Up to this point in my short blogging journey, there has been a lot of focus on our house and all the fun craziness that has gone in to its beautification. You’ve seen nicely edited and filtered photos of how fabulous it (can look) looks and everything is very la-te-dah. We do live a charmed life.

Because I’m a nerd, I went to a LOT of school. My direction was science, so I took enthralling classes like bio-statistics, organic chemistry and anatomy/physiology. Along those lines, I became familiar with the Laws of Thermodynamics. My favorite (and most applicable here) is the second Law which states that “all things tend toward entropy”, or chaos. Another way to put this is that all organized systems eventually become more disorganized with time.

Sigh.

Such is the life of a mother! As a Type A personality/control freak, having young kids in the house has been among other things, ahem, challenging.

To be brutally honest (as I always hope and try to be), the last few months have found me a little stuck in what you might call a desert. A desert of spirit, of mind, of faith. It has sapped my energy and creativity and has made the most mundane task feel like lifting weights. As I swept the floor the other day, I looked down and I realized I was looking at the most excellent visual example of how I have been feeling. Please observe:

If you missed it, that’s me. You know, the one in the middle with the blue hair?

Here, just for clarity’s sake;

On that particular day this little blue-haired friend completely summed up how I felt about life, and life with children in particular. I hadn’t had time to get dressed properly (note the sweats peaking out of the first picture) and smelling faintly of garlic, (see all the garlic peel remnants around our little friend) I felt out of place and out of sorts. As I gazed at the little stout plastic person, pieces of the mess nest started to pop out at me. The little plastic door stopper was pulled off our kitchen cabinet door by my three and a half year old after I had repeatedly told him not to. The Cheerios represented my desperate attempts to coax my now one year old into eating some solid foods. The zip-ties had likely traveled from the garage; that great abyss of tinkering creations and half-finished projects. And of course there was the gritty stuff. The sand and soil, likely tracked in by my own shoes as I mucked about, seeking solace in the garden.

And then there is the intangible mess that simply comes from being an imperfect human living with other imperfect humans. The grit and fluff and accumulation of sharp words and mistakes, the whining, the grumpy days, the selfish choices.

So much mess.

I’ve felt myself drowning in the never ending tasks of cooking and cleaning, nurturing and doing all the other glamorous jobs of motherhood. Or the less glamorous (note the size of those hairballs) such as cleaning toilets.

Woven through all of this is my tendency to compare. It’s a dangerous past-time. Linked-in (a website, in case you are unfamiliar, where you can list your skills, employment info, resume, etc to assist in networking and job searches) frequently reminds me of the success of my professional peers, many of which (despite having children), have continued to work full time at high powered jobs, thus furthering their careers and saving lives like we were trained to do.

On the other spectrum there are The Moms. You know, those moms.The ones who manage to comb their hair on a regular basis, have docile children and clean cars. The ones who are always smiling and appear to have their ducks in a row.

And here I am, a garlicky, blue-haired troll, drowning in hair balls and Cheerios.

On days when my walls and carpet looks like this;

it can be hard to maintain perspective (or sanity). To say the least.

I can’t say I have any mind blowing advice or solutions. As a matter of fact, this post has sat stuck at this paragraph for about a month now. I want to finish it and say that things are magnificent, that I feel like I’m getting refined and sanctified, that I have something superb to offer to you, my readers. But I don’t and maybe that’s the point, at least for the moment. Like the apostle Paul wrote when he said he just kept striving daily to finish the race that was put before him; I just keep striving to survive this season and cling on to what matters.

Because mothering, and life, is messy. It just is sometimes. And that’s ok.

So if that’s where you are at, just think of me, you’re little blue-haired friend. Maybe it will give you hope to know that we are all floating around in our own little mess and there is a kind of beauty and camaraderie to just laying it out there and rolling with it.