Noah Kahan and Parenting in the In-Between

Managing clutter, both inside and out. (Guest Post)

The Pomegranate is grateful for the opportunity to feature Andrew Knott as a guest writer for Father’s Day. Read last year’s Father’s Day feature, from Carlos Greaves, here.

Photo by Compagnons on Unsplash

My younger two children had a sudden urge to tidy up on a recent Saturday morning. Summers come early in central Florida, so I was pleasantly surprised that there was still time left for spring cleaning. And I was completely shocked that my children chose to clean without any prompting. My kids are 10 and 12, so the days when it was fun to clean with a toy feather duster, mop, and broom exist only in my fading memories.

My daughter cleared out and organized a desk where she keeps, for lack of a better term, an assortment of trash. I guess it’s supposed to be her arts-and-crafts area, but it seems to serve mostly as a hangout spot for bits of paper and beads and pieces of cardboard with random items glued on. The locals rave about it. It’s a place you can get lost in and escape the trash bin for months, if not years.

Meanwhile, my son asked for my phone so he could listen to “Orbiter,” a new song by Noah Kahan, and proceeded to clear off and reorganize a couple of shelves cluttered with games and decrepit old books. Inexplicably, we sorted almost everything into the keep pile, but hey, at least the stacks on the shelves became a bit more angular and crisp. We also put the old toy feather duster to use. What can I say: we don’t clean a lot, and we don’t get rid of things often, so the toy duster is still here consistently cluttering up a corner and is also our best cleaning implement.

The cleaning frenzy didn’t last long. Nothing does. Children grow up. The years slip past. Forgotten toys collect dust in bins and on disorganized shelves. Yet here, in a crowded combination dining room/playroom that feels mostly like a museum commemorating a lifetime of my children’s interests, I still sit typing away on my loyal laptop at the end of a paint-splattered table.

I’ve been a stay-at-home parent for over a decade now, and this in-between space where the children are more self-sufficient in many ways, but still reliant on me for transportation and peanut butter jelly sandwich assembly, is rather confusing. Many years ago, I naively assumed my life would change dramatically when all my kids started full-time school. But when the much-anticipated start of school for my youngest came and went (more than five years ago now!), it felt like nothing really changed.

Shockingly, after a decade of fitful self-employment or outright unemployment, I was unable to seamlessly transition into a financially lucrative and emotionally rewarding career between the hours of 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. I wrote some radio ads until AI swept that freelance job into the abyss, I wrote a book that very few people read, and I continued to edit a parenting humor publication. None of these activities paid much, if anything, and they didn’t bring me any sustained level of personal satisfaction.

Now, from the outside, being a full-time parent for more than a decade while maintaining a decent portfolio of side quests might seem like more than enough for one person to do. And objectively, it probably is, but I’ve yet to mention the one major contributor to my ongoing angst about my perceived lack of productivity and the relentless passage of time: mental illness.