if you are reading this on break from ironing your underwear and fine-cleaning your bathroom tile grout, chances are, you could benefit from a lesson about the evolution and breeding habits of clutter.

thanks to gretchen‘s sophisticated time-lapse photography (read: two passing smart-phone shots), today’s reality project  post features two images of the same space.

kitchen -- SUNDAY

kitchen -- MONDAY

gretchen writes,

you know how sometimes you look around your house and think, “wow!  this place is a disaster – could it BE any more disgusting? i have to clean it up TODAY.” but then life gets in the way. let’s face it, when is cleaning up the constantly recurring mess more fun than spending time with your child, going to a concert, or just sitting down with a glass of wine because you are only one woman and you are tired at the end of the day? then when you look again 12 hours later (or so) you think, “hmm, apparently yes it COULD be more of a disaster.”

that is what this picture shows.

thank you, gretchen, for reminding us that just as rome wasn’t built in a day, neither are our colossal messes. you did the right thing in this situation. i hope you played with your kid, went to a concert, and had threeglasses of wine, all while sitting down! plus, as evidenced by monday’s shot, cleaning products can actually contribute to the clutter. we could all learn a lesson from you about priorities. 

speaking of priorities, read here about my friend susan, whose commitment to order involves a card catalog in her living room. but since she became a mother 19 months ago, her “chaos has quintupled.” we might all do well to take her advice:

nobody ever died from a messy coffee table.

if someone snuck into my house under the cover of darkness and absconded with my kitchen cd player, i would never cook again. as i see it, kitchen music has a twofold purpose:

1. to focus children’s boundless energy on hilarious and frenetic dance moves so that parents can get dinner on the table…

2. and to drown out endless screeching requests for dora gummies and other persistent high-pitched pleas.

without further introduction, i present to you dancing in the kitchen volume II. may your evenings be full of music and meatballs, wine and the weepies. bon appetit!

for those of you who missed dancing in the kitchen volume I last march, it is available here.

my new friend caroline recently shared with me that many of her women role models don’t seem to balance love and work as much as they appear to be merely surviving love and work. implied in this statement is the notion that mothers are in a constant state of reaction to life’s curve balls: forgotten lunches, toddler illnesses, workplace dramas, heaps of laundry, et cetera. the holy grail (which i often mistake for a wine glass or champagne cocktail) then becomes that rare stillness that gives rise to intentionality. it’s the chance to act, and not react. it’s about making wise choices about those few moving parts in our lives that we can actually control.

for me, it’s difficult to imagine what a life of balance could look like when mere survival seems to be the most prevalent motherhood mode. but in the words of carolyn g. heilbrun, “what matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that.” essentially, even as most of us are caught up in the business of reaction and survival, we have moments when our thinking shifts, when we trust our instincts, make counter-cultural choices, take charge, and replace conventions and expectations with trail-blazing honesty. even those of us who live lives of survival have a story or two to tell about a moment of balance. and in the words of my new friend caroline, “stories take us beyond abstract theory and into the world of the living and integrating.”

there are tales of a new way lurking in every person’s history; there is potential of trail-blazing honesty in every encounter. the key is to extract these stories from others and to share our own. when we do this we are collectively constructing a new narrative — one that has the power to draw us out of survival mode, even if it’s just for one moment at a time.

[source for this post is located on the bibliography page found on the sidebar to your right.]

is there anything more makeshift than a family road trip with small children? one minute you are pulling out of your driveway with carefully organized kids’ activities in tow along with deluded dreams of a three-year-old exhibiting the kind of silent focus reserved only for phD students. the next minute (okay, well, more like 15 hours later), you are knee-deep in piles of disintegrated goldfish crackers, and the only things interrupting your gratitude for the bottle of wine waiting for you in the trunk are the countless spin moves required of you to maintain back seat order.

well, now that our drive is behind us and my little bird is safely napping in his pack-n-play in the closet of the beach condo, i can say, as i always do, that the chaotic drive was worth it. especially since we found this playground equivalent of the magic kingdom just outside of jackson, ms: 

given that our usual playground stops involve scaling eight-foot chain-link fences as a family and trespassing on the private property of churches and elementary schools, this one really wowed the kids. they didn’t even seem to mind settling down in the woodchips to eat their supper:

i’d say the real low point of the car-ride was when i gave the kids suckers followed by a roll of toilet paper stolen for entertainment purposes from the previous night’s hotel. i looked back, and the one-year-old had transformed himself into a flailing, sticky mummy. oh well. lesson learned.

now, excuse me while i see about that wine…