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I went to Borders recently and saw a book titled, “Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life”. Nobody understands this sacred messiness better than mothers. My home is literally untidy, which is a difficult concept for my inner neat-freak … and the outer one … to come to terms with. As a child, everything in my room had its place: the picture cube, the ceramic ring box from Holland, the small ceramic otter, and my dolphin statue. Every two weeks I would come home from school to find that my mom had dusted and not put my knick knacks in their habitual niches, so I would have to rearrange them.

This sticky habit of mine refuses to un-glue. Now with a toddler who loves to explore all the nooks, boxes, cupboards, and shelves, my stubborn neat freak squirms in me constantly. My daughter, Layla, loves to extract each pot and pan from the kitchen cupboard and pour water from one to the other. Another of her favorite pastimes is to try on my shoes and flop around the house in different pairs. It’s not that I don’t enjoy watching her be silly, in fact I love to see her explore our home landscape and the world in the creative ways that only a child can. And it’s not that I mind cleaning up all that much, but the disorder shifts my insides, too, and nudges at my desire to have things look they way I want. This is rarely possible.

And it’s not just the physical mess. Layla and motherhood have altered the way I live, the way I eat, the way I sleep, the way I structure the contents of each day. I can’t always get myself out of bed to do yoga at 5 am, so I practice in chunks throughout the day. Just this morning, I had to dodge Layla’s wooden school bus and ceramic tea set. When I flattened myself out onto the mat to lift my chest into Cobra, Layla plopped herself onto my calves. She giggled when I lifted her from there into Downward Facing Dog, so I moved from Cobra to Dog a few times to amuse her. This is my yoga, a flexibility that is not as much of the body but of the ego to bend itself around the corners of motherhood.

Shortly after Layla was born, I struggled in this role of, what I initially saw as chaos, albeit a loving and desired one. I just couldn’t shake the nostalgia for an uncluttered home and day that didn’t demand I pack the diaper bag before walking out the door. As my ultimate love and adoration for my daughter has matured, I have found that all the disorder she has brought into daily life has reordered me on a spiritual level. I have learned to let go of my notions of how my home and existence should be because there are more important things … like the joy and love Layla smiles into each moment. I have learned to allow Layla and life to move me along with them, rather than resist, and to find and savor the bright fibers in the heap of linens and laundry. The messiness in our home is proof we enjoy playing and exploring together. I cannot depend on eight hours of nightly sleep or find the time to finish a novel in less than a month (poetry, I have found is much more convenient and compact), but I can devote myself to this baby who has been blessed into my care. And love it because I know I can raise her to feel loved and adored, even if it means the books won’t be arranged the way I like them.

Motherhood comes with messiness, but it is a sacred mess. In the chaos of it all, my ego shrinks one size at a time, along with the muddy, food-smeared t-shirts. Clutter has given me the space to become a better mother (I hope) and better person (I pray).