during dinners at that table, Jason and I navigate the tumble of tales and ideas shared by our three teenage daughters.

photo 1I can also see the vintage sofa I happily snatched up as a single mom about to move into a rented duplex. It’s the same sofa I sat on to read books to my young daughters, but it has since been reupholstered (following an unspeakable incident with the family dog). Behind the sofa is the piano I grew up hearing my grandmother play; she gave it to me when it was time for her to move into assisted living, and time for my daughters to learn to read music.

And beyond the sofa and piano, just inside the front door, is a gallery wall of small artwork and treasures. An olive-wood cross, carved and painted in Santorini where Jason and I honeymooned, hangs just to the left of a painting my ex-husband made of the house he and I lived in when our daughters were born.

photo (7)Suddenly, I can see my home for what it is: not a collection of aesthetic choices I hope will communicate something appealing about me, but vessels holding the real stories that have emerged in my life. And that gallery wall in particular? It also symbolizes my acceptance of those stories—the intentional, beautiful stories as well as the haphazard and heartbreaking ones. Together, they speak truth: Welcome to my home, welcome to my life.