From The Confessional: We're Tired AF Of Cleaning Up Everyone's Sh*t

Motherhood is messy. There’s no other way around it. It’s a literal shit-show to start, and then it’s a full-on disaster every day forward—from the toddler days of dumping all the Tupperware out of the cabinets over and over all day long, to the big kid years of “crafting,” eating snacks everywhere, and letting dirty cups pile up in their rooms. Babies are boogery and messy and smelly. But turns out, so are teenagers. And eight-year-olds. And then, someday, they grow up and leave. But not long after, we have grandkids who come over and fuck shit up all over again.

So yeah, messy.

Some moms miraculously have clean houses. (I’ve never understood this.) It might be because they’re just naturally organized and actually have a place for every single tiny LOL doll and Shopkin. It might be due to anxiety and the need for neatness and order to function. Or it might be because you secretly (or not so secretly) have a housecleaner that makes the beds and flushes the toilets and hangs up the wet towels that are all over the floor.

Those are the only explanations I can come up with.

Now that my kids are older, they are helping more and have new chores this summer that they’ve never had before, so that’s a huge help to Mom. But is my house still a post-apocalyptic shit-show on the regular? Yeah. And I’m pretty sure it always will be.

The Scary Mommy confessional is full of moms with thoughts on their own messy homes—whether they’re actually fine with it but are sick of judgment from others, or whether they’re not fine with it, but can’t get it under control (and also are sick of judgment from others). A lot of moms, however, are just freaking tired of the mess. Tired of the stickiness and poop and pee and piles of toys and never-ending dishes and laundry.

But most of all, moms are tired of feeling invisible and taken for granted as we seem to be the only ones who fucking see it.

So, if anyone else in the house could, maybe, step up and take out the trash or fold a damn towel or wash a fork, that’d be great.

Little kids are gross. Cute, but gross. Pets too.

And living in our family’s constant mess makes us fantasize about being alone someday. Sorry-not-sorry, fam.

We know we should be more fun and do all the special memory-making but we also know it will just lead to a giant mess for us to clean up after.

And then quarantine hit and we were trapped under the same roof as these people for weeks and months on end. Any chance we had of keeping a clean house was pretty much canceled.

For some of us, a messy house really affects our mental health.

And we find ourselves judging others due to our warped upbringing.

Except this person. She’s just judging for the sake of judging, and that’s not cool.

So if you’re living a never-ending cycle of laundry folding and dish washing and toilet scrubbing and you are desperate for your stinky family to just leave for a day or two so the bathrooms can smell like lemon scented cleaner and not stale urine for once, I hear you. Same. Boat.

My family isn’t going anywhere and I do love them to pieces, so I’ll keep pushing laundry piles out of the way that no one seems to notice but me, and I’ll keep putting shoes back in their cubbies that don’t belong to me, and I’ll keep nagging the people I brought into this world to put. away. their. shit. and flush the damn toilet. They will, and then they won’t. And then they will, and then they won’t again. And round and round we’ll all go, forever, on this dirty-ass merry-go-ground we call parenthood.