I look at these little glowing screens at three in the morning and I see these rooms—these playrooms—that look like they were staged for a god that only cares about symmetry. Everything is color-coded. Every block is in its place. I see these young mothers looking at them, their faces reflecting that blue light, and I know they feel like they’re failing some invisible exam. It’s sort of pathetic, really, how we do this to ourselves. We humans have this pathological need to turn the chaos of being alive into something that looks like a catalog. We want to believe that if the toys are sorted by the colors of the rainbow, then maybe our lives won’t feel like they’re slipping through our fingers every single minute, every minute. I spent thirty years in a house that smelled like curdled milk and floor wax, and I’ll tell you right now, there was no magic in it. Not really. We talk about a "magical childhood" like it’s something you can buy at a store or arrange on a shelf, but it’s just a lie we tell to keep the mothers from screaming. I remember sitting on my kitchen floor in 1982, surrounded by plastic dinosaurs and crumbs that had been there for a week, just staring at the wall. I felt like I was disappearing. I was sort of fading into the wallpaper, I guess. Every day was the same. Every single day. I wanted to be someone who mattered, but instead I was just the person who moved things from the floor to the bin and back again. My daughter shows me these photos on her phone now, these "organized" spaces where the children supposedly play with wooden toys that cost more than my first car. She looks at her own living room—which is a disaster, let’s be honest—and she looks like she’s been punched in the gut. She thinks she’s depriving them. She thinks those children in the photos are somehow more "whole" because their playrooms don’t have dust bunnies. It’s a kind of madness. We’ve decided that the aesthetic of a life is the same thing as the quality of it, and it’s just... it’s a lie. It’s a total lie. I watch her scroll and I see her identity just leaking out of her, replaced by this desperate need to be a curator instead of a person. I remember wanting more. That’s the thing no one wants to hear from a grandmother. I wanted to be someone who didn’t have play-dough stuck in the carpet. I wanted a life that wasn't defined by the constant, grinding maintenance of small people who didn't even know my first name for five years. I felt a kind of resentment that I carried like a hot coal in my pocket. Every time I cleaned the same spot on the table, I felt a little bit of my soul just sort of dry up and blow away. We aren't meant to live in these little isolated boxes, trying to out-curate each other. Humans are social animals, but here we are, staring at pixels and feeling ashamed of our laundry. And the mess... the mess is just the evidence of being alive, isn't it? But we treat it like a moral failing. I see these women apologizing for their "messy" houses and I want to shake them. I want to tell them that the organized playroom is just a graveyard for creativity. It’s sort of a museum of things that aren’t being used. My house was a wreck because we were actually in it. We were actually existing there. But even knowing that, I still felt the shame. I felt it every single time the neighbor stopped by, every single time. It's a weight that never really goes away, it just sort of changes shape as you get older. I think we’re all just terrified of the void. We fill it with bins and labels and "curated" moments because if we stop to look at the actual reality of raising children, it’s terrifying. It’s messy and loud and it eats your identity alive. I lost myself in those years. I became a ghost in my own home, a sort of household appliance that also happened to have a heartbeat. And for what? So my kids could have a "magical" time? They don’t even remember most of it. They remember that I was tired. They remember that I was always, always cleaning. They remember the stress, not the color-coded blocks. I’m seventy-two years old and I’m still angry about it. I’m angry that we haven't changed. We just found new ways to make the cage look pretty. We’ve traded the Sears catalog for an endless scroll of perfection that no one can actually reach. It’s a kind of psychological warfare we’re waging on ourselves. I look at my daughter and I see the same hollow look I had, only she’s got a high-definition camera to document her "failure." It makes me want to burn the whole thing down. Maybe we should just let the toys stay on the floor. Maybe we should just admit that it’s all sort of a disaster, all of it. There’s no resolution here. I’m sitting in my quiet, organized house now—now that it doesn't matter anymore—and it’s empty. It’s perfectly arranged and it’s silent as a tomb. I have all the "organization" I ever wanted and I’m still just staring at the wall at 2am. We spend our youth wishing for the mess to go away and our old age wondering where the hell everyone went. It’s sort of funny, in a way. A cruel, cosmic joke. Every day is just another day of trying to convince ourselves that we’re doing it right, when there is no "right." There’s just the mess, and the quiet, and the screens. Every single night, every night.