No Mess Like Home
By Sienna Mayers
Most university students were outraged to leave home only to be locked in tiny new ones for eight months. But I felt free.
No, I didn’t flee the country when COVID hit. I write this from my own personal 3-square metres of accommodation, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
My last housemate was very messy. We all have those friends. It’s adorable really – those cute, chaotic scatterbrains! What are they like? Childlike and full of life, too busy making someone laugh to remember their doctor’s appointment or put sausages in the oven. That sort of ditsy dottiness is endearing, right? Everyone knows that. When you step inside a messy person’s bedroom you often roll your eyes and chide them affectionately for their sloppiness. They giggle and say “yes, yes I know! I’m working on it, okay?”
But what if that messy bedroom isn’t just a messy bedroom? What happens when those piles of papers on the floor and clothes strewn over the bed stray into the hallways, the living room, kitchen, bathroom and your life? What happens when your brilliant, funny, messy friend is your mother? Suddenly it isn’t quite so brilliant, or funny.
Soon there’s no space on the dining room table to do homework or even eat breakfast. I can watch TV, as long as I also watch the piles of boxes on the floor overflowing with newspapers dated the same year I wore the baby clothes next to them.
Coming home after a week away feels like a slap in the face which stings harder when my mother welcomes me with open arms and a radiant smile.
“I missed you!” she says, ushering me into a stiflingly full car-boot sale which is apparently actually my house.
I get used to seeing board games balanced on fruit bowls and wigs hanging off bar stools. There’s no rhyme, reason or method. Just madness. And don’t be alarmed if you see a green plastic urn on the counter top. That’s just Dad. My father lives on the breakfast bar.
I double-take at the sordid splendour every time I come downstairs. The novelty has barely worn off after twenty years. I laugh at the sheer absurdity, and I’m reminded fondly of my dad’s old “clutter chuckle”; the special low, humourless laugh-groan he’d omit whilst turning in slow circles round this cathedral of carnage. Arms folded in a towelling robe, he wanted his tombstone to read “killed by the clutter.” Only half joking.
My laugh isn’t quite so macabre. The sight of my pink Build-A-Bear lying moth-eaten on the floor in Hello Kitty knickers does genuinely amuse me. We step over her every day whilst she stubbornly holds fort in her tiny dressing gown. I haven’t touched her since 2008 but this furry piece of ancient past greets me daily. Why don’t I pick her up? My mother treats every wayward toy or bag of newspapers like a historical relic, which I suppose now they are. The clutter is to be seen and complaints not to be heard. She will deal with the thousands of Metros in due course. Her mess: her rules.
Thus, the set-up is not without comic value, though I’d rather not live in it. If it were a museum I’d probably visit. A (30-year-old, well-travelled) friend did once describe it as “one of the most intense visual experiences I have ever had.” That could be on the brochure. Come along, I’ll use the entrance fee to pay for my therapy. After I’ve paid for my mum’s.
The house has never seemed so freakish than now that I’m faced with moving back for the summer. It is just as cluttered, except more so because my sister has also moved back from university and the past year of her life is in bags on my bedroom floor. Her life from every year before that is covering her own bedroom floor. Now nowhere is safe, apart from our downstairs toilet which my mum uses for her work Zoom calls. It’s our pride and joy because it’s the only place where you can see the floor. Unbelievably, we’ve managed to keep the entire arms-width clear. Whilst urinating, you might be tricked into thinking you were in any old house. Then you open the door and just like Sarah opening her faux-bedroom door in The Labyrinth you’rein for a nasty surprise.
I would never have chosen to be raised in this circus. Yet in my mother’s eyes I had the perfect childhood. She was raised in a severely racist, deprived region of Toxteth in 70s Liverpool and can’t forget it. She wore hand-me-downs that she hated and always felt ugly.
But to her own mother, she was lucky. My grandmother was a Chinese peasant who was raised as a servant and later married off to an older sailor who would “take care of her.” She can’t read or write in any language, and she still serves everyone else huge portions whilst taking scraps for herself.
So, what are a few boxes? My mum would have killed for all this stuff when she was little. I don’t get called Ching Chang Chong every day, and I get to go on holiday. I have the freedom and the means to dress how I like, and mostly do as I please. The boxes may suffocate me but to her they’re proof she made it out.
She is the mother of all messes but her love is as conspicuous as the clutter. Most mornings we’re greeted by notes next to our breakfast. ‘Good morning sweet petal’, ‘You are a fine eggsample of a good egg’. Lounging on the sofa I’m accosted by enthusiastic renditions of the hip hop or burlesque or martial arts move she picked up that week, costume provided by knick-knacks strewn around the room. One minute there’s a wig on the floor- the next it’s on her head. She diligently maintains a windowsill display of miniature figurines being devoured by rubber tarantulas or fighting each other, different every time I come home. I’m always noticing new touches to the decor – like the tiny plastic frog bathing in his private bottle-top pond by the sink. Life here isn’t boring, apart from when she discovers how to make a new dish and is so proud she makes it exclusively for a month.
Recently, I spotted two books amongst the sea of objects forming a moat around the breakfast bar: ‘How To Go Clutter Free’ and ‘Banish Clutter Forever’. She insists with alarming sincerity that she’s a ‘minimalist at heart,’ her secret self threatening to break out at any moment.
Despite her enthusiasm for change, her response to FAQs concerning why she can’t simply chuck everything away now, suggests it would be a heinous act akin to separating a child from their dæmon in His Dark Materials. She’s tethered by an umbilical cord to her belongings and she’s the only one who can cut it. In her own time.
In the meantime, I try my best to forgive her. My mother is the liveliest and happiest person I know and does everything – apart from tidy up – to make us feel the same. I wouldn’t have her any other way, despite wishing the house was literally any other way. She messed up in the truest sense of the word. But who would I be if she didn’t?
Phillip Larkin was right to say that “man hands on misery to man.” But they hand on joys too, and my home is full of them. Full to the brim.
