Cozy Puffin Burrows

There is a structure in my living room made of every cushion we own, two blankets, and a dining chair that has been relocated for the purpose.

I have been told it is a burrow. A cozy puffin burrow, specifically, which is a phrase I did not teach them. There are apparently rules about who may enter it. There is a stated need for snacks inside it.

It has been there since yesterday.

I could write you the essay you’ve already read.

You know the one. It says that the homes on the internet are staged — the spotless kitchen, the entryway with nothing on the console, the sculpted mother in linen, the couple laughing at something offscreen. It says real life is messier than that. It says the mess is where the living happens, and you should stop measuring your Tuesday afternoon against somebody’s photograph.

All of that is true. I believe every word of it.

I’d only add one thing, because I think it usually gets left out.

Behind every one of those photographs is a woman. A tired one. Somebody’s mother, healing from something, growing out of something, lost this month and thriving the next. She cleared that console off ten minutes before she took the picture and put it all back afterward, the same as I probably would. What we’re looking at isn’t a lie about her life. It’s one frame of it, and she chose the frame, and I don’t blame her for choosing a nice one.

So I’m not writing this against her.

And I’m not going to pretend the photographs are why I struggle, because they aren’t.

Here is my actual problem, and it took me a long time to say it plainly.

I like order.

Not as performance. As a pleasure. I am genuinely happy sorting a pantry. There is something in me that settles when a room is put right, and when a room is not put right, something in me does not settle. I have been like this my whole life, long before there was anyone to photograph anything for.

So when I look at the living room and feel that pull to start picking things up, it isn’t vanity and it isn’t comparison. It’s that a house in order is how I come to rest.

Which means the tension in my house is not me against the internet.

It’s me against me.

A woman who needs order, raising two people whose entire job right now is to make mess.

Both of those are legitimate. That’s what makes it hard. If the mess were only chaos I could clean it. If my need for order were only vanity I could talk myself out of it. Neither is true. A child building a burrow is doing exactly what a child is supposed to be doing, and a woman who feels calmer in a tidy room is not broken.

Nobody warns you that some of the hardest things about motherhood are two good things that don’t fit in the same afternoon.

The other day the light came through the window at whatever angle it comes through in the late afternoon, and it caught my daughter’s hair, and I saw the color of it — the actual color, not the word for it.

She was inside the burrow. The room was a disaster.

And I stood there and thought: why am I so worried about this living room.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire argument, and it lasted about four seconds, and then she asked for a snack and I went and got one and later I put the cushions back.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a tidy ending available and it isn’t true.

The tidy ending says I learned to let it go. That I look at the burrow now and feel only tenderness. That the light on her hair converted me permanently and I’ve made peace with the mess.

It isn’t quite that, and it isn’t a system either. I don’t have a method. I’m not cleaning in secret after bedtime and I don’t have one room I keep sacred.

Here’s what’s actually true: the whole house is a mess, and I’ve accepted it.

Not in a rearranged, philosophical way. In a plain way. The house is messy today and it will be messy tomorrow and there have been stretches of several days where every single room was a disaster and nothing about that was a crisis.

I still want order. That hasn’t changed and it isn’t going to as far as I can tell. But I am not going to get it every day at this point in my life, and I’ve stopped treating that as a failure of mine.

This is the season I’m in. There are two small people here whose work is spreading out into every room, and I chose to be home with them precisely so they could. The mess is not the cost of the decision. It’s the evidence of it.

Years from now the house will be quieter and tidier and I will be able to walk into a room in the morning and find it exactly as I left it. I don’t think I’m going to enjoy that as much as I currently imagine.

In fact, I’ll tell you what I actually feel when I picture it, since I’ve been honest about everything else.

My heart aches.

Because a quiet, orderly house means my children are grown. It means the cushions stay on the sofa because nobody needs them for a burrow. It means the rooms hold still.

I will be glad for them. Genuinely — it will be their turn to spread their wings and build whatever life they want, and I have wanted that for them since before they existed. I will be proud in a way I can’t picture yet.

But something in me breaks a little at knowing the order I keep wanting is coming, and that it arrives on the day they go. Or on they days they are too big to have imaginations that take them to far away places. And I already miss it.

So I get to want a clean living room and dread the one I’ll eventually have. Both. At the same time. Every day of this.

That is apparently what this is.

I grew up in a house with dirt floors and a roof that leaked, where the hallway had no ceiling at all and we set buckets out when it thundered.

Nobody in that house was keeping it for a photograph. But it was kept — swept, painted every few years, the floors eventually paved, a tin roof added over the open middle so people could sit. My grandmother started nixtamal at six in the morning in a kitchen that was never once styled.

That house was in order and it was full of children. It just wasn’t in order the way a magazine means it.

I think about that more than I expected to.

The burrow is still up as I write this.

It’ll come down eventually — maybe tonight, more likely not. And it will go up again, because that’s what those two do with a room, and because I’d rather have a house with a burrow in it than a house you could photograph any day of the week.

I still want the room clean. I’ve just stopped believing that wanting it makes me the villain of my own house — and stopped believing that not getting it makes me a bad keeper of it.

Some seasons you keep the house. Some seasons you keep the people in it.

I know which one this is. And I know it doesn’t last.

That’s why the cushions can stay where they are.

Con cariño, Abril