The Closet Under the Stairs

The closet I was going to fix

Last weekend I cleaned our basement for my daughter's birthday party, and when I got to the little closet under the stairs (insert Harry Potter joke here, ha!), I stopped and took a picture. It's not a fancy space (a sloped ceiling with the original textured drywall, a tension rod sagging under a row of ball gowns, a firefighter helmet, a handmade Tigger costume my grandmother made for me because my mom called me Tigger (how did we miss the ADHD diagnosis?),and a wooden play kitchen wedged in by the door), and if you'd asked me four years ago, it was supposed to be a lot more than this.

When we moved in, I had big plans for that closet. Cute wallpaper on the sides, a different light fixture, something you'd actuallywant to photograph. We've lived here for four years now, and I have done exactly none of it.

The story I almost told myself

I'll be honest, my first thought looking at that picture wasn't a kind one. It was something like, "You said you'd do this, and you didn't." It would have been so easy to slide right into the negative script: lazy, unmotivated, disorganized. Have you ever done that? Looked at something you meant to finish and let it quietly become evidence against yourself?

But then a different memory showed up. When I was little, one of my friends had a space under her stairs, and we played in it constantly. I couldn't tell you what color the walls were or whether there was a light fixture at all. I just remember thinking it was the coolest thing in the world that she had a little hidden room where we could make our own house and no one cared if we drew on the wooden underside of the stairs. Nobody had styled it, and nobody needed to.

That's when it clicked for me. My children don't see a closet I never finished. They see a castle, a kitchen, and a fire station, a place to put on a ball gown and serve tea to whoever wanders by. That space is already doing exactly what it's for, and the "unfinished" part only exists in my head.

This is something I do with clients all the time, and it's simple to describe and much harder to practice: change the question. Shame asks, "What didn't I do?" A kinder, more accurate question is, "What is this already giving the people I love?" Same closet, completely different answer.

The cake that wasn't perfect

This year I made her birthday cake myself instead of ordering one. It was not Pinterest-worthy (it was a little lopsided, and the frosting had opinions), and I was prouder of it than of any cake I've bought. It wasn't about how it looked. It was that I made it for her, in our kitchen,and she knew it.

I'm a 90s baby, and I keep thinking about how birthdays feltback then, before Pinterest turned parties into something competitive insteadof something memorable. Nobody was styling a dessert table for the internet.The parties weren't curated, they were just fun, and the adults were mostly in the room with us instead of behind a camera.

To be clear, this isn't me knocking anyone who loves an extravagantparty (if that's your joy, go for it, truly). It's about noticing when the joy quietly turned into pressure, and when the audience shifted from our kids to everyone scrolling past. That's the vibe I want to carry through motherhood: low pressure, a little messy, and actually present.

The pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a phrase for this decades ago, the "good enough" mother. His point was that kids don't need a parent who gets everything right. In fact a perfect parent would harm children because the child wouldn’t know reality and that their every whim isn’t always met. Instead, they need a parent who shows up, pays attention, and repairs when things go sideways. Good enough isn't settling. It's what actually helps kids grow.

The pictures I take these days aren't for social media or a party-planning guide. They're for their baby books. I hope that someday they flip through them and see what I saw when I looked back at everything my mom did for me: not how it looked, but how much love went into it.

So, if you're carrying around a mental list of half-finished projects that feel like proof you're falling short, try asking the question I asked in that basement. Who is this actually for, and what is it already giving them? You might find the answer is a lot gentler than the story you've been telling yourself. (And if that inner critic is loud enough that you can't hear any other answer, that's exactly the kind of thing we love sitting with here.)

Our kids won't remember the wallpaper. They'll remember that someone made room for them to play.

‍