I got screened for ADHD (or maybe just plain old ADD? I’m not feeling very hyperactive, these days, it must be said) last week, after waiting months for an appointment to do so. My beloved PCP sees her patients at a community health clinic near several shelters and a public park. The waiting room is always a slightly chaotic scene, and my doctor is always running a few minutes behind. And then, often, she’s forgotten a form, or she needs to run back out to check on my blood work, because she can’t remember But once she’s in the room with me, she’s in the room with me. You know? Anyway, I like her a lot and I trust her deeply.
And the lateness and forgetting and slight chaos—the mess—is, honestly, a source from which that trust flows.
Because she is a physician and not a psychologist, my doctor went down the list of ADD/ADHD symptoms and simply asked me if and to what extent I experience them, not how they make me feel.
Basically: Where are your messes? and What are their shapes and sizes? and What tools would help you as you try to manage them? and not: Do you feel ashamed of these? or Do they remind you of your parents’ messes? How about your dead ex’s messes? Remember how it felt, always trying to clean those up?
Because my doctor doesn’t hide her messes, nor judge mine, I was honest on every question, and I didn’t apologize one time. We were safe in that little room together, talking about my inability to stop double-booking myself or meet my writing deadlines or wash my dishes.
We’re having some friends over for dinner tomorrow night (and because they also have very young children, when I say “night,” I am referring to an hour that falls squarely within the time of day I used to call “afternoon”).
We don’t know these friends very well yet, which means two things:
1) I am filled with a kind of first-date-like energy; I’m very excited to host them, and to ask them a lot of questions about their lives, and to (probably) overshare about my own life when asked politely in return, and
2) I currently reside, up until the moment they kick their boots off in our tiny mudroom, in a hell of my own making.
Well, of my dog’s making too (she sheds at a rate and in a volume that would overwhelm the most technologically advanced vacuum, which ours is not) and of my three-year-old’s. And of The New Yorker’s, of course. A weekly magazine arriving in our mailbox (and from there tossed onto our countertop mail…pile) weekly.
Do you know how many weeks there are in the year?
Picture 52 magazines and tell me that’s not too many magazines for a household of four creatures, only two of whom can read. Look me in the eyes and tell me. You can’t.
But we, the grownup human beings in the house, have largely contributed to this hellscape. The aforementioned partially-read magazines have been piled up, they have not piled up mysteriously on their own. We have to take some responsibility here, for our messes.
We also have to let other people see them, if we ever want to know and host and create with and maybe also eventually (or immediately, for me, sometimes) love those people and let ourselves be loved by them in return.
A connection with someone who has seen my pile of New Yorkers is forged from strong and beautiful, if fraying and seaweed-stinky rope, a knot and an anchor and a dock that’s steady and solid through any swell or storm.
This, I know, is what I want, more than the delicate little ribbon, sure to unravel, that might tie me to someone from whom I hide the stack. Someone whose presence in my home makes me feel like I need to pretend I’ve read them all, or to shove them into a closet or under a hastily-made bed.
If I only loved my baby when his face was clean and he pronounced all his words correctly and clearly and in order; if I only loved my best friend when her mind was calm and clear and her desk was organized; if I only loved my dog when she wasn’t shedding everywhere or digging uneven holes in the garden; if I only loved the ocean when it wasn’t making a mess of the shore, or when it wasn’t being choked by our plastic garbage mess? If I only loved the abortion clinics I’m moving through when no members of their staff were beefing and gossiping behind each other’s backs, or when their junk drawers weren’t full of errant phone chargers and pronoun pins and security badges and Clif bars that expired a year ago? If I only loved this movement—or any of our movements—when it wasn’t fractured and dented and crumbling along the fault lines of our disagreements and our difficulty coalescing with comrades we might not choose as friends?
There’d be no real honest true love at all.
When someone is honest with me about a messy feeling or experience they might prefer to hide, when someone lets me in on their body’s weird little quirks and unpredictable contours, or gives me a ride in their car full of seltzer cans, or tries to explain their abortion or their gender or their love story in terms and language they haven’t edited or rehearsed. My jaw unclenches and my muscles relax and I can see them clearly, because I’m not glancing over my shoulder or trying to keep track of what all of my messy sh*t might look like through their eyes.
For many people—especially mothers, or straight-A youth-group good girls, or people raised to believe that their life must be a pristine and museum-like home with no dust in the corners, people for whom cleanliness is a moral imperative—abortions feel messy. They feel like stories to be hidden, or made more tidy and palatable, polished for company or shoved into basements and attics so no one can see them.
But my abortion story is no messier than any other story of pregnancy, heartbreak, blood, life. And neither is yours—no matter how you’ve been made to feel.
A mess is an adult sleepover, friends draped over each other and borrowing each other’s pajamas and toothpaste and spilling our popcorn everywhere. A mess is late-night misspelled texts and homemade, sloppily decorated birthday cakes delivered a day late. An argument with a sibling that leads to a deeper and more authentic relationship or a decade of no-contact or more, messier, arguments that help you figure out what you’re actually arguing about.
A mess cannot be a concern in 2024, I feel. Not when there are genocides to stop, and planets to nourish and fight for, and abortions to fund and babies to feed and burp and bathe and soothe and keep safe.
When there are people to love.
All my favorite books have typos and dog ears and rips and coffee stains. All my favorite stories aren’t linear or simple or neatly resolved. All my favorite people are messy and don’t hide it.
And all messes are made or managed or inherited by people worthy of love and company, and a messy bunch of flowers when I arrive at their door.