I can’t tame the mess monster no matter how much cleaning I do

That should have been a turning point for my tidiness, if I had any self-awareness.

Still, I passed off my lost ATM cards as cute for as long as humanly possible, until I became a parent to other humans.

As a mammy, there is a pressure to stay on top of things. A chaotic individual is endearing, but a chaotic mammy risks a call to the relevant authorities. While most children don’t mind a little mess, they don’t want to grow up in a hoarder’s den either.

My husband and I would hover dangerously close to the latter if left to our own devices.

The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is so large that it is painted continuously. Once one side is painted, it’s time to start on the other (thank you to Vogue Williams, who recently shared this fact on Elizabeth Day’s podcast How To Fail). It’s a similar situation in our house, where the tidying is constant.

Of course, it’s great that our ten-month-old is on the solids, but I can’t say I relish the clean-up. Every meal involves steaming, blending, washing up and drying, just in time for the next meal, when you get to do it all again.

Since having children, cleaning has taken on a whole new meaning. It is nonstop, yet it never looks or smells like I’ve done much to tame the mess monster.

Our days start with washing, end with washing, and are punctuated with more washing. The washing itself consists of a broad spectrum: washing people, washing dishes, washing clothes, washing walls, and washing husbands if they’re standing in the same spot long enough.

I spend most of my days cleaning and tidying up the chaos that comes with two small people, yet you’d never think that was the case if you nipped into our abode to use the facilities.

Of late, I have been caught on the hop not once, but twice, when a caller had to venture upstairs, thus totally negating the efforts I had made to do a panic clean downstairs to dupe them in to thinking I am more domesticated than I am.

Whatever chance I had of fooling these friends that I was on top of things, with my scented candle in the sitting room and the Febreze setée, was decimated by the overflowing laundry bins in our bedroom and the numerous Vincent de Paul bags littering the landing.

The problem with small people is that everything is gooey, sticky, or sometimes both.

I am constantly finding used Calpol syringes and jam-covered handprints on kitchen walls. I once thought the poem ‘Subh Milis’, by national treasure Gabriel Rosenstock, was heartwarming (father finds jam on a doorknob, father gets annoyed, father realises jam will one day no longer be on doorknob, father feels sad). Now, I take a more cynical interpretation every time I am on my hands and knees scrubbing some blackberry concoction off our kitchen walls like our rental security deposit depended on it (which it does).

The last time we had a house guest, I had been ‘Mr Sheening’ like a mad woman in the weeks prior, only to have the same house guest announce my house smelled ‘like yoghurt’.

Needless to say, we have had no house guests since, as this was a passing comment too far for parents constantly battling against a tsunami of discarded porridge bowls and increasingly sinister, ever-growing scattering of Paw Patrol stickers.

Online mammies fall into two camps: Cleaning obsessives who embrace that ubiquitous, dolphin-grey aesthetic and say things like, “My alarm goes off at 4.30am as I like to deep clean the bathroom before I get the kids up”; and excessively messy mammies, who open Instagram reels by saying things like, “People ask how I can go to sleep with my house so messy. It’s very simple: I just close my eyes.” There is nothing wrong with a little mess, but these mammies are either exaggerating the chaos for the clickbait or have a hoarding problem as they zoom in on mouldy plates and talk us through their recent, inexplicable cockroach invasion.

Similarly, the mammies whose homes are bordering on sterile are surely exaggerating their ability to maintain a pristine fridge at all times when the rest of us have homes that smell perpetually of yoghurt.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to parents and cleaning. I have friends who genuinely enjoy getting their clean on and have always been house proud, as well as friends who are a little happier to let the underpants and used baby bottle slide down the back of the couch. We are all just doing our best, and part of being a parent is embracing the clutter.

As a very wise fridge magnet once said, ‘Excuse the mess, we live here.’

• Julie Jay is currently touring her new standup show ‘Julie, Madly, Deeply’ nationwide. Tickets can be found online at www.juliejaycomedy.com.