It’s 5:30 p.m. and I’m in my pajamas making stir-fry out of the decaying contents of my fridge while a miserably tired toddler clings to my leg and whines. I’ve suffered from inexplicable muscle cramping all day. I’m late with at least three freelance assignments. My husband is already an hour late and I’ve been clockwatching all afternoon for the moment he’d come in and offer some relief from the whining toddler, who can’t go to bed until at least 7 or she’ll be up at 3 a.m. asking me to find her “tool”—the Black and Decker socket set that is her equivalent of a blankie—which she’ll inevitably have lost in her tangled sheets.

If all this hadn’t been witnessed by my neighbor, who’d dropped in for a drink after work, it would have passed virtually unnoticed by me—there have been plenty of nights like this in our family, and there will be plenty more. But her presence led me to question whether or not she could possibly find any beauty in this inglorious, mundane scene from my life as a housewife.

Judging from the pitying expression on her face, I’d say no. She’d come over to dish about a weekend rendezvous, during which telling she stressed, multiple times, her adamant refusal to become anybody’s wife. “I just want to have fun!” she kept protesting. I wasn’t exactly providing a shining example to contradict her decision.

Honestly, my life as a wife and mother is pretty much as hectic and as stressful as it looks to the casual observer. And yet, it is the surest joy I’ve ever known. In context, this minor episode of aggravation will be wrapped in hundreds of other little instances of joy and satisfaction that manage to elevate the whole from the mundane to the sublime.

But how to explain that to someone just stopping by?

It’s not just me making domesticity look so hard. I get those magazines—hell, I love those magazines—showing beautiful modern homes populated by clean, happy, well-dressed children and their clean, happy, well-dressed moms. “House porn,” I’ve heard it called. Of course I don’t read the stories (are there any stories?); I only look at the pictures: the all-natural wooden toy lying just so beneath the Ikea coffee table; the antique architect’s lamp which, mysteriously, has no electrical cord that might clutter the layout. The next page might feature an equally artistic shot of that night’s meal—nutritious, organic, gourmet, homemade. The message telegraphed about what it means to keep house makes my life look, in comparison, pretty messy.

It’s so easy to feel disappointed when real life doesn’t look like what is projected all around me, the same way a child who obsessively watched the Winter Olympics might be disappointed when he can’t snowboard like Shaun White his first time out on the slopes. Or, the way someone who looks at actual pornography might be disappointed by contact with a real human body and all its flaws—the idiosyncrasies that make it particular and needy. It might make one want to give up without a fight. But I want to know real joy, not a slick simulation that chokes our capacity for the real thing before it can ever reach its fullness.

I’m slowly accepting that I will probably never be able to sew my daughter’s clothes, bake crusty European loaves of bread, and train espalier fruit trees in my backyard. At least not at the same time. I’m letting go of my imagined versions of events in favor of what’s happening now. But it takes much vigilance, and patience, and much, much humility, to check those proud fantasies and instead, savor what is before me.