I left the kitchen a mess & everyone survived.
There’s a version of me from not that long ago who would have handled last Tuesday very differently.
Jason was at band practice. The kids & I had just gotten home late from 2 hours at the dance studio. Everyone was tired, nobody was particularly cooperative & the kitchen was exactly as we had left it that morning.
A year ago, I would have been hollering at the kids to stop playing tag in the house while I scrambled to get something on the table. I would have been grumpy through the whole bedtime routine…not because I’m a bad mom, but because I already knew what was waiting for me on the other side of it. The kitchen. Still there. Still my problem. Dishes to scrape & stack, pans to hand wash, water bottles to clean out, counters to wipe down, food to put away, dishwasher to run…The night was hardly over the moment the kids’ lights went out. 😮💨
That is what I used to carry into bedtime. The dread of everything still left to do. And it made me impatient and overstimulated & not very fun to be around at 8pm—which then made me feel guilty on top of exhausted, which just made everything worse.
But lately I’ve been doing something different. This is what last Tuesday looked like…
I packed dinner before we left so the kids could eat in the car on the way home. That one change alone took the scramble completely off the table. We walked in, went through the bedtime routine, and I got everyone to sleep.
And then I looked at the kitchen.
Clutter on the island. Dishes in the sink. Counters not wiped.
And I went upstairs with the kids to bed.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
I want to tell you what I thought was going to happen when I left it.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I thought I’d lie there thinking about it, doing the mental math of how much worse it would be in the morning, eventually getting back up to just handle it because the anticipation would be more exhausting than the doing.
What actually happened was I fell asleep almost immediately.
And in the morning, the kitchen was exactly as I had left it. A little messy. Completely manageable. Not the disaster I had built it into in my head. I put the kids’ clutter on the stairs, loaded the dishwasher, wiped the counters. It took maybe ten minutes. Nobody commented on it. Nobody suffered. The morning was fine.
The only thing that changed was that I had given myself back a sense of peace & manageability the night before.
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I’m not suggesting you never clean your kitchen. I clean mine most nights. But I used to clean it every night regardless of what the night had cost me—as if the kitchen had a claim on whatever I had left at the end of the day, no matter what.
It does not.
The dishes will be there in the morning. You will have more capacity in the morning. The kitchen does not care what time it gets clean. But you — you only get one version of Tuesday night. And you get to decide what you do with what is left of it.
Leaving the kitchen a mess is not a failure of standards. It is a decision about where your energy actually goes.
And sometimes the most intentional thing you can do is just go to bed.
Talk soon,
Erin
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I’m Erin—a former teacher & mom of two in Boulder, Colorado. Every week I write about what doing a little less actually looks like in my house. Not the idea of it. The real version. 💕 You can click here to learn more about me & what you can expect from A Little Less.
I do the same. Sometimes I clean before bed. Other times I just can't make myself do it.
I would like to be able to find a clean kitchen in the morning.
Maybe someday I'll get there. For now, that's the best my family and I can manage.