What do you do when things feel messy?
Our garden this year is messy. It’s full of weeds. I planted the zucchini too closely and it infected the squash with powdery mildew. The cucumbers have been struggling all summer. Most of the carrots never germinated despite my replanting them. I’ve sort of given up.
And yet… once or twice a week I go out there and there’s still all of this:
So, if there is obviously fruit coming out of the garden - though perhaps not as much as there could be, given different time and circumstances - why does it feel like failure?
I wonder if my feelings of failure center around the fact that it doesn’t look the way I think it should. I envision some version of “Better Homes and Gardens” mixed with “Ballerina Farm” and am disappointed when this is the reality:
I shuffle out to the garden when I have time (or after purposely delaying grocery shopping so I’ll run out of produce and be forced to go see what’s there). I gather carrots and a few zucchini, then a few of the cucumbers that are still producing despite whatever yellow scourge they’ve contracted. I observe that the grasshoppers have slowed their kale consumption and there’s a few leaves left for me. The zinnias just keep going, so I snip a bunch and pick a few carrot tops to accompany them for greenery.
It’s a decent amount of produce - it might cost me $20 at the farmer’s market to buy the same. But when I’m distracted by how fragmented and messy it feels, I don’t really see it for what it is.
If I look at my garden and can only see the things that are failing, do I forget how much more we’re getting from it than if I hadn’t planted it at all? G.K. Chesterton reminds us that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. Important things are still worth an imperfect effort but how do we make peace with the imperfection instead of letting it tempt us to despair?
I think this is the perpetual plight of the idealist living in a less than ideal world. We tend to compare our reality to a blueprint of perfection that we wrongfully assume is out there somewhere. If you thought about things very pragmatically you’d be hard pressed to find a garden that didn’t involve dirt. You’d also be hard pressed to find a child that didn’t produce dirty laundry and leave a trail of crumbs.1And those idyllic farm animals? They poop.
But we live as if these things - the dirt, the mess, the animal manure, the dirty diapers, the dirty dishes, the piles of school papers, the laundry in corners - shouldn’t be a reality if we’re doing it right. It’s like we expect to exist in some picture perfect utopia.2 Then when things are messy, complicated, annoying, full of bugs, or produce copious dishes, we assume we’re doing it wrong.
You’re not doing it wrong. It’s just messy.
All of it.
I’ve been talking with a few friends about community and friendships, and it’s been interesting to see some of these idealistic assumptions cross over into relational territory. A friend shared her surprise that she wasn’t the only one who felt isolated and lonely, even in the midst of people. She had assumed everyone else just had better community - that somehow being a person was different for everyone but her. Another conversation in the comments of a friend’s writing revealed shared frustration, wondering why it is so hard to have a group of friends without also having to organize the group. I’m struggling to figure out how to juggle my own time and commitments; I feel stretched between the desire to connect and the obvious mismatch of time and energy in this demanding season of home life.
Secretly I wonder - if I’m a capable person (as I’m fairly certain I am), and if I feel overextended with the few things I’m committed to, and if most people I know are doing way more than I am… but everyone I talk to feels like they don’t have community - what are we doing?
What is our expectation of ourselves? Of others? I truly wonder if it’s even based in reality at all. Are we continually holding ourselves up to a standard that isn’t actually real because it exists only in the conglomerate version of reality that we see reflected online? I think this is the danger of even things like this newsletter. You might assume that I’m a different sort of person from you and somehow have more figured out. I might have a knack for the written word, but I’m as human as everyone else.
This week I’m tired, I’ve been crabby with my children, we’ve had a mixed bag of school days and my house looks like this:
And I even wonder about taking the pictures of messes - am I just trying to be funny by sharing my (literal) dirty laundry on the Internet? No, I’m really not. This is me trying really hard, but still being frustrated by the fact I’m finite. I want to shake a few shoulders (mostly my own) and say: NO ONE IS DOING IT ALL. They aren’t. If they appear to be put together, never miss anything and are the most dependable person you know, there’s about a 95% chance they have high functioning anxiety, a chronic illness and a history of childhood trauma.3
I’m asking these questions about what we’re doing for myself as much as anyone. I’m tired. The perfectionist thing is exhausting and frankly I don’t want to do it anymore. But it feels a little scary to accept the possibility that I could just be okay with being messy. It doesn’t mean I give up, it just means I give up being perfect. And what would this look like relationally?
I could have cleaned my bathroom yesterday. Instead I sat on the front porch and watched the baby crawl around the sidewalk and then I drank some tea. Then the baby choked on a leaf and I had to do the whole flip the baby upside down and whack on the back maneuver. We moved inside, I sent most of the kids to the backyard and tried to sort through some laundry in my room. Someone started screaming. Somehow we ended up back on the front porch steps, someone brought me a book and begged me to read. After the book was done I went inside and everything in the house was still a mess. I made dinner, which created dirty dishes. It does seem never ending some days. I shoved the laundry back into a basket before I crawled into bed.
What I’m beginning to realize is that the housekeeping will take whatever time I give it. There’s not a huge difference between mostly clean and very clean. It’ll never be sterile, so if we’re just going for sanitary, maybe it’s worth it to sit on the porch for thirty minutes.
I’ve been so focused on efficiency and productivity for so long that I’m not sure what the point of all the time saving and producing even is. What I know is that everyone I talk to seems to be lonely and it’s hard to make in person connections. I know that my children are growing quickly. I know that something has to give and I want to give it to the things that matter.
What those things are? Well I’m still trying to figure that out. But I’m almost certain that the people in front of my face, these little humans of mine, a husband I love, the people I see at church and co-op, our neighbors across the street, the family that sometimes annoys me, I think these people need to matter more than an online world.
Finally, I’m curious about where my readers land on this:
Reading: I started Domestic Monastery by Ronald Rolheiser and it’s a quick and thought provoking read. I think I shared the best quote in last week’s letter. I appreciate the framing of domestic life as a path towards holiness. So often I’ve felt like ministry is contrasted with family life as if they’re mutually exclusive. The acknowledgment that motherhood, especially caring for small children, is a type of monastic vocation with its interruptions and isolation, was welcome.
Essays:
This by
“We Need to Talk About Our Compulsive Busyness”This by
“I’ve had my eye on you: how not to propose marriage”This by
for fall collection “Will We Ever Feel Finished” and “Between Mothers and Sons” byQuotable:
Edith Stein writes,
And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God's hands and leave it with Him.
I’ve actually found that when my children go “shihtless” all summer long it really cuts down on laundry. Otherwise no life hacks here. One child never changes his clothes, one changes his clothes four times a day. It always averages to too much laundry.
Dare I say… we expect to live in an Instagram world?
This is anecdotal, mostly based on a case study of n-1
Great post!
What I've noticed over the years -- I've been at this homemaking thing for 50+ years now -- is that when I make lists of the things needing to be done in a given day, it often happens that none of them gets done. So that definitely is discouraging.
But if I were to make a list of what DID get done... well, it would be impossible, because we don't even have any idea of what our prayers and attention alone accomplished, in the long run, in the lives of our children and others around us. And as far as physical tasks, just getting out of bed, making eye contact with your children, finding them something to eat, taking a nap with them .... a thousand things you have done in a day when "nothing" got done.
I think you yourself have probably written about similar realities. And what you have written here is extremely valuable. When the garden is a messy failure, God actually is using it to provide you with food. This is symbolic, of course, of our lives. There is a book I've never read, Being as Communion, whose title has become a prayer of sorts in my heart. God is with us in this moment, and it's His presence that is our Life.
Thank you, Annelise!
I’m really glad there’s been such a recent push to value homemaking/homesteading type work in recent years but now I feel it has almost generated its own “do it all” culture that mirrors the regular culture’s level of busyness and productivity. Our garden actually did quite well this year ... and I just can’t keep up with the amount of food. I squeeze in a couple of food preservation projects a week but it’s not enough to preserve *everything*
I feel deeply bad about this even though I remind myself that it is entirely optional to even be gardening! (Not to mention I will never get to the mulberry tree or (crab?) apple tree and I didn’t even realize I should feel bad about this until this week when I read a Substack about how natural food sources go to waste 😵💫). I was reading in my Mennonite cookbook about how food preservation was a family project involving grandparents etc. so if you’re the only adult home with kids on a regular basis it’s not even realistic to be doing everything yet somehow I still think it is 😂