Making In the Midst of the Mess

The office/school room I’m currently sitting in to type this looks like a creative whirlwind hit it. There’s random puzzle pieces and leftover stickers from Easter sitting on the desk beside me. One child left a mosaic picture they made on top of the printer and it’s sitting next to my husband’s D & D dice. The top of one bookshelf has a stack of picture books about to topple off. There’s a painting and a partially read book someone left thinking they would come back to it in the rocking chair. The closet doors are open, showing the overflowing craft supply basket and the storage bins I use for extra homeschool resources that are in bad need of a purging. The floor is covered by a board game someone forgot to put away, a cardboard box that has been played with to the point of falling apart, small pieces of paper from a “puzzle” someone made, and more random bits and bobs than I can possibly count.

I’d like to say this is merely the result of my family being sick for over a week, but honestly this room looks like this on a fairly regular basis. And for a long time the way this room looks right now is the thing that kept me from saying yes when my kids asked to create. While I’ve learned in the last few years to embrace the mess and say yes anyway, I also don’t want my home to constantly look like Hobby Lobby exploded inside it. So how do we balance the mess of creating with the desire for a clean and tidy home? While I am by no means an expert at this, and my home does often look like a tornado went through it, I have found a few strategies that help me find a little order in the chaos.

1. Don’t compare your “middle of the day mess” to someone else’s “company-ready home.” Abbie Halberstadt (author of M Is For Mama and Hard Is Not the Same Thing As Bad) has said this multiple times, both on her Instagram and in her books, and it’s a mantra I quote to myself frequently when I start to feel embarrassed by the state of my home. The reality is that my four kids are home with me all day, and our home is going to look “lived in.” So I’ve learned to see the craft supplies strewn across my dining room table as my oldest works on a project, or the stack of papers scattered around another daughter as she works on the book she’s writing, as part of their creative process, not a mess that needs to be cleaned up immediately. That being said, they do, eventually, have to be cleaned up. But it’s okay to let it stay messy for a bit while they are in the process of making something. How long you let them stay in that creative process before cleaning it up is going to depend on that child, on your other children (if you have toddlers in the house, then you need a plan to keep them from destroying the older ones’ cherished creations), and on your own capacity to deal with the mess.

2. Teach your kids that being creative isn’t synonymous with being a slob. I really struggled with housework for the first five or so years of being a mom. I would tell myself that “I didn’t become a stay-at-home mom to clean all day” and “It’s more important to spend time with my kids than it is to do housework,” and while those things are true, they also were an excuse at times for me to avoid doing the menial, boring jobs when there were other, more fun things to fill my time. My natural tendency is always to read one more story, play the board game, go for a walk with my kids, or pull out the paints rather than clean a toilet or declutter a closet. Some of you are wired the opposite and are more likely to clean than to spend time on the things I mentioned above. Neither is right or wrong, it’s just a tension that we have to live in as mothers; and the best place for our kids to learn that is from watching us model it.

3. Get your kids involved in the cleaning. It’s not wrong to expect your kids to help manage the mess, especially if they are contributing to a large portion of it. I think of this as the trade-off for creativity; I say yes when my kids want to make something, knowing that I’m not going to have to clean by myself. If your kids are currently doing nothing in the way of household chores, start small with a daily five minute pickup. I like to make this as simple as possible; don’t assign a specific time to it, just do it whenever you think of it during the day, or when the mess starts to really bother you. And pick a specific area based on what’s the messiest, or where your kids have been creating. Enough times of picking up after themselves, and they will start to be more conscious of the mess they leave behind when creating.

4. Designate homes for your kids’ creations. We talked yesterday about how to store supplies for creating, but you are also going to need a home for the things your kids are currently making or have already finished. We have a few specific homes for these things; note that each of these containers serves as a limit for creative work. You simply can’t keep everything, which we will talk about in the next point.

• Memory bins: Each member of my family has a small, clear rubbermaid type bin that lives in their closet. This is where the most special things go, including a favorite baby outfit, things they’ve received that they want to keep safe, and the most special of their creations. Note that these bins aren’t very big, so only the best of the best makes it in there. I’m usually the one to suggest that they keep something in there, and I probably only do it once or twice a year per kid. 

• School paper bin: I keep a simple basket on a shelf in our school room and every single paper my kids do during the school year goes in it. This includes everything from worksheets and copywork pages to creative writing projects to two-dimensional craft projects or paintings (big craft projects we do for school usually get displayed a little bit before we decide what to do with them, but we only do a handful of those a year). At the end of the school year, I dump out the basket, sort everything at once, and place a few samples of each subject for each child,along with any particularly good creative work, into their school folders. These are accordion file folders with lots of pockets; each child (who is school-aged) has their own, and each pocket is for a specific year of their homeschooling. 

• Activity bins: Each child has a black basket that also lives on a shelf in our school room. These bins serve two purposes: 1) they house coloring and sticker books and other hands-on activities that my kids use during read-alouds; 2) my kids know to put any creative projects they are still working on in their bin. Sometimes they will also put finished projects they are still playing with in there as well (like the kites they are currently obsessed with making). 

1. Recognize that the point of creativity is the doing, not the final product. Remember how we talked about creativity being about the ideas that are happening during the process of creating, not about the art that is made at the end of the creative process? I want to raise kids who grow up to be creative adults, NOT adults who are pack rats with the need to hang on to everything they’ve ever made. If I kept everything my kids created, our house would look like an episode of Hoarders. Some kids naturally struggle with this more than others, but it's our job as parents to coach them through it and help them develop the skills they will need as adults. Sometimes they will ask to take a picture, and I’m always happy to do so if they want me to. Sometimes they want to give their creation to someone else. And sometimes they just need a little time to separate from it (which is why they are allowed to keep a few creations in their activity bins). But two things I always try to impress on them is that the item has to have a home and that they will probably have to get rid of something else to make room for that item. My oldest two recently noticed that they had a lot of writing and drawings that they wanted kept, more than they could realistically keep in their activity bin. They cleaned out a cubby on a shelf in their room to make space for these papers, so now they have a home. But they also know that it’s their responsibility to manage them; I remind them constantly that the floor is not meant for storage, so if papers are on the floor they are probably going to get thrown away (or ruined by their mischievous little brother). Obviously, I’m not heartless: if I see a paper on the floor I know they’ve been working on that day, I will ask if they want it before just tossing it. But I still make THEM go put it away, because that is part of the responsibility of creating.

Know that wherever you’re at in this process of balancing the mess of creativity, it gets easier with time and practice. Hopefully these blog posts are helping you see how to overcome some of the obstacles to creativity in your home, and are encouraging you to say yes more often to your kids' requests to make things. In our next post we will address a few last obstacles to creativity and also talk about how to balance saying yes to it with the demands of busy motherhood.