My husband and I are finding that as our baby gets increasingly mobile – he can now “creep” about the floor remarkably quickly! – our home gets increasingly messy. Even when my husband and I try our best to tidy up the living room at the end of the day, just a few minutes after we come downstairs the following morning, toys and baby things are strewn about everywhere – cars, shapes, stackable cups, balls, rings, animals, teethers, puzzles, activity stations, stuffed animals, pillows, blankets and more. Sometimes all of these baby items make our relatively small living room feel too crowded and chaotic and unpredictable and out of control and disorganized…in a word, messy. But it also feels lived in, as all of these various items are reminders of moments shared in this space – moments of laughter and connection and learning and play, and also of tears and frustration. As our baby learns and grows, and as we learn and grow with him, messiness happens, but even our small and limited living room is proving capable of holding these experiences. This messy living room is the very space in which relationship and connection is occurring, and in which each day we are getting to know our dear little baby better and better – and, I hope, in which he is getting to know us. And when we think of this, my husband and I truly wouldn’t have it be any other way.
This tangible picture of messiness as a means of play – and therefore, connection – that I get to experience daily with my baby makes me think of the more abstract “messiness” of connection that I experience in relationship, particularly relationship with my husband. Lately my husband and I have been having some hard conversations within the “living room” of our marriage; while there is a part of me that wants to “clean up” this relational space instead of allowing complex emotions and different perspectives and sometimes contradictory desires and varying opinions and numerous needs and heavy stressors to get “strewn about”, doing so would actually mean our relationship was not particularly “lived in”, and would likely make it hard to truly be engaging with one another. So my husband and I have been trying our best to process our relationship by discussing how we each are experiencing one another and our marriage, how we are feeling known and loved well, and how we could be knowing and loving one another better – we are trying to “play” in our relational space with one another. This is sometimes hurtful and hard, and we both often fall short of how we aspire to love one another, but it is also usually ends up fostering greater mutual connection and closeness and knowing and learning and growing. And I think over the years, we are becoming increasingly able to trust in our love for one another within the messy “living room” of our marriage, and to then trust that this love is strong enough to hold the honesty of painful emotions, truths, and experiences alongside joyful experiences. Or, said another way, we are learning that our love for one another is strong enough and safe enough to hold mutual vulnerability, for even though we at times hurt one another – both intentionally and unintentionally – at the end of the day we know our hearts are for one another, and, by God’s grace, always will be.