When Life Is Messy

Life gets messy. Life is messy. We all know this. Life with kids is messy. Marriage can be messy. Friendships can be messy. BLOGGING can get messy. My life took on about 5 months of full on MESSY between November through April. We are talking all the small things that suddenly come at once.

For me, it started with Thanksgiving weekend and feeling good about life: my new balance and finding my voice as a mom through blogging blah blah blah. Then, our home renovation started and the trouble began. Electrical wires dangling unsafely with promises of the electrician coming ASAP only to be left that way for days. Not good with a 3 & 4 year old, so we spent a week basically staying out of the house. Not easy with a 3 & 4 year old in December in the NYC area.

Then came Christmas and the rush of hosting a Christmas Eve dinner 2 days after the renovation was completed. We are talking cleaning everything, unpacking everything, and somehow playing Santa Claus & cooking. Then, it went to thinking what a great idea it would be show grandma the kids’ new ice skating moves. Lap 2 around the rink we realized that was a BAD idea…grandma left with a broken arm in two places. Ouch!

Then came studying for the WSET 3 wine industry exam for hours a day for several weeks. Translate – lots of movies for the kids. Good news….I passed! Bad news…all the sitting rekindled a bad hip injury and led to two months of a PT and one month in a back brace. I literally finished my last PT session the day before my husband, J, had a complete hip replacement in March. Played nurse to a very good patient for a month at home. He was amazing!

Then went to update my website at the end of March only to find that it was no longer there!! Horror. I still have no idea what happened, but I took it as a sign that life was just too messy at that point and I needed a break. I needed to be just Mommy & Wife for a few months and drop all the other complexities I was trying to add. I needed to take care of my family so that we got back to that fun-loving and energetic unit that we have always been. I needed to go back to all the little domestic projects that had cobwebs on them. I needed to regroup, recenter, and make sure I was writing because it gave me true pleasure and was not a chore.

Life gets messy and often in the messiness we find the message we needed to learn all along, but didn’t see before everything went bananas. The message in my mess was to slow down, do less, refocus on my home for a bit, and let go. I am lucky, my messiness is a bit mundane and all the stuff that happened could be fixed. There are times in life when the mess can’t be fixed. Still, no matter what level of mess your life is in right now, I encourage you to look for the message in that mess. Cue in and see what needs to be done. Roll your sleeves up and tackle whatever is at hand, even if you have to neglect some other important things in your life (like I did with my blog for two months). I promise that if the other things are truly important, they will still be there when your mess is cleared and you will feel renewed going back to them. I am so happy to be back writing again and I am so glad that our house is back in order. Just in time for summer….sipping a glass of wine outside on the patio.

Swirl, sip, sigh…