Messiness As A Portal
Watermelon juice dripping off sticky fingers. Sand stuck to legs and hair and armpits. Butter and barbecue sauce decorating the cheeks and hands of little faces. Birthday candles and their melting wax blending into vanilla frosting.
While I write to you, I’m sitting on a beach in Florida, surrounded by the high pitched giggles and yells of 8 nieces and nephews (yes. And most of them are younger than 4 years old). This is our first vacation together in many years, because of pregnancies, weddings, training in the hospital, and serious illness. We are all together, maybe for the first time in a decade. Even better—we are all under one big roof, sharing meals and sleeping schedules AND sleep regressions.
You can’t escape mess when you’re little, and you don’t try to. Very simply, you don’t have the skills to not make a mess, and when it comes to good play, it usually involves being so immersed that a mess is a marker of success. When it comes to priorities, you can tell that little kids aren’t observing themselves from the outside, and that it truly hasn’t occurred to them that they should.
It reminds me so much of this quote by Anne Lamott, which is my favorite quote to share every summer since I was 21, almost a decade ago.
“Oh My God, what if you wake up some day, and you're 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn't go swimming in those warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It's going to break your heart. Don't let this happen.”
Of course, the mess isn’t just idyllic details. While writing this, all the little children began to peel off to each of my siblings with different complaints.