mr. clean doesn't even know my address anymore

My sixth grade son, Cris, needed a baby picture of himself to submit to the yearbook staff at school. So the other night, we hopped into the time machine that is my shelf full of photo boxes, and pulled out two that contain pictures from the mid-1990's. Looking through those snapshots, it was shocking for me to see how neat and tidy our little house in Thornton looked. The carpet was vacuumed, the floor swept, the counters clear. Knick-knacks appeared to be dust-free, and there were even decorations on the walls. Three little boys played happily with their toys and each other as I snapped away with my 35mm.

This is so remarkable to me because if you were to walk into our current home on any given day, you may find several pairs of shoes strewn haphazardly by the front door, the pan used to roast last night's dinner soaking in the sink, empty cereal boxes on the counters, newspapers and cups on the table, and a desk full of school papers and mail that needs to be sorted. I'm not posting all of this to air out our dirty laundry, so to speak, but because I was really taken with the home I saw portrayed on Kodak paper. "That looks so nice," I thought, as if looking through Better Homes and Gardens. "I would like to live there."

In early 1996, our boys were ages 4, 2, and an infant. I remember feeling very overwhelmed at times, like I couldn't keep up. I longed for a future filled with more than diapers, Barney, and toddler-sized tantrums. But now, looking back from my more experienced point of view, I'm left wondering what, exactly, was so stressful to me then? I couldn't have known that 1996 was before....


...before the kids gave up their naps, before the 4th child was born, before PTA, before basketball, before dance classes, before football, before cheerleading, before grueling high school schedules, before teaching Sunday School, before Dan's crazy travel schedule and working from home, before going back into the workforce, before Girl Scouts, before teenage angst, before a son's first relationship, before his driver's license, before curfews, before braces, before college nights and SATs, before satellite TV, before the internet, before cell phones. Before we had so much pulling on us, from so many different directions.


But we don't live in the before, and we don't yet live in the after. We live somewhere in the middle, and I have to remember that this is, like that was, just a season in our lives. And somewhere down the line, perhaps in the next decade, I'll be pulling photos off the shelf once again, and will have a reason to look at the images captured in 2007. Maybe by then I will have been able to dedicate time to filling my scrapbooks with our memories. I'll flip through the pages, look at the images of a busy-but-smiling family in a cluttered-but-loving-home, and I'll think, "That looks so nice. I would like to live there."