Before bed the other night, Reagan and I were cuddling in her bed, gabbing about our weekend. Since it had warmed up a bit, she had the pleasure of all the outside shenanigans that she has been fond of since – well – since I would take her outside as a toddler.
As we were finishing up, prayers said and time for bedtime kisses, we did our normal one-and-a-two-and-an-I-love-you and used our index finger to take a kiss from our own lips to each other’s nose followed by each of us kissing the other’s palm of their hand – our nightly ritual.
Only, that night, I realized that she hadn’t had a bath and quite honestly, judging by the looks of her hands, it looked like even if she gave them a quick soap and rinse, they needed a good scrub. Jokingly, I asked her if she had pig guts on them. She giggled her guilty, mischievous giggle that, even when she is in trouble, always makes it hard for me to keep from smiling.
Knowing that — even though I was grinning — I was still a little disappointed that she hadn’t given her hands a good wash like I had asked her to, she felt the need to explain to me that we didn’t have any chalk to put on her hands so she could do pull-ups on her bars out back so she instead rubbed dirt on her hands. There wasn’t an explanation about why they weren’t washed – just a reason for why they were so dirty.
For some reason, her reasoning took my mind to the backyard – how we needed to clean it up for spring and restock things like her chalk. I started explaining to her that we would need to get out there soon and get it ready for the warm months ahead, including cleaning up all the junk left behind from last summer and filling in some new holes that she had decided to dig up.
Immediately, upon hearing this, she shot up in bed and said, “Mommy, THAT is not happiness!” The sincerity in her eyes and the firmness in her voice could have convinced me that the sky was green; she truly meant it.
So, I pried, “what is happiness, Reagan?”
While I cannot remember her response word for word, she went on and on about her adventures outside around the house – all of which were the reasons that we needed to clean up the backyard in the first place. All of these “messes” that she had made in the process.
And guys, I think for the first time in her almost 8 little years alive, a lightbulb went off in my head. Ever since this child started making messes, I have been following her around cleaning them up. Once she got old enough, I would just constantly remind her to clean them up, over and over. It has always been so frustrating to me that such a little kid could make such amazing messes.
I am not kidding. There have actually been times where I thought she must be creating chaotic wrecks just to try and push me to my limits, to see how far I could go before I just couldn’t take the uncleanliness anymore. Seriously, I had started taking it personally – the dirt, sparkles and slime EVERYWHERE. How did she not see it? She had to be doing it on purpose, right?
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not sure that I ever actually thought those things, much less said them out loud. But I am certain I have felt that way many times in the past. Somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing the delight in her actions and only saw the destruction. I lost the wonder she was creating along the way.
Like a ton of bricks, this realization hit me hard, what if I had continued to miss all of that and bickered the creativity right out of her? Thankfully, she is as stubborn as her Mama and didn’t allow that. Ha!
And even more so, thankfully she reminded me what happiness really is to her. It opened my eyes up to the reasoning behind the mess: that it wasn’t about me or challenging my rules on cleanliness; it was about her and her imagination, inventiveness and inspiration.
Trust me, this doesn’t mean that she never has to clean up another mess she makes – and yes, she still has to wash her hands after she rubs dirt on them! But this little girl gave me a glimpse back into that innovative mind of hers and what happiness means to her – which ultimately makes her astonishing ability to create messes a little easier to handle.
Sarah (Pitson) Shrader was born and raised in Lima. She is a Lima Central Catholic and Tiffin University graduate. Sarah is a full-time working mama who enjoys writing about her somewhat crazy, always adventurous life as a mother. She lives in Bath Township with her daughters and writing inspirations, Maylie and Reagan.
