Dust

A gentle cry emerges from the bedroom. I pause our read-aloud as Edwin, my 3-year-old son, perks up his head. “Aria’s awake!”

After two hours of quiet and enjoying Mommy all to himself, Edwin delights in the sound of his sister’s voice—at 16 months, Aria is quickly transitioning from baby sister to promising playmate. I slide a bookmark into Charlotte’s Web and follow Edwin down the hall. We both climb onto my king-sized bed where Aria was napping.

“Hey, Aria! Hey, little sister! Did you have a good nap? Want to play with me?” Edwin bounces, giggles, tickles. The rosy baby rubs her eyes, confused at first in the near-darkness. She takes in our familiar voices and soon joins her brother in the fun. They love this daily wake-up ritual–bouncing together on the bed, laughing and pillow-tossing with no particular game or purpose besides silliness and being together.

I draw open the heavy blackout curtain just a sliver, sensitive to sleepy eyes. Afternoon sun pours in from the south-facing window, exposing a plane of dust across the room. I stare at it dumbly.

So much dust. I have allergies, so I do my best to mitigate the dust—an air filter and hypoallergenic pillows; regular washing of the blankets. It’s enough effort to keep my eyes from itching, but apparently not enough for the dust to escape the sun’s knowing eye.

I squint, less from the brightness and more from irritation at the dust.

In this baby-toddler season, there is never a shortage of the messes I can see—the toast-crumb floors, the jam-sticky counters, the story books piled beside the shelf, pages crushed at painful angles. Everywhere I look, there is something to wipe, to sweep, to tend to. But it’s not even the endless work I mind so much. It’s the endless mental struggle to accept that imperfection persists, no matter how I strive to conquer it.

There is so much to surrender in these young-mom years: a clean house, free time, leisurely weekend sleep-ins (or sleep at all, sometimes); hot coffee and the illusion of being a naturally patient person. Myriad lessons to learn. The struggle to accept and adapt to the demands of motherhood is a perennial topic among my group of friends, in stilted conversations over living room coffees and a hundred interruptions, or within text threads where a cohesive thought is easier to come by. We share our struggles, grapple with them, the older moms offering encouragement to the newer: they’ve been there, they know.

The more moms I talk to, the more I’m convinced we each have a prominent pain point or two, our personal steepest learning curves. I know extroverts who miss their social life, and introverts who miss their quiet. I know women who deeply struggle to accept their changing bodies. One mom I know aches most for her identity as a musician, which feels crushed under the weight of her new role as Mom.

Well, I know my own Achilles’ heel of motherhood: the mess. Disorder in my home has a hold on me, and it can bring my years of growth in surrender and acceptance and peace, not to mention maturity, to a screeching halt.

The mess: my weakness is really that simple and that complicated. Simple in the tangible, even finite (so they say), physical chaos. Complicated in the way my brain tangles clutter and dust all up with my identity and worth and enough-ness. I like to tell myself it’s because I’m a visual person that disorder bothers me so much, but there’s something deeper lurking. Maintaining order in my home makes it easier not to notice the more chaotic parts brewing inside of me—like the lifelong need to be seen as ever-exemplary and competent, tidy and low-maintenance—the resulting years of suppressed anger turning into chronic resentment. I’m slowly looking at my internal tangle, examining the knots. I’m noticing how those knots love to hide behind a wall of external order—a wall that usually held up just fine, before kids. What I know for sure is that I’m attached to clean and tidy, however fleeting or surface-level; or perhaps more accurately, I’m attached to the idea of clean and tidy.

And here I am, laughing with my kids in my dusty bedroom, wishing I could close the curtain and be none the wiser.

“Mom, what’s that?” Edwin asks as I sit there staring, teetering at the entrance to a rabbit hole of shoulds.

“Dust,” I shrug, pulling myself away to engage in the play. But the kids are still and quiet; curious. Aria lifts her dimpled hand to point–she sees dust in the sunlight, but she doesn't see what I see.

She sees magic. A thousand flecks of glitter; dancing, swirling. Too faint to be seen by themselves, the specks of dust carry the sun, reflect it. They answer to our breath and to the gesture of an outstretched baby hand, revealing secret patterns of the air. Watching it, Aria is reverent with wonder; watching her, suddenly, so am I.

The room could be a snow-globe. The magic is coming into focus for me. Perhaps there’s a reason fairies use dust in the legends. Perhaps there’s a reason the Creator picked dust as the medium for his masterpiece. Dust is one of those wonderful things where the beauty is easier to miss than to see. Dust is beautiful when it reflects the light.

I’m a bit like that, come to think of it. My soul collects dust, and I’m allergic. I look too closely at my vices and I start to cough; when I work to clean the dust away, my eyes tend to water. Still, when I send my dusty particles off into the air, I see movements of the Invisible. Light makes my mess beautiful when I’m brave enough to open the curtain.

There’s a lot of mess in this life. And a lot of beauty. How many of the messes are a bit lovely when I choose to see? When I let them reflect the light? My baby showed me transcendence in a billow of bedroom dust. Where else can I find beauty, if I pause the striving for perfection, and just sit with the mess for a minute, just look?

I don’t have to look very far.

There’s that pile of disheveled books on the floor, still. But perhaps, I might notice the story behind them—the quest for knowledge, the love of words and pictures, and the eager voice saying, “Mommy, can you read it to me again?”

Dirt and boots are sloshed around the entryway. My fresh eyes might see in those my kids, traipsing off on adventures through the mud, losing themselves in imagination and the soul-soothing of trees, moss and forest air.

Blueberry stains streak my oak table top a dark purple. Maybe, the remnants of July’s fresh sweetness could bring me a smile on an icy morning in January, thinking back and ahead to warmer days.

What other messes are here? What other beauty can I see?

I remember one day shortly after my son’s first birthday. A sippy cup of milk hit the floor beside his highchair, a daily occurrence. While I never cry over spilt milk, I sometimes want to cry over the sheer number of times I have to bend down and clean it up. I reached for a wet cloth, turned to wipe the spill, but paused, struck. The cup spun in a perfect circle, spewing out milk in a symmetrical pattern both surprising and familiar: a perfect crown of thorns. I snapped a photo to remember.

An image both ugly and beautiful. Horrifying and redemptive. This might, for once, be spilt milk worth crying over. A mundane mess, the petty annoyance of cleaning up after my child, reminding me of ultimate sacrificial love.

I suppose that’s motherhood. A lot of ugliness, suffering, and sacrifice. A whole lot of beauty, joy, and love. Usually, it’s both intertwined. One revealing the other. Like wide baby eyes, sparkling with delight as they reflect a cloud of dust.

Guest essay written by Mary Baklinski. Mary is a young mom of three, hobby farming and homeschooling on the west coast of Canada. She loves early mornings by the fire, long walks in the forest, black coffee, ice cream, reading to her kids and laughing with her husband. And she loves cleanliness just a little bit more than is good for her.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.