about 3.4 times per day, i take in the cluttered chaos of our home and say to myself, “man, this place is a shit hole!” the national average for mothers is actually quite a bit higher (ten times per day). sometimes it pays to have a high tolerance for filth.

but no matter how often i am affected by domestic dissaray (actual DSMIV term?), it always comes with a sense of personal failure. rarely do i remember that this place is a fraternity house and that the odds are stacked against me. seldom does it occur to me that finding time to scrape the kids’ sticker art from the kitchen floor would mean neglecting some other responsibility or necessity, such as showing up at work or sleeping.

this is why i think my generation can greatly add to the flow of women’s progress simply by telling the truth. even the tidiest among us have at least one little corner where stuff from every category of life  is thrown together like new yorkers on the subway. life is moving along too quickly to stop and sort everything out. but if we pause long enough to voice our realities, the sense of personal failure might give way to the obvious collective notion that no single person can effectively accomplish the zillion tasks that are set before modern mothers.

today’s contribution to the reality project comes from elise, who gazes upon this scene daily from her perch at the computer.

there are boxes to break down for recycling, an old microwave to dispose of, grocery bags to return to the car, and a rogue cat carrier standing on end next to it all. there are “storage” areas just like this in nurturing homes all across the country, each of them taunting us with ridiculous standards and tiresome to-dos.

i am finding that nothing combats a sense of personal failure like a sense of humor. to all the folks who are willing to unveil their messes as part of the reality project, thank you. at the very least, these scenes make us laugh (there’s no cat in the carrier, right?). at the most, they just might help us learn to stop making society’s failures our own.

lately i have been thinking about women’s progress and the gifts each generation of women has shared to improve life for the next. what do i have to offer? in a recent post i wrote for the fabulous liberated life blog, i admitted that

“the contents of my work and family life are tightly crammed into a metaphorical (and very disorganized) closet. the pacifiers and burp cloths live next to my dusty grad school diploma and laptop, which are obscuring a bunch of unread papers about the upcoming “level II beach party” that my son brought home in his school bag. i live in fear that someone will open the door of this closet and instigate an avalanche of all things dear to me.”

there are so many opportunities available to modern women. but what will i contribute to the next generation when taking advantage of these opportunities tends to yield a disorganized mishmash of overwhelming stuff?

and then it hit me (an idea… not the avalanche). perhaps my generation is charged with the important and unglamorous work of telling the truth. we can help define the problem. progress is impossible without an honest look at the current state of things. the plethora of mom blogs and parental facebook confessions speaks to the notion that our generation simply wants the freedom to come clean about the complexities of modern motherhood.

“the truth hurts,” according to an old saying. but sometimes, the truth is hilarious! some friends of mine have recently posted pictures on facebook of their own disorganized mishmashes of overwhelming stuff. these scenes represent the new normal of modern motherhood where everything does not have its place.

many thanks to lane and stiles for contributing the above pictures to what i am titling “the reality project.” let’s say there is a half-eaten sucker stuck to your uncashed paycheck or a jock strap in your fruit bowl. let’s say you’ve been walking by these scenes in your home for three days without even noticing. snap a photo and send it to me! the truth is funny. we might as well laugh. and who knows… we could be doing the next generation a favor.

i invite you to join me on my quest to find glimpses of truth and goodness amidst the parenting pandimonium of the holiday season. share a word or phrase or image on your blog and link to this post. i’ll link back to you each time i share my own images, words, phrases, etc.

you can even grab this button for your blog if you want:

it is located in the sidebar to your right.

motherhood seems to come with inherent questions to be faced daily, whether we realize we are facing them are not:

are we to measure the truth of what we read against the truth of our own experience, or are we to measure everything we experience against the truth of what we read? motherhood is not without its sacred texts or its powerful experiential learning. how can we weave these things together into an authentic version of motherhood, or moreover, an authentic way of being human?

on most days, for me, experience trumps book knowledge. i tend to draw much of my parenting tendencies from my own experience of being a child. there are many things about how i was raised that i want to duplicate for my children.  i expressed one of these ideals in my post about neighbors, in which i called to mind a time when “there were no scheduled play dates or activities. our parents simply let us loose to waltz through each other’s back doors and live out our days covered in sweat, mosquito bites, and melted popsicle juice.”

but a comment on this post reminded me that we cannot simply transplant the parenting habits of decades past into our lives without having wrestle with our fair share of questions. lane writes:

“I am challenged to find a balance between encouraging the friendships and life lessons of playing outside and the very real dangers that lurk in the spaces that we cannot supervise. How old to ride a bike on the street without a parent? How old to walk four houses down alone to play? How reliable is the adorable dog playing in the yard across the street? How well should you know a family (neighbor, classmate, whatever) before your child has unrestricted access to their house?

A Lebanese coworker of mine commented how Americans are the most generous nation of people to respond in a crisis, but as individuals, we keep our doors locked tight (figuratively and literally!). We DON’T typically know our neighbors, and we often don’t bother to try. I wonder how we can manage to be both at once?”

these are excellent questions, lane, and ones that move me out of the state of idealistic nostalgia and into a more real and complicated place. in fact, this is the place to which i keep returning, whether i want to or not. this place seems to be on the way to everywhere else i want to go. it’s a place of CONSTRUCTION.

what's a blog post w/out a cheesy stock photo?

i started this blog because i perceived that there is a gap between our cultural models of motherhood and the kind of mother i aspire to be. after looking high and low for models, mentors, and reading material to fill this gap, i realized that no ready-made solution exists. i will have to build one to suit me. we all will. so much of a mother’s job is construction.

and here, in the gap between the outdoor play of past and present and in response to all the questions about bicycle boundaries, strangers, and yard dogs, no ready-made solution exists. again, i will have to build one to suit me. we all will. so much of a mother’s job is construction.

i admit that i would often rather settle for a ready-made model and avoid the messy work and on-the-job training involved in building something new. but just knowing that there are other women out there donning their hard hats, scaling towers of literature, and descending into their own histories, actually makes this motherhood experiment fun. i’m so grateful for the company of so many who are committed to crafting something that is good and real.