Making a Mess

What happens when you stop glossing over the muck of things and start deep cleaning?

In March of this year I moved house, which also involved moving to a different town, in a different province in Thailand. I packed up our life in the small border city of Mae Sot, the 11 years I’d given to that place, those relationships, that work. I put the things I deemed worth keeping into a big truck and followed several hours behind it through the twisty mountains of northern Thailand until the kids and I arrived at the place we are in now and set about making it feel like home.

This house has beautiful wood floors made of solid teak planks. They’ve been stained a lovely warm color and then varnished. But at some point, long before we moved in, someone decided to try to make the floors look new and shiny again without doing any of the proper preparation. As far as I can tell they just sloshed a layer of clear coat over the whole entire floor without even cleaning it first. There is literally mud in the corners, sealed in under this clear coat.

It did not have the intended effect. As you can probably imagine, it doesn’t look pretty at all in the areas where the floor was the most dirty and it peels everywhere.

I discovered this while vacuuming out the corners of my daughters bedroom before she moved into it. Whole pieces of the ugly varnish just peeled away with the vacuum’s suction. When I mopped, more pieces came loose. So I set out to see just how much of this ugly clear coat would come off. I took a whole evening to scrub away at her floors before she moved into her room.

Most of the dirty top layer came up, and, to my deep satisfaction, it looked so much better.

Then I tackled the muddy corners in each of the rooms, watching as the mop water turned black and the floor varnish peeled away. It’s incredibly satisfying to watch a huge sheet of dirty discolored varnish peel off and reveal the shiny beautiful wood surface underneath.

It’s become a bit of a family pastime. Anytime we’re sitting and talking, or maybe listening to an audio book or podcast, we’re probably also rubbing away at the floor with our finger tips, finding the loose curling edges of the varnish and then peeling them away. If we stay here long enough, the whole floor will be cleaned, all of that last misguided layer of gloss peeled away to reveal the warm wood underneath.

I can’t help but think that the whole thing is symbolic of what the past few years have been like for us emotionally.

For a long time I’d been trying to make things look bright and shiny for us, glossing over the muck in the corners. Things were a mess. Certain rooms were covered in dirty residue. But instead of noticing and cleaning it up, I glossed it over. I put it all in the best possible light. I omitted the darker things. “Look at what I’m thankful for.”

There was no time in the frantic day to day to truly deep clean. No possibility of getting into the edges and corners of our life with a scrub brush and soap. How do you deep clean muck that you’re actively trying to pretend isn’t there?

But the gloss started to peel away. Inhabitants of our house let their masks slip, faltered in the act of the bright shiny face they put forward. (I don’t remember when any of us asked the other to put forward a shiny face, but it was done nonetheless.)

It got ugly.

When I scrub at a floor in my house where the gloss is bubbling and separating, for a time it looks like I’m making it much worse. Peeled off clear coat forms little piles everywhere, muddy water streaks the surface. It’s hardly clean or shiny looking. The clear coat doesn’t always come away clean, in big satisfying pieces. Often it flakes off, some of it stubbornly clinging to the surface. But after a lot of work I sweep away the peeled off pieces, and mop it again. It looks better than it did before. Maybe not perfect, but better.

The longer we live in this house the cleaner the floors get. Almost daily we peel away a little bit more of the badly applied veneer to reveal what is underneath. The top layer takes away with it the dust and dirt that it sealed in, and below we see rich warm wood, clean and shining.

But it will take a long time, working inch by inch, to strip away all the false layers, and see what’s truly there, underneath the surface.

I’m also peeling away the many layers of my story that kept me from seeing the muck in my past and present relationships. I wove stories that were an attempt to make the best of a hard situation. I created love out of breadcrumbs. I worked hard to make it work. Short and fast solutions glossed over the problems I didn’t want to acknowledge because life raced inextricably forward and babies needed to be fed, and I wanted to feel safe.

Now I’m deep cleaning instead, uncovering the things I should have noticed a long time ago, and actually dealing with them.

It looks like a big giant ugly mess sometimes. But I’m no longer content with appearances that lack substance, with allowing things that should be addressed to be glossed over instead, with only reminding myself that I have a beautiful wood floor without facing all the mess that lies on top of it.

And in the process, I’m making the place where we live an actual home, where everyone feels safe and loved and accepted as they are, no gloss needed.