One of my blogging friends, Jimmie, wrote What My (Messy) Artist Daughter Has Taught Me. I totally got that post as I had been thinking about the struggles of being a neat person who likes everything in its place when your child isn’t anything like that. It sounds like my Caroline and Jimmie’s Emma are a lot alike. Creative, empathetic, and funny describe Caroline for sure.
Jimmie wrote:
But Emma is not bothered by messes. In fact, she says she likes to have all of her possessions visible (on the desk or on the floor) so she can know where everything is.
That sound you hear? That’s my head exploding because I cannot relate to this way of thinking at all. But I see it in my home on a daily basis.
An Attitude Adjustment for Mom
Although “neat freak” is a bit too strong to describe me, quasi-obsessively orderly would not be. I am relentless about picking up each day. I cannot go to bed if there are messes in every room. I find it depressing to get up to things left undone from the day before. The early years of motherhood, with its endless array of paraphernalia, was an especially tough go for me in that respect.
One area where I failed time and again as a mother was voicing my frustration, displeasure, and otherwise crankiness regarding Caroline’s messy room. She didn’t see it as messy, but it drove me nuts.
Worse yet, I would be especially frustrated when it was time for her to go to bed and somehow we hadn’t gotten it picked up earlier in the evening. Far too many times **I** put a damper on bedtime because I was frustrated with the state of her room. Part of my frustration was felt toward myself for not getting on it earlier and part of it was directed at Caroline for not being naturally wired to be neat in the way I am.
At some point, I realized that this was my problem, not hers.
This became especially true when she expressed the idea that I expected perfection in her room. I had never said that or even implied it. Even when her room was “picked up,” it never approached what I would consider anything close to perfection. But somehow that was the expectation she was carrying in her mind. What seems “normal” and “picked up” to me somehow became an expectation of “perfection” to her. This was especially grievous to me because I AM a recovering perfectionist. The last thing I want to do is burden her with those kinds of expectations whether they were accurate or not.
Safety Standards for Creative Clutter
My standard line each evening became, “Would you please make sure no one will trip over anything in the night?” I’ve boiled it down to a safety issue and that’s it. There was no pushback after that and she obligingly complies almost all of the time.
Caroline’s combination of being artistic and not naturally wired to organize means her room can be, um, very busy. So once a week or so, David and I do a fifteen to thirty minute “room rescue” with her to keep it under control. We don’t make her pick everything up or put everything away. We respect her preferences. But we make sure any spots that are simply getting to be too much get dealt with.
Letting Creative Child Be Herself
I’ve read other bloggers say that if your kids can’t keep their room picked up on their own each day that they have too much stuff and the answer is to give away or get rid of 75% of it. I don’t agree. We’re not going to give away all her toys or punish her for having a room that isn’t picked up all the time to my preference. It’s her room and she’s old enough to be allowed some say in what it looks like. If she wants the contents of her room on display so she can easily find them, then that’s really her choice. As long as it doesn’t pose a health or safety risk, I choose to let her be herself.