my creative house, or, I justify my mess

I’m a bit embarrassed to write this post, but as soon as I had the idea, I knew I would do it.  Embarrassment be damned.  I’m sure my husband will be equally parts mortified and appalled, as he never sees the house this way.  What way?  The way it is between the hours of eight and two or three, Tuesdays through Thursdays.

You see, my husband is a very neat person.  He puts things away after he uses them.  Me? Not so much.  Not by nature, anyway.  I’m a doer then a cleaner.  Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have my house clean all of the time, I just don’t function that way.

My husband is home three days a week, and during those days I generally pick up after myself as I go because I think it is right to be respectful of our shared space.  When we’re sharing it.  But during the four days he’s gone, I’ve begun to do differently.

And my house ends up looking like this (unedited photos and I resisted the urge to make my mess look a little better before shooting these, and yes, that is a half eaten apple on the floor):

And the pictures don’t even do the mess justice.  I need a panoramic camera (or my father-in-law’s circuit camera).  And it is hard to believe that all this mess was stirred up in a few short hours.  But this is a functional mess.  You see, I’ve only recently begun to allow myself to let the house get this way.  A few months back, I found myself in a total creative slump.  I was so busy during the day keeping up the house, feeding the insatiable mouths and stuffing load after load in the washing machine, that I didn’t have the energy or the desire to use the few hours I had in the evening after the kids went to bed to do anything.

It was getting to me.  Something had to change.  I felt like I was cleaning up after the kids all day long, the same messes over and over.  I would rush through the livingroom-diningroom area putting away toys and books, cajolling Junah into picking up her discarded outfits, picking tracked in leaves out of the carpet.  Then I would turn to dishes or laundry only to find the toys, books, clothes and leaves needed tending to again.

So I stopped cleaning up.  I would do the dishes and the laundry, make the lunches, wipe the faces, hands and behinds, but I stopped the tidying madness until the afternoon.  It was an amazing difference.  Suddenly, instead of picking up toys fifteen times a day, I was doing it once (maybe twice).  And there was so much more time to my day.

And I found that I could, occasionally, use that time to do something I wanted to do.  I could make a dryer ball, or cut up some tshirts to make yarn or assemble some artsy cards or write a blog post.  I could make a mess of the diningroom table while the kids made a mess of the rest of the diningroom (and livingroom, and bedrooms).  I could put Ivan Ulz’s “Songs from the Old School” onh for Ezra or downloaded audiobooks like anything Skippyjon Jones for Junah, or throw open the front and back doors for both, or give into Ezra’s request for a “show! show!” and do a little something for myself.  And sometime around two or three in the afternoon I could clean-up, make dinner and feel good about my day.

And this is what I need to do.  Because laundry and dishes and yes, even time with my kids, are not enough.  I need to use my brain and my hands and for something else sometimes.  And  it can get messy.

How do you manage to create and keep up?  What does your space look like when you’re working?