In Praise of Lived-In Homes

Illustration by Tom Lurchenko.

By Toby Lowenfels

Recently, on my way to pick up my son from a play date, I received this text from the other mom: "Feel free to come in! My house is lived in, and I don't care if people see it. I plan to be super-clean and organized in about 14 years." I immediately knew we’d be friends. And, when I arrived, I didn’t even notice the mess. Our kids were having a blast, and that’s all that mattered. 

Far too often, I’ve thought about having people over only to change my mind because I didn't feel like cleaning. And I know I’m not the only one who lives in fear of the dreaded drop-in. If the mom who texted me didn’t really care about the mess, she wouldn’t have mentioned it. Her warning reflected a concern we’ve been conditioned to: Why do we feel our houses have to be perfect? Why do I feel guilty that no matter how much I clean up, I haven’t cleaned up enough? Caring too much about having a clean house should not get in the way of real life, but it does and it’s got to stop.

Some of it is generational. For instance, my mother always told me not to let my kitchen sink hold more than one meal’s worth of dishes. And at age 40, I still feel anxious if I break that dictum. I bet you have an obsessive ritual passed down from your mother or even hers. Maybe you never leave the house with an unmade bed?  

In an era when Instagram and Pinterest make us covet “curated” homes, and cleaning tutorials are a whole genre of TikTok — which we watch for fun! In our free time! — we have to admit we’ve at least partially done this to ourselves. When we sit down to relax and open up an app, we’re faced with someone’s clear-bin-organized under-sink area and color-coded closets. Ours will never look like that and rather than accept this as fact, we internalize it as a failure. It’s a paradox that we can be aware of these expectations we shouldn’t have to live up to, and yet we’re compelled to reach for them.  

As a mom of three children under 9, I don’t just clean whenever I feel like it based on my own standard of living. I’m cleaning constantly, and the kids are actively working against cleanliness simply by existing. That’s my Sisyphean struggle, though I suspect people without kids also feel the underlying preoccupation with tidiness for the sake of aesthetics. It would be nice if we could all lower our expectations about what our houses need to look like. To let ourselves off the hook a little. 

And let’s talk for a minute about how unrealistic this pressure actually is. No friend has ever come to my house and been, like, “Ew, toys.” Likewise, I’ve never felt that reaction in someone else’s home. We just assume people will judge us in ways they don’t, then we let this worry get in the way of enjoying time together.

So what if we took an informal pledge to stop caring as much? It only works if we all do it.

To get to the point where I accepted a certain level of clutter, I first had to unfollow the interior design feeds that were making me feel bad about my lived-in house. They were not portraying the reality of living with children. Where do they store their mismatched Tupperware in those open-shelved kitchens? Am I the only one whose daughter keeps old bubblegum wrappers because she likes their smell?

Instead, I look to folks like Claire Zulkey, of the Evil Witches newsletter, who shares realistic snapshots of her family life. Her feed features the expected mayhem: stray papers, homework assignments, disheveled pillows. But also: happy faces. 

Then I acknowledge that some organization is necessary to avoid chaos. I hate spending 40 minutes looking for a single toddler shoe, and we can’t live with yesterday’s Goldfish crackers ground into the carpet. Our system right now involves a schedule of chores that keeps the kids accountable for their own stuff. I like to hope I’m building solid future roommates for wherever they end up in life. For now? They can keep their collections of oddities, but I work with them to purge the old or expired ones. The important part is that they’re involved (I learned this the hard way).

Find the mess-level you can live with, and then assume your friends and family will accept it as well. 

One of the best parts of Nathan Fielder’s series, The Rehearsal, is when he leaves his carefully modeled fake household and enters a real home. He’s visibly charmed by the out-of-place details that signify living with kids, like a lone battery left on a window sill. Why even pretend we live in a world without stray socks and Amazon boxes? Look for the charm, and you may see a pile of crayon nubs as a sign of creativity. A neglected UNO game signals siblings getting along. A beloved collection of rocks is simply that: beloved.

And remember, it’s not just you. Welcome friends into your mess with the understanding that they just left their own sharknado of toys. We don’t need to impress each other, and there’s actually no award for having a junk drawer that looks like one you saw on Instagram one time. 

The real prize is having time to enjoy however you choose. And to get that, you might need to do the bare minimum around the house for a decade or so. So, let’s do that. Then we can take a field trip to the Container Store and get organized.