Still Need My Mommy

I’m almost thirty and I’ve come to the conclusion that I will never outgrow my need for a mommy. She bore me and raised me and shipped me out of the house. Maybe she assumed that since we had become such good friends and I had become so largish, her role would change and she would be more of a buddy than an actually hardcore mom. This has not proven to be the case. She gets to be my buddy and my hardcore mom. My Mommy. The woman who cuddles me and supports me and tells me everything will be okay. The woman that helps me clean my bedroom.

Usually when my mom comes to visit, I spend hours cleaning in preparation so she’ll see how well I learned from her cleaning lessons, what a good homemaker I am, and how I have everything all together. I know that with the smell of cleaning products filling the house and the pristine vacuum lines on the carpet she has to know that I’ve been busting a move in order to pull the wool over her eyes, but she’s very gracious not to ever mention the transparency of my cleanly ruse.

This week when she came to visit, I’d been sewing Halloween costumes for about a week and had let the house go to that chaotic place houses go when left to their own child-ridden devices. The house was trashed, but I had all night Thursday to clean before she arrived Friday morning. Then we got some devastating family news and neither Dan nor I were in any shape to be cleaning a house. We just needed to figure out what was happening, comfort each other and pray.

So I called my mom and told her not to be shocked but that the house was not gonna be spotless. It was not going to be tidy. It was not, in fact, going to look like well-bred humans lived there, and I apologized.

She was so kind and laid back about it and has spent the last few days alternately chilling when I needed someone to chill with and cleaning when I was ready to get down to business. Today we did my bedroom, taking it from a state of disarray to place of complete beauty and blessed organization. And we had fun doing it.

It’s such a nice change from childhood to get to clean my room alongside my mom and want to learn of her ways of organizational genius and to be grateful for the chance to do it. Having her around just fills me with calm and restores order to my world.

When something’s broken, she can still fix it. With her and my dad around, I still feel safe and loved and like I’m the most special little girl around, no matter how messy my house is and no matter how big of a little girl I am. I really hope I can provide that kind of safe place for my kids. No matter how big they get, they should know that there is always room for them in my heart and on my lap.

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