Every Toy Was on the Floor

I walked into the room and every toy was on the floor. Every single one. The bins were empty and tipped. There was no path to the window.

I could have sighed. The sigh was right there, on the tip of my tongue, as some people would say.

I smiled instead.

There is a version of this story that is insufferable. It is the one where a woman tells you she is grateful for a mess you are currently standing in at nine o’clock at night with nothing left in the tank.

That is not what this is.

I am tired too. I am tired in the ordinary way. The floor is not a spiritual experience and I am not going to tell you it is, because I would be lying if I did.

What I noticed, standing in that room, is that I had been about to do something.

The sigh is a thing your whole body gears up for. The thought — oh no, not again. The tension in your shoulders. The eyes in disbelief. Your lungs bracing for impact and pulling in a breath you didn’t ask for. It is what you do when you walk into a room and the floor is covered in chaos and you’re exhausted from cleaning the living room. It costs almost nothing. And it is aimed at nobody in particular.

It happens to you. What comes out of your mouth doesn’t have to.

I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to sigh.

There is a way of talking about children right now that I have stopped being able to listen to.

It is everywhere. The jokes. The captions. The whole vocabulary of being worn down by the tiny people you chose to bring into this world. And I understand where it comes from — it comes from women with nothing left who found that complaining was the only thing anyone would receive from them without argument. Say you’re struggling and people move toward you. Say you’re happy and they think you’re lying.

It isn’t the mothers. It’s the agreement we’ve all made — that the baseline is burden, and anything else has to be justified.

I’m not signing it. I refuse.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to about a destroyed room.

A room like that is evidence. Somebody in this house decided to begin something. They had an idea and there was nothing stopping them and they went and got everything they needed and they started.

Think about what the opposite looks like. A house with small children in it and nothing on the floor. There are a few ways to get that, and most of them cost something. The toys are somewhere the children can’t reach. The children are somewhere else. Somebody is following behind them closing things.

And some houses are quiet because a child in them is too sick to play. I’m not talking about those. Those women would give anything for this floor.

A tidy house is not free. It is purchased. Usually with the only currency a child has, which is permission.

I’m not saying don’t clean. We clean. I’m saying I know what the floor is telling me and it isn’t failure.

My grandmother kept a house with dirt floors, a leaky roof, and no running water. Twelve living children. She could not read or write.

I’ve thought about that house my whole life, and the thing I never once heard anyone say about it was that it was tidy, or perfect, or magazine ready.

It was full. People came in and out of it. Whoever showed up got fed. There was always something on the stove and someone at the table, and there is not a single photograph of it anywhere in the world, because nobody was documenting a house like that.

She kept it her whole life. The keeping is the reason I can write this sentence.

She was not managing a mess. She was running a house with people living in it at full volume. That is a different job, and it is the one worth doing.

So I changed the question.

Not what happened in here. That question has one answer and the answer is always a complaint.

What did they build.

It turns out there’s an answer to that one. There usually is. Sometimes it’s obvious and sometimes you have to ask, and the asking is its own reward, because a child explaining the thing they made is the most serious they will ever be about anything.

That is the whole practice. It takes four seconds and it is the only parenting advice in this essay.

They will spend most of their lives not being children.

Most of it. Decades of it. My daughter will be a woman for sixty years and a child for twelve, and the twelve are happening right now, on this floor, in this light, while I decide what face to make when I open the door.

Fifteen years down the road, those rooms and this house will look different. The floor will be clean. Almost everything will be left untouched. And it will stay clean for a very long time.

That thought alone makes me so sad.

The mess has an end date.

I stepped over the blocks and left the room loud.

Con cariño, Abril