Handfuls of Hope

The beackseat of my car is a burial ground for broken toys, errant lego bits, crusty hats, food wrappers, mouldy crumbs of long forgotten, half-gnawed muesli bars, the lonely, disembodied lids of drink bottles, paper-dry husks of orange peels, crumpled receipts, and the dumped-out sand from shoes, beach-filled with tiny deserts that come undone on the floor like broken hourglasses.

I suppose that’s a given with three kids.

They showed a messy backseat on an episode of a popular kids’ show, and parents everywhere fist-pumped triumphantly in solidarity when they saw it. There is victory in visibility, a collective shame broken open so we can poke at its mushy insides.

It was one of those jokes that land because they hurt just a little, in the place beneath the ribs that longs to be seen, that feels the stab of so many tiny failures each day in the slow de-evolution from careful pride into the messy chaos of life, the inevitable slippage of control, the perception that we’re just not trying hard enough even as we burn ourselves to the ground hoping our ashes will prepare the soil for our children’s growth.
Maybe if we tried harder, we could have all that and a clean car. Maybe if we could just get it right… and that gut-pull like a thread stitching us together draws a chuckle from our lungs, so we agree when the kid begs for “just one more episode” because that animated family is just like us. Their backseat is wreckage and ruin, but there is hope in being seen.

Lately, I’ve been taking one handful of rubbish out of the car each day, after strapping in the littlest one, soon to be not so little at all, or maybe that’s already happened and I’m just not quite ready to admit it. I reach beneath his feet and scoop out a few empty bottles, crushed-flat juice boxes, and dump them straight into the recycle bin in the driveway. The next day, a donut box, a boba straw, an old band-aid, and an inkless pen.
Day by day, little by little, a square of floor appears. Then an whole swathe of sandy carpet. After a week, the not-so-little-one exclaims “The car has been cleaned!” and I realize he’s right. Or at least it’s getting there. It’s far from perfect, but it’s getting better, one handful at a time.

I’m an all-or nothing kind of parent. Kind of person. I want the job done and I want it done correctly and five minutes ago would be great thanks. The incremental approach has never satisfied me.

I’ve never been great with delayed gratification. I’m drawn in by the high risk, fast payoff model that gets my synapses humming with dopamine. I think that’s why I like to hit a problem hard and fast, get it sorted, while it’s fresh in my mind. Maybe I don’t like the niggling feeling, the tickle of centipede feet across my mind, that unsolved problems produce. Maybe I’m afraid that if I leave it ‘til later, I’ll forget. Or lose interest altogether. I often do.

If the job is too big for one fell swoop, it feels utterly overwhelming. Impossible. But if I can clear the board in one hyperfocused burst of productivity, then I’m a formidable force of functionality. I’m unstoppable.

But for some reason, one handful each day is getting my backseat clean enough that even the not-so-little one, who doesn’t even notice when he’s hungry or thirsty, can notice this.

And it fills me with hope that through the hard slog of parenting, all the shame and imperfection, progress can be made, is being made, all the time. Sometimes it’s just too slow to feel like you’re doing anything at all, sometimes you feel useless and overpowered by the forces stacked against you, some days you can only paddle desperately against the current and hope that it’s enough to keep everything from getting swept out to sea.

Some days you spend making up for lost ground, fighting your way back to the good enough that was never really good enough at all, or at least it never felt like it at the time, but now what you wouldn’t give to get back to a familiar landmark of enough-ness.

Some days you don’t make any progress at all. You’re running too late, or you forget, or you’re just so grumpy that the thought of digging through a sticky mountain of someone else’s rejected food scraps is too much to bear considering.

But even in the irregular practice, one handful at a time is all it takes.