Seeds Grow in Dirt (My Mother's Day essay, oft told)

It was a rotten year and a half for housework.


My New Year’s resolution was to keep my house utterly clean. I washed walls, I organized closets, I dreamed of shininess.

Then, my oldest son had a problem with school. And pregnancy happened—never my finest hours. Within a short time I was a pregnant, home-schooling mom of four kids under ten with a perpetual headache. A major accomplishment for the day was setting out the cold cereal at mealtime.

The year went on. Home-school continued, and the baby arrived, and everyone knows how productive those first few months aren’t with a newborn. If her little white nightgowns were clean, I felt like queen of all housework.

Meanwhile, grime pockets formed behind doors, dust bunnies grew and had bunny families—several generations of them. The top of our old piano started to collect so many items it could open an antique store of its own. At a low point, there was a two-week period where someone broke a different item made of glass every single day. For some reason I got called to the Relief Society presidency, just to add to the chaos.

Months passed. Baby learned to crawl. My year teaching a bright, much happier, 4th grader wound down. The two preschoolers started to be a little less prone to break glass. But the house languished, nay, wallowed in its filth, especially the formerly light blue carpet. In fact, one spring afternoon after Little League, I had an argument with Zane, who insisted our carpet is grey. “Light blue,” I claimed half-heartedly, barely remembering the true color myself.

Summer came. All five kids tracked in roughly 75 pounds of dirt from their treasure pit in the sand pile and about a million squished leaves from their fort under the nectarine tree. My girls had birthday parties for their teddy bears that for some reason involved crumbling blueberry muffins into oblivion on the grey carpet, possibly in an attempt to turn it blue again. I got drafted to be the interim Webelos leader and actually sanctioned large messes in the house. Cousins came over and incited a game as destructive as it sounds: Toy War. We went through our twelfth 100-count box of Otter Pops and our second vacuum cleaner motor (due to renegade thread while the oldest three kids learned embroidery.)

When mid-August rolled around, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Stephen went back to fifth grade, and he found a niche in learning there. Zane opted out of soccer, so we now only had one uniform to find on Saturday mornings. Rachel started kindergarten, and Catherine dropped out of preschool after a month to stay home to paint and do coloring books with mom. Baby Zuzu could now walk around by herself, looking for stray popcorn kernels to gnaw on with her two teeth.

Things got quieter around home.

With a sense of newfound power, I conducted a yard sale, which made it so we could park inside our garage again. Miracle. Next I looked to tackle the house.

That first morning, however, I caught a glimpse of our kitchen sink, the drainer side. Whoa. How long had it been? A while, for sure. Gingerly I lifted the drainer.

Oh. My. Goodness. What was that green thing?

I pulled out the clean, drying measuring cups and lifted the rack from the sink. Yep, something was definitely growing there: a two-pronged leaf sprout, about four inches tall.

With a squeal of horror I plucked out the sink stopper and found the little white root ball and what looked like the yellow-brown transparent hull of a popcorn kernel around its base. Or maybe it was one of Gary’s gardening projects. Or an escaped food-storage black eyed pea?

No! How could I have let the sink cleaning lapse long enough for a seed to germinate and sprout—plus grow four inches? I wanted to cry. What a terrible housekeeper. My kids could probably get some kind of disease from filth this rampant! My word! A seed grew in my sink!

Then a thought stopped my self-berating rant.

Hey. Seeds grow in dirt.

In the past couple of years my most precious seeds, all five of them, had grown an awful lot in this dirt.

Now, I certainly hadn’t been a perfect mother by anyone’s definition. I hadn’t kept a cheery temperament every single day. I hadn’t nurtured my children in every way possible. Without question, I had not created an “antiseptic environment” for my little ones to play and learn in.

But they grew.

I know they say cleanliness is next to godliness. Whoever “they” are, they’re mean. That’s too much pressure. Seriously. Instead I find myself thinking maybe other things wedge their way into the lineup beside godliness. Maybe doing-the-best-you-can-motherhood is one of them. After all, God helps all things to grow. Maybe that’s what motherhood is all about.

Now, it’s not that I will henceforth refuse to scrub my tub or decide never to replace that ailing vacuum. But God formed Man out of the dust of the Earth. Perhaps I ought to be aiming to do that, too—to form men and women out of these sweet little seeds they are now, and remember that most seeds require all kinds of light, and water (that’d be Saturday night baths), and at least a little dirt. Because seeds grow in dirt.

Clean Carpets and Clean Manuscripts

Last week I did what I dread. I pulled out my carpet shampoo-er. It was time. Long past time.

To get the dirty deed done, first I had to move a ton of furniture into the garage and to the side of the room. This involved silk plants and magazine racks and the rocking chair and a couple of lamps and the little bookcase with all the kids' piano books. And the kitchen table and chairs. And tipping the loveseat up on its side and balancing it against the window casing. And shoving the long couch up against the front window where no one walks or drags trikes or sleds or rollerskates so the carpet is still relatively bluish there, as opposed to the brown-grey-blue of the heavy traffic areas.

In this house, with these feet, everywhere is a heavy traffic area.

Then, it was the vacuums. I make that plural because the big one, my Hoover Platinum, vacuums the middle of the floor, and the hand-held with the wand gets the edges of the room. Man, that thing has a loud, high-pitched wail. Good thing I put in earplugs, or I'd be sitting here enjoying the strains of tinnitis instead of Phineas and Ferb being piped in from the other room.

How long does it usually take me to vacuum? Like 15 minutes? More or less. This time, I think I clocked in at three times that long. There was just that much dirt lurking. Ground in cold cereal, thanks to the little girls doll tea parties. Hey, I had a bad year for housework. It happens.

FINALLY, I pulled out Old Reliable. Er, Old Soapy. Or whatever it is I'm going to name that shampoo-carpeter (as my sister calls it.) The Hoover SteamVac. It's pretty heavy. And it's loud. And it requires vacuuming at a snail's pace with something twice as cumbersome as my regular vac.

It took me five (count 'em five) hours of push and pull to get through the living room and hallway. Forget the bedrooms. Every time I emptied that rinse basin, I cringed. How could that black sludge be all around us?

WE ARE LIVING IN SQUALOR.

When I finished, I couldn't just stop. The black sludge sickened me. I had to make another pass. Against the better judgment of my impending back-pain, I got up my courage and made another pass.

Guess what. No black sludge! Yes!

Sure, there was brown sludge this time, but it wasn't black this time. A little cleaner! So happy.

After that pass, I realized it could use another rinse. However, I'd been at it for hours, and all I could do was crawl into the passenger seat of our suburban and say, "Sweetie, can you, just, please, uh, drive me through McDonalds. Need. Hamburger. Need. Yogurt. Please?"

My sweetie did. Those yogurt parfaits deserve a place in the candy pantheon. I love them.

So. My point is this. The first time I went through my manuscript to edit it, it made me sick. Pulling out black sludge. Chunks of goo. Bad, bad, murky nasty. It made me want to quit.

But I kept at it. The second time, it was more like brown sludge. Less goo. More clarity. And the third time, even cleaner.

Now, on my umpteenth read-through, it's a lot cleaner. My critique pals are pointing out the typos, rather than the glaring plot errors, for the most part, and it's encouraging.

So, to get a clean draft, it might take a lot of passes to get there. It's worth it! Here at home my carpet is almost blue everywhere again. I walk through and it's spongy fluff, rather than brownish matted ick. What a change! I feel the same way about my manuscript. With every pass it improves.

Of course, like with any analogy, it can be taken too far. The wash cycle can actually start wearing away at the fibers of the carpet, and likewise over-editing can start chipping away at the charm and life of the story. Be gentle and selective and careful.

Now. Enough of that. I have been thinking about that yogurt parfait and how a lot of things ought to be included in the Candy Family. How did that biology chant go? Kingdom, phylum, class...Who knows. Anyhow, it's my firm belief that many cold cereals belong firmly in in the candy family. For sure any that list its first ingredient as sugar just flashes "candy!" at you. Apple Jacks? Candy. Froot Loops? Totally candy. Those taste a lot like Skittles to me. Sugar Smacks...burned candy. What about anything that is half sugar-coated oat flour and half marshmallows? Undeniably candy.

Bill Cosby had a skit about fatherhood where his kids were chanting something about chocolate cake for breakfast. Not a bad idea. But candy/cereal -- just a good substitute for that on days we don't feel like baking before the morning meal.

Bring on the sugar. I'll have mine in honey nut flavor today, please.