The Mess Behind the Beautiful

Chocolate Delight was my Dad's favorite dessert when I was a little girl. To this day, whenever I make it, I always think of him and flash back to a freckled faced girl in a small house on Pasadena Street. But I digress... Tonight we hosted a dessert & coffee gathering for about 24 people so I not only doubled this decadent dessert, I quadrupled it! Which meant that yesterday afternoon in between school, ukulele lessons, and after school pickup I had to bake muffins for breakfast and prepare/assemble  dessert. Those of you with small children know that life typically operates with "windows of opportunities" or "pockets of time" revolving around the nap schedule. So once P and I finished our ukulele lesson I had about an hour left to accomplish my culinary goals! Now please understand, one of my "happy places" is in fact, my kitchen. Please also note that I tend to be a messy cook on a good day... So on a day when I'm pressed for time and making multiple items... Well, let's just say it got a bit harried. A little more than halfway through the process I looked up and surveyed my countertops... It looked as if all of my cabinets had just exploded. I thought of the beautiful blogs where people take pictures of what they're making and everything looks pristine and polished and perfect... This was not my reality. So I climbed up on a stool and snapped a couple pictures of my horrific mess because it's real. As I towered above the chaos, I realized that behind every "beautiful" there is a mess. Think of it for a moment... Behind every priceless picture of a beaming toddler lie endless sleepless nights, countless tantrums, and more diapers than one could imagine. Behind every beautiful 25 year wedding anniversary are the years when ends would barely meet, harsh words spoken rashly, fumbled apologies, and buckets of tears cried over lost jobs, lost children, lost opportunities.  Perhaps it's a skosh of a stretch to leap from dessert to philosophy of life, but in our world of perfectly filtered social media I fear we are at risk of forgetting the messiness of living. That we may get lost in everyone's perfect feed and survey our own chaos and feel that we somehow don't quite measure up. May my countertops remind you that every beautiful you see has a mess in the background! Embrace your "mess" today, for it is tomorrow's masterpiece!

haley for the hutch crew