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Until you get rid of about 80 percent of your belongings, you have some choices to make.
Pick one:
1. Clean house OR clean garage. (NO! You cannot have both. You must CHOOSE!)
2. Clean rooms OR clean closets. (NO! You cannot have both. You must CHOOSE!)
X’s & O’s,
The Reality Fairy
P.S. What the hell is all this stuff and why do you have it? What’s the matter with you people???
* My husband offered to make me a grape soda float the other day. I thought he wasn’t serious. He claimed he was. I still didn’t believe him. (Experience has taught me not to believe most of what he says, especially when he claims to be telling the truth.) Then he made himself a grape soda float. He made one for Elvis, too. Some of it splashed on my hand and I licked it off. It tasted like vanilla ice cream topped with Children’s Tylenol. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS??? WHY???
* If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, wonder no longer. Where I’m going is nowhere, fast.
* I can’t seem to let go of this fantasy I have about everyone I know leaving me the hell alone for a week.
* My three-year-old hasn’t had a proper bowel movement in at least three weeks. That was when I started keeping track. I’m afraid the real figure is something more like six weeks. Time flies, etc. We’ve given her laxatives and suppositories. It’s an ongoing problem, so before you tell me to take her to the doctor, let me assure you that she’s been taken, many times. She even had an x-ray once to inform us that she was indeed chock full o’ crap, just as we suspected, and we ought to give her more laxatives. Her pediatrician said, “I know. I consulted the G/E people, and that’s what they said. Just keep stepping up the laxatives until something gives. [shrugs]“ This is modern science, kids. But what we have here is not merely a failure to poop; it is actually a refusal to poop. It’s a triumph of the will. Don’t worry. I’m all done talking about it. For now.
* Three things that shouldn’t last three hours but often do:
1) Movies
2) Church services
3) Children’s birthday parties
* I’ve already been informed that I need a vacation. I’m just going to step up the laxatives until something gives.
* I have a ton of dirty clothes to wash. (By “ton,” I actually mean more like 700 pounds. Not an actual ton.) I haven’t been able to wash the dirty clothes because I’ve had more pressing laundry issues, like the ton of dirty towels that keep piling up on a seemingly-hourly basis. (In this case “ton” is an actual ton because of the water weight that dirty towels have.) Is it wrong that I should make wet, dirty towels a priority over (relatively) dry, dirty clothes? It will be when the underwear runs out. Which is why I have to go do laundry now. I actually should have been doing it all morning, but I was too busy making breakfast and mixing impotent laxative cocktails.
* Someday I’ll write a real blog again, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
I just checked my voice mail, and there’s a message telling me that I don’t need to bring dinner to the in-crisis family tonight because they say they won’t need meals brought in for the next couple weeks or so. Can you believe it? It’s like a call from the governor–a reprieve! That means I only have to figure out what to serve six people, not twelve people. And I don’t have to think that hard anymore because my blog buddies came through for me AS ALWAYS and gave me all these terrific ideas, so now I not only know what I’m feeding my own family, but the next time I say I’m going to bring someone else dinner–like in a couple weeks or so–and I start stressing out over what to make for them, all I have to do is remember the Miracle of June 2, 2009 and GO STRAIGHT TO THIS PAGE. You people are the best!
Oh, and I suppose I technically owe God one, too.
I have to make dinner for a family of six tonight. Oh, and another family of six, since I also have to feed my own family. It wouldn’t be a problem except that I have no idea what to make for dinner. I haven’t been able to think up something to make for dinner in, like, two weeks. I’ve been faking it a lot. I don’t know what the big deal is. I seriously just cannot think of anything to make for dinner. Every day I think, “Dude, what do we even eat?” Why can’t I remember what we eat anymore? The task is even more onerous when you factor in the fact that you need to be able to transport it to some other location.
I said I would bring dinner to this family from church who are going through a very difficult personal crisis, and I knew when I said it that I would have difficulty doing it because I’m having so much difficulty thinking of what exactly people eat these days–including us–but I figured since I was doing God’s work, God would provide..like…an idea of something that I could make for dinner–but so far that God-thing isn’t working. I seriously have no idea what to cook. And it doesn’t help that my husband pointed out that there are teenage boys in this family and therefore whatever I make, there will have to be a LOT of it.
When did eating become so difficult? I don’t like cooking, but I also don’t mind it, so long as I have a plan. I’ve been thinking about this for days–seriously, days–and as of right now, we’re at T-minus-six hours and still there is no plan. No plan!
This is one of those moments when I think how useless it is to ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” Because if I were Jesus, I would just perform a miracle. But I think if I actually make dinner tonight and don’t involve a pizza delivery service and/or corn dogs, it will be a miracle.
Have you ever seen that episode of Scrubs where Turk asks Carla what’s bothering her, and she peels back her scalp and there is a gushing forth of all her neurotic thoughts and obsessions? That’s what this blog is going to be like.
I am doubled over with guilt for the following reasons, in no particular order:
1. Last month I called Princess Zurg’s best friend’s stepmother to see if PZ’s best friend could come to PZ’s birthday party and found out that PZ’s best friend broke her leg in a really bad way over Spring Break and was totally bed/couch-ridden for the next couple weeks and still needed to have another surgery and was going to have limited mobility because of the whole crutches thing for however long it takes to recuperate from a broken leg that’s been broken that badly. So that’s why PZ didn’t have a birthday party this year, because if the best friend can’t come, what’s the point? And the reason I didn’t know about PZ’s best friend’s broken leg before this was because PZ’s best friend lives on the other side of town and her family doesn’t have a car, and so we don’t see her very often at all, especially not since PZ has been going to a different school for the last year. I can count on one hand–probably half of one hand–the number of times PZ has seen her best friend over the last year. That is the state of PZ’s social life. That I felt guilty enough about already, and I didn’t think it was possible to feel much guiltier, but I didn’t foresee the broken leg. When I heard about the broken leg, I felt just awful for PZ’s best friend, and I said I would certainly bring PZ over for a visit, soon. In fact, I penciled it into my calendar for that week. But it didn’t actually work out for that week, and I told myself I would have to pencil it in for some other day the following week, but you know what? I never picked up another pencil, and I never took PZ to see her best friend with the broken leg. It’s been a month. I could still take her–I still want to take her, or think I want to take her, or think I mean to take her, but I’m beginning to suspect that maybe I really don’t mean or want to take her and never actually did because if I really did, I would have done it by now, wouldn’t I have? The truth is that a best friend on the other side of town is much like a starving child in Africa to me, only without a convenient little intermediary organization like UNICEF that I can write a check to and thereby assuage my guilt. No, I have to actually block out some time in my schedule to actually visit the best friend on the other side of town myself, but that is too much work, and that is why I’m a terrible human being. Moving on!
2. Lest ye think the best friend with the broken leg is some kind of aberration in my ordinarily-chock-full-o’-thoughtfulness life, I also have an aunt who lives on the other side of Portland, whom I see about once a year. No, once a year is too generous. I see her about once every year and a half, usually when some other member of my family comes through Portland and says, “I should really see B. while I’m here,” and I say, “Oh yeah, that’d be good, I’ll go with you.” My aunt is getting on in years and is now in a nursing home. I don’t know exactly how long she’s been in the home because I didn’t realize she’d gone there until my older sister mentioned it to me one day. I know she’s only been in there sometime since last July because last July I went to see her in her house (not “the home”), but still, I haven’t been to see her in “the home” and don’t even know which home it is because I haven’t called any of my cousins to find out or get an address to send a frakking Christmas card, should I be so humanitarily inclined this year. I’ve lived a half-hour away from her for the last five years, and I just haven’t gone to see her because I haven’t wanted to think about what to do with the children or when would be a good time to go or calling on the phone and having a conversation–it’s all just been too much, darling, too much, because I’m a terrible human being. But wait! There’s more.
3. After the turbulent elementary school years with Princess Zurg, I have been so relieved and happy that Mister Bubby has done well in school and has never been a problem for anyone and always does his homework and has just generally let me send him off to school and not worry about him for six-and-a-half hours, five days a week. Then a few weeks ago I got a call from his best friend’s mother, who wanted to know if I was also concerned about the fact that our sons have learned exactly nothing new in school this year, that they are still doing the same crap they did in first grade, only with slightly different worksheets. That was the first time I ever really stopped to think about it and realized that actually, yes, now that you mention it, Mister Bubby has been complaining that school is boring and he already knows everything they’re teaching him and why can’t he just go to third grade, and yes, they do have an awful lot of worksheets, don’t they? What the hell is up with the worksheets? I don’t remember doing so many worksheets when I was in school. I guess they can’t afford books and slates anymore because they have to buy computers so our children can be competitive in the twenty-first century. And what are they using the computers for? Hell if I know. The last time I was involved in a child’s education, it was primarily for the purpose of figuring out how I could get myself less involved on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis. All I’ve ever really wanted was to send my kid off to school for six-and-a-half hours a day, five days a week, and not have to worry about anything beyond that. I don’t remember my parents being that involved in my education until I was in high school and the math got harder. I’m feeling a lot of resentment over the fact that I’m devoting all of May 29–paying a babysitter for six-and-a-half hours–to volunteering at the school for “Australia Day,” the annual second grade extravaganza. It’s not like I ever volunteer at the school if I can possibly help it, and usually I can help it quite a bit because our neighborhood school is overrun with parents who volunteer for everything. It’s a very competitive game–who will be the lucky soul who gets to chaperone the field trip to the rock museum???–and I’ve been quite content not to play it. They used to make me volunteer to chaperone field trips because PZ was supposedly so volatile that even being attended by her own freaking aide was not enough, no, she had to have parental supervision if they were going to take her off of school property, and so, yes, I was pleased as punch not to be doing that anymore–but now it’s freaking Australia Day and they need all the helping hands they can get and MB wants me there anyway because I never volunteer and possibly he’s afraid the other kids assume that his mom must be some kind of crack mom because she’s never seen on school property during school hours. And that’s how I got roped into being a group leader in the morning and running the flipping didgeridoo in afternoon, whatever the hell any of that means, I haven’t even looked at my job description(s) yet because I’ve been so preoccupied with the fact that I pay all this money in property taxes and my neighbors spend so much of their time helping out in the school, and my son is still doing first-grade worksheets in flipping May and what the hell does he need a flipping didgeridoo for anyway? I’m so angry about it and yet I feel I have no one but myself to blame because I was the one who wanted a worry-free education for my son–rather, an education for my son that was worry-free for me–and this is just what you get for not worrying: fill-in-the-blank worksheets and mother-frakking didgeridoos. Nice work, Mother. I hope you ate a lot of bon bons this year while your son’s brain was atrophying!
4. We were thinking of sending Elvis to summer camp this year. Rather, Sugar Daddy thought it would be a good idea to send Elvis to this summer camp for children with disabilities, and I had no argument against it because hey, who doesn’t need to get rid of Elvis for a couple hours a day during the summer? So we sent away for an application for this camp, and we got the paperwork in the mail a couple weeks ago, and I started to fill it out because I’m pretty good at filling out paperwork. I did all right with the name and address and emergency contacts and doctors and insurance information, and then I got to the section where I had to describe in detail the extent of my child’s disability and his specific challenges, and I thought, “I can’t do this right now, I’m going to do it later,” because after all this time I still have trouble confronting these facts about my son. I have a visceral response to requests for quantification about his disability. I just can’t handle it. I don’t understand why, but I just can’t, and by “can’t,” I really mean I just don’t want to, and I don’t know why, but I just don’t. But I have to, or he’s not going to go to camp, and I will be sorry later, sometime this summer, when he’s driving me crazy and eating all the popsicles and replacing all the batteries in all of the small appliances and can’t find the right screwdriver and wants me to push him 89 times on the swing but he really means 99 times and he gets frustrated and starts yelling, “aaahhhAAAHHHHaaahhhhAAAAHHHHHaaaahhhhAAAHHHHHaaahhhhAAAAHHHHH” with the full force of his diaphragm behind it for the forty-seventh time that day, and I will probably start screaming myself and want to pop him one and possibly I will actually pop him one because I can’t stand it anymore, and I will only have myself to blame because I was too lazy to fill out the paperwork on time so he could go to camp and make me a little bit less crazy. And I wonder how I can love my son so much while simultaneously not wanting him around very much. Maybe I don’t love him as much as I think I do, unless he’s asleep. That’s just not right. Which reminds me, I need to find that frakking paperwork and fill it out, and now I’m afraid I won’t be able to find it.
5. Girlfriend is almost 42 months old and still needs to be toilet-trained. Sugar Daddy did the heavy lifting with toilet training Elvis, although that was mostly because he finally got the idea that I wasn’t going to do it, and so now he deserves a medal and I need to get on the stick and finally toilet-train our non-disabled child, who has absolutely no desire to use the toilet. In point of fact, she has the opposite of desire. I think sometimes that I was born in the wrong era. As much as I enjoy the conveniences of modern life, I often wish that I could have parented back in the day when adults weren’t supposed to care about scarring their children for life, and if they didn’t do what Ma or Pa said, Ma or Pa could just beat them with a stick and voila, instant compliance–and they didn’t grow up to be serial killers or anything, just average, reasonably-productive citizens who also beat their children with sticks. Not that I want to beat my child with a stick–no, I am far too modern and enlightened to have such feelings, but I admit that I am just plain old weary of trying to figure out how to get my children to do stuff without beating them with a stick. How did toileting get to be so complicated? How did human beings evolve to the point where sitting in their own filth is a preferred state? I have seen each of my children reach the stage where they were interested in the toilet, only to immediately recoil upon being offered a toileting opportunity–and not only recoil, but turn and run in the opposite direction, screaming bloody murder, huddling in a corner every time the word “potty” is uttered–leaving me feeling very much like a guy who’s misinterpreted a pretty girl’s attentions and ends up not only offending her with my romantic advances but turning her into a lesbian besides. What on earth have I done?
6. I am seriously considering giving up my housekeepers because it is so depressing to me to walk around my house and realize that I’ve just been engaging in a bi-monthly exercise of shoving stuff in closets and drawers so someone else can come vacuum and mop, and once the vacuuming and mopping is done, all the crap that we own just comes SPROING!ing out of aforementioned closets and drawers and deposits itself all over the floors and countertops, along with the neverending stream of new crap that finds its way into our house on a daily basis. I am just ready to surrender to entropy already. I caught up on the laundry, sort of–the clothes part, I was mostly caught up on, and then I had this backlog of towels I had to wash, so I’ve washed nothing but towels for the last two days, which is not to say I’ve been continuously washing towels for 48 hours, but towels is all I’ve washed, and now I have an unbelievable backlog of actual clothes that need to be washed again because you just can’t go 48 hours without washing clothes, not when you have six people in your family, all of whom wear clothes. What do I do all day long? Seriously, what do I do? You know how OBL can’t go grocery shopping until she’s organized her pantry? I look in my pantry, which is an unqualified disaster, and I just think, “I would sooner never eat again than try to figure out what the hell is in here,” and then I cram another cereal box in there, close the door real quick-like, and jam a chair in front of it so it doesn’t SPROING! open again. I’m like the anti-OBL. It’s not like I do nothing. Obviously, I am filling up my days with something other than blogging and Facebooking because people still have clean clothes and they have food to eat and there is toilet paper in the house, but on the other hand, there’s all this entropy and long-neglected best friends with broken legs and aunts in failing health and summer camp paperwork unfilled-out and three-year-olds in diapers, and I have to tell you, people, it’s not because I don’t have enough hours in the day. It’s probably because my parents didn’t beat me with a stick more when I was little.
Okay, it was good to get that off my chest. I’m not going to visit anyone’s best friend today, but I think I will do the dishes and start on the laundry and pick up the 47,368 pieces of paper that are lying all over my living room floor. I might even sweep the kitchen floor. I should go to the Target, but I don’t remember why. Somebody’s prescription. Also, I’m pretty sure that since I’ve said the word “frak” about 67 times before 10 a.m. today, it probably means that I should pick up some tampons, too. Incidentally, I feel like “frak” is so much more satisfying than saying the actual F-word, it’s got to be more vulgar somehow. In any case, I should probably stop saying it around my kids. I’ll put that on my list of stuff I “mean” or “want” to do. Damn, I’m gonna eat some chocolate cake now.
12:28 p.m. Start cleaning kitchen.
12:29 p.m. Girlfriend screams for the “blue brush,” i.e. the thing we scrape the ice off our windshield with. I don’t know where it is. I look for it anyway. Can’t find it. Tell her I can’t find it, don’t know where it is, must cease caring now. She is not appeased. I go back to work.
12:34 p.m. Think I hear sounds of mischief emanating from upstairs. Turn down my iPod to get confirmation. None such. Turn iPod back up and continue working.
12:43 p.m. Girlfriend asks for help fixing her car track. I fix the car track. Go back to work.
12:48 p.m. Elvis needs help getting the big box of corn dogs out of the freezer in the garage. I ask Mister Bubby if he’d also like a corn dog for lunch. No response. I go back to work while Elvis makes himself a corn dog.
12:48 p.m. Elvis needs help with the corn dog. I help him. I go back to work.
12:53 p.m. I am temporarily stymied by my discovery of a mysterious plastic cap. I can’t tell what it’s supposed to go to, or if it is disposable. It says very clearly on the cap “Lift Off Replace.” What does that even mean? Can I throw it away? Will I regret that later?
12:55 p.m. Girlfriend asks for a corn dog. I make her corn dog. I go back to work.
12:56 p.m. Girlfriend screams for mustard. I look for the mustard.
12:57 p.m. Elvis screams, “Stick is broken! Stick is broken! Mommy, come take a look!” I say I’ll look as soon as I get the mustard for Girlfriend.
12:58 p.m. I have misapplied the mustard to Girlfriend’s plate. She is so upset that she can’t properly explain how I can rectify the situation. I have Mustard FAIL, and Elvis is still screaming for me to look at the broken stick. I finally get a mustard-ketchup combination that Girlfriend can live with, then go upstairs with Elvis to see that he has drawn a picture of a corn dog with a broken stick. I make appropriate comments and go back downstairs to continue working in the kitchen.
1:02 p.m. Elvis screams. I ignore him.
1:04 p.m. Elvis is downstairs screaming, “Draw pickle!” I am in the middle of sorting various papers and debris on the phone desk and can’t give him my full attention.
1:06 p.m. Elvis is still screaming, “Draw pickle!” I am still sorting and say I’ll be there in a minute, just as soon as I finish this one thing, which technically isn’t one thing but many things rolled into one, but I keep thinking it won’t take longer than ten seconds if I can just hear myself think for that long.
1:08 p.m. Elvis is still screaming, “Draw pickle!” I find a copy of a “Tens Go Fish” math game that Mister Bubby’s teacher sent home for us to play together. The pieces haven’t been cut out yet. I feel guilty because I never played Tens Go Fish with him even though MB doesn’t need any help with his Tens and the likelihood of him being interested in Tens Go Fish is absolutely nil. I wonder why I can’t shake the guilt. I finally give in to Elvis’s screaming and go upstairs to see that he has drawn a picture of a pickle–a very fine picture of a pickle. I make appropriate comments and go back downstairs.
1:10 p.m. Elvis screams, “I erased it!”
1:11 p.m. I realize that I’ve finished cleaning the kitchen, but there is still this pile of crap I don’t know what to do with yet. I realize that I feel guilty about the Tens Go Fish because it is printed on such high-quality card stock and it seems a shame to just recycle it without putting it to some good use. I think the back side is theoretically still usable, but I can’t think of anything I could use it for in the next five seconds before I give up and recycle it. But I can’t recycle it. Even though it’s the teacher who started killing the trees, not me, I can’t shake the guilt.
1:12 p.m. Mister Bubby asks, “Are the corn dogs almost ready?”
I was forced to clean out my church bag this morning. Remember when I cleaned out my purse and you couldn’t believe all the crap I managed to fit in there? Well, my church bag is this full-size backpack that houses all the snacks,water bottles, books, papers, crayons, diapers, wipes, etc., crappedy crap crap CRAP that I haul with me to church every week and it makes my purse look like…something really empty. Anyway, I had to empty it this morning because I knew that my keys were in there somewhere, so I turned it over and shook all the contents onto my living room floor. I wasn’t ready to do that. Yes, it definitely needed to be done, but I was not ready to do it, mentally or physically. I just wanted to find my keys so badly, damn the consequences.
(Note to self: Never ever EVER put your keys in the church bag again. Ever.)
So now there’s a pile of debris about six feet high on my living room floor. Imagine the contents of my purse times twelve and covered in a thin film of Goldfish cracker dust. I haven’t cleaned it up yet because, as I told you, I was not and am not prepared to tackle that job. I did find my keys, though. Which will come in handy tomorrow, when it’s Housekeepers Eve and you still can’t see the floor for all the clutter and I just get in the car and drive off and never come back.
I probably shouldn’t have announced those plans publicly.
Sugar Daddy recently replaced Princess Zurg’s bookcase with a desk and also built a shelf for her to put her great-gobs-o’-stuff on. The problem is that the desk and shelf will not hold all of the great gobs o’ stuff that have been displaced by the removal of the bookcase. My mission, should I choose to accept it–or not, like I really have a choice?–is to find a place to put all of that great-gobs-o’-stuff before Wednesday morning. You like how I referenced Mission: Impossible because it IS impossible? There’s no place to put all of that stuff. That’s why it was crammed into a bookcase in the first place.
Do you know that we have boxes of stuff that was packed up after the fire that are still sitting unopened in our garage? What’s in there? Heck if I know. I don’t remember, and I don’t care. I had to go into the garage this morning to look for the box that housed my scrunched-up fitness ball because I’ve decided that I’m finally going to use my fitness ball, about fourteen months after I bought it. Yeah, you scoff, but just wait. Seriously, just wait. I will use it eventually. I have to use it because I worked so hard to re-inflate the #$*(# thing, and I’m not giving my husband an excuse to deflate it again. But now I’m off-topic. I went into the garage, and it was so depressing I almost wanted to set fire to my house again.
Not that I set it on fire the first time. That was totally not my fault and not on purpose either. So, ah…hey look at that over there!
It’s hard to simplify your life when you’re holding on to so much crap for psychological reasons that you don’t even know about. I know I suffer from “I might need/want that someday” syndrome. I know that most likely I won’t need or want any such thing, but for some reason I can’t…let…GO…of it. Because I might need or want it someday. Like the day after I throw it out. I’m totally going to want/need it. It’s happened! Very rarely, but still. It’s happened. I thought, “I think I’m going to need that someday, but I haven’t wanted it for the last 10 years, so why would I want it ever?” So I got rid of it and BAM, three days or three years later, I was thinking, “Dude, where did I put that thing I was never needing or wanting until right now?” And I couldn’t find it. And I eventually went out and bought a new one. And then I remembered that I never really got rid of it in the first place because there’s the original staring me in the face again. So yeah, never mind. That story proved exactly nothing except that I’m addicted to owning stuff.
Is there a twelve-step program for people like me? Packrats Anonymous? I’m sure there is one, but I’m actually not as bad as a lot of other people I can think of, and I don’t want to go to a meeting with folks who are still figuring out how to throw out their third-grade spelling tests and their lucky soda pop bottle lid collections. Maybe there’s another group, Packrats-Who-Think-They-Aren’t-Packrats Anonymous? That would be the one for me.
Well, I’d better go rake some personal effects off the living room floor or strengthen my core muscles. Whichever seems easier.
Still thinking…
P.S. Okay, bouncing on this fitness ball is way so much funner than cleaning, it’s not even funny. I don’t think it’s doing anything for my core, but I’m having a good time. You should seriously get one of these if you haven’t already. Only you should pay somebody else (not me) to blow it up for you because that part is the opposite of fun. Sorry, can’t bounce and blog at the same time. See ya, suckahs!
Every Christmas my mother-in-law gives me a calendar for the new year. At least one–sometimes she gives me two. Once, I think, she gave me three. I mean, sometimes there are a lot of really good calendars out there, you know, and you can’t pick just one. Well, this was the year of lean kine, so far as calendars were concerned, because my MIL had a really hard time finding a calendar for me. She didn’t see any that she really liked, but she finally settled on the one she thought would be most useful for me.
It is one of those “busy family” calendars, and it has all the days of the months in rows and there are columns for individual family members–up to five. (Because what “busy family” has time for more than five people in it? Seriously.) But she figured that the younger two kids could share a column, since it’s not like they have that many extracurricular activities. I thought that made enough sense. And it’s got pictures of cute animal families, so it’s attractive, too.
Uno problemo: I CANNOT WORK WITH THIS CALENDAR.
It sounds all well and good in theory–a rectangle for each person for each day, all the activities organized into a single column for each individual–but no. No. No. No. It’s not good. It’s not well. It’s too new. It’s too different. I can’t get used to it. I’m thirty-seven years old, and I’m used to looking at my months a certain way. Specifically, I need seven days across, with a big box for each day, all 30 or 31 or 28 of them. Everything that’s happening in one day has to be in the same box. I can’t deal with these five little boxes in a row. That’s too much. To me five boxes = five days. I can’t see it differently. I’m trying, and it’s just not working. I look at my calendar and I can’t tell what’s Monday and what’s Thursday. I look for Friday, but it’s not Friday, it’s Mister Bubby. What the hell? Where IS Friday? It’s down there, where Sunday the 25th ought to be. No. No. It’s not working for me, I can’t deal.
I keep telling myself to try harder because my MIL did go to all the trouble to buy me a calendar, and it wasn’t even on sale yet because it was still December, so I owe it to her and to the principle of conservation and to my ancestors who lived through the Great Depression to make good use of this fine calendar that was specially designed for busy families like mine (well, families like mine, minus one person). So I continue to write stuff down on it. I practice looking for Friday on Sunday. I find myself increasingly aware of just how many extracurricular activities my eight-year-old is suddenly involved in, and how not busy my ten-year-old is. I start to remember that weekends are shaded in purple.
But then somebody calls and asks me if I can do X on which day or when am I going to be free to do something else whenever, so I glance over at my calendar and hell if I can tell what day is which and where the blank spots really are and what they mean–is that Thursday, or is it Mister Bubby? Is it Princess Zurg? I’m free on this Monday, but not on that Elvis and/or Girlfriend. No. No. NO, THIS WILL NOT DO!
It may have been PMS, but I just about had a nervous breakdown on the phone last week when I tried to schedule a play date. It may be a personal problem, but it can’t go on. It’s only January 14, but I must buy a new calendar.
Apparently it really is the calendar year of lean kine because when I looked at the Target the other day, all they had were Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers and Dale Earnhardt Jr. I very nearly went for the Dale Earnhardt Jr., but then I thought, “No, Mad, you’re on the rebound right now, don’t do anything hasty.” I wanted to get one of those enormous desk calendars that you can also hang on the wall, but they were all out of them. I must not be the only one with calendar issues this year. So I ended up not buying any calendar, and I figured I could just live with this one for a while longer.
Then I had to write something on Mister Bubby’s Thursday, and I nearly lost it again. Seriously. Not another day. I can’t stand it another day.
One of my faithful Xanga readers, Anumati, has solved the mystery of the wall-facing toaster for me:
Pick up toaster. Wipe side of toaster. Turn toaster around. Wipe other side of toaster. Set toaster down.
That makes good enough sense to me. Even if it isn’t true, I am officially un-befuddled. Maybe next week if I’m feeling scientific and/or cheeky, I will set the toaster facing the wall before the housekeepers come and see if it ends up facing out the right way afterward. But probably I will forget. At any rate, when I see the toaster facing the wall, I will just think about how I am no longer confused, and that will make me feel good. At least, I will no longer be confused about that one thing.
You know, I don’t like to seem like I’m complaining about anything my housekeepers do, even when they do stuff that’s wrong. Well, the housekeepers themselves never do anything wrong (yes, they are perfect saints, as far as I’m concerned). The housekeeping service sometimes does wrong things, but they employ my housekeepers, so I don’t like complaining about them, either. Complaining about having housekeepers is stupid and annoying to others.
Of course, only other people who have ever had housekeepers know what it’s like to have housekeepers. People who have never had housekeepers think it’s like that scene in Corinna, Corinna where the long-suffering maid played by Whoopi Goldberg walks into these rich people’s home the morning after a wild party and the place is just a wreck with food and records and all manner of debris all over the floor and furniture overturned and couch cushions gone astray, and Whoopi Goldberg just sighs and gets to work because this is her job and that’s white people for you. Unfortunately, that’s just a movie.
In real life, my housekeepers would laugh me to scorn if I left my house in a wreck like that and expected them to clean it. Well, probably they would not laugh. Probably they would glance around and get this look on their faces like “OMG, can you believe her” and then sigh and call their supervisor. Then I would get a call on my cell phone at the McDonald’s. where I’m eating lunch with my kids because that’s what we do on housekeeper day, and it would be the housekeeping supervisor explaining to me that they are a housekeeping service, not a bulldozing service, and she’s afraid they will not be able to clean my house in its current condition and would I like to reschedule for another time? And I would say, “Are you #*$(&* kidding me with this? You should have seen the place before I tidied!” and she would repeat the thing about the bulldozer and we’d go back and forth until the conversation finally ended with me apologizing. That’s real life.
People who have never had housekeepers are appalled at what I pay to have housekeepers. One of those people is Gertrude, my babysitter, whom I would never, ever, ever have told what I pay to have housekeepers, except that she’s nosy and can’t stop asking questions and therefore she knows. I won’t tell you the exact dollar amount because that won’t mean anything to you; depending on where you live and how big your house is and whether or not you have pets or smokers in your house, my dollar amount may seem like a rip-off, a really good deal, or just about right. Suffice it to say that the housekeeping service makes more than four times what Gertrude does per hour. I have no idea how much the actual housekeepers get paid; I pay for a service so I don’t have to figure that stuff out. I know there are individuals who will contract with you to clean your house for far less than what a cleaning service company will charge you, but reliable housekeepers of that ilk are harder to find than housekeeping services, which are in the phone book. I don’t move in the social circles where ladies have housekeepers named Consuela who get paid $50 under the table to clean their 3,500-sq. ft. house, including windows. (I don’t have a 3,500 sq. ft. house, but ladies with housekeepers named Consuela do.) I do have a phone book. Well, I did have a phone book, back when I hired the housekeeping service. And I called every housekeeping service in the area, and I chose the one that quoted me the lowest price, which was in fact much lower than all the others, but much greater than what we paid the housekeeper who cleaned the house where we dogsat in the summer of 2002. That woman was hired by the owners of the house (and dogs), who did move in the aforementioned social circles.
Her name wasn’t Consuela. I think it was Cathy, and she smoked while she was cleaning house, but you could never tell because the place smelled so much like Pine Sol afterward. I love the smell of Pine Sol. Do you know why? Because it isn’t dog. But then, I like the smell of cigarettes better than I like the smell of dog.
So yes, Gertrude knows that I pay the housekeeping service more than what I pay her to take care of my four children. I suppose that’s a sad commentary, but that’s what the market will bear. If Gertrude charged four times what I currently pay her, she would only work for me about three to four hours a month (like the housekeepers) instead of twenty to thirty. Actually, she would probably not work for me at all, and I would be like those people who take the kids everywhere and only go out by themselves when relatives are in town and can watch the children for free.
Speaking of relatives, my mother-in-law was also appalled at what I pay the housekeeping service, considering that (from her perspective) I’m required to do most of the work of cleaning the house before they even get there. By “most of the work of cleaning,” I’m referring to tidying and decluttering–which is, in my opinion, the most tedious and irksome part of housekeeping. Not coincidentally, it is the part that you can’t pay professionals to do. Unless they are played by Whoopi Goldberg.
Or if they are smokers named Cathy. Cathy was pretty good about dealing with a little untidiness now and then. (A little untidiness–we were only there for four months and didn’t have time to build up a hefty supply of crap that could vomit itself onto flat surfaces in the blink of an eye.)
So yeah, I try not to even tell that many people that I have housekeepers because most of the people I know think that puts me in a class of people they don’t want to know. Especially if I’m telling them, “The reason I’m so stressed out right now is that the housekeepers are coming tomorrow and I have to get the house ready”–because if they’ve never had housekeepers, they don’t understand how having your house cleaned by someone else could ever be stressful and also they don’t understand what there is to get ready because they’ve never given the subject any thought past “Must be nice to have a housekeeper.”
Which it is, you know. Nice, I mean, to have a housekeeper. It’s great because every two weeks I am absolutely forced to deal with my own crap. Theoretically, it would be cheaper for me to hire Gertrude to take the kids out for x number of hours, while I stayed home and cleaned my own house. But then I wouldn’t get any McNuggets. Also, if I were cleaning my own house, I would always be putting off tidying and decluttering to the point where I truly would need a bulldozer (or, alternatively, a house fire–I can’t tell you how much easier it was to tidy after we had the fire), and the house would only get cleaned every three to six to nine months, and never all at once. It’s great to have all of your house clean all at one time, even if it doesn’t last very long. It’s better than having part of your house clean and then going to clean the next part while everybody dirties up the part you just cleaned. There’s just something very satisfying about it. Also, I don’t have to clean the toilets. That’s awesome.
Actually, it isn’t the toilets I mind so much. It’s the bathtub and the shower. I hate hate hate cleaning bathtubs and showers. Not because they’re dirtier than toilets but because they’re big and awkward. Also, I hate mopping floors. (In my house, the floors are almost dirtier than the toilets–because the toilets get cleaned between housekeeper visits, but the floors don’t. Fortunately, people don’t usually poop on my floors.)
P.S. If you think it’s weird to clean for your house cleaners, you should meet my friend who cleaned with her house cleaner. That’s weird.
Several years ago there was a Baby Blues cartoon where Wanda sprains her ankle, and the doctor tells her she has to stay off her feet for a few days. In the next panel, Wanda and her perfectionist neighbor, Bunny (who drove her to the ER, but only after getting her car detailed), look at each other, and in the panel after that, they simultaneously burst out laughing with big open-mouth guffaws and HA HA HA HA HA!’s and saying stuff like “Off your feet!” “For a few days!” “HAHAHAHAHA!” And in the final panel the doctor says something like, “Why are stay-at-home moms always the most sarcastic?” whilst Bunny says to Wanda, “Oh, I know–maybe your husband could help out!” and Wanda, tears of hilarity flying out of her eyeballs, says, “Stop! Stop! *snort* You’re hurting my foot!”
What’s funny about that cartoon is not the sentiment–which is a little unfair to Darryl, who, if I recall correctly, ends up taking a week off of work to tend to the kids and laundry and junk while Wanda recuperates (even if he does say, “YES!!!” the minute she announces she’s back to normal)–but the expressions on Wanda’s and Bunny’s faces just make me laugh. Which is why it’s a shame that I can’t show you the actual cartoon. We have it in a book somewhere, but I’d have to scan it onto the computer, and the scanner’s upstairs, which means I’d have to walk upstairs, and I don’t want to walk upstairs because my ankle, which I sprained last Thursday (“last week, on ‘I Am the Giraffe’…”), is bothering me again.
So I was noticing just now, as I was shuffling kids off to Cub Scouts and Activity Days at the church, that my ankle does not seem to want me running around on it just yet. I never really noticed how big I am on running, or indeed how fond I am merely of walking around a lot, until I sprained my ankle and had to stay off of it for a few days. If you had told me a week ago that I was going to have the opportunity to lie around and put my feet up for a few days and that I would squander it by being bored and frustrated, I would have laughed in your face, kind of like Wanda and Bunny did to that poor doctor, who was just trying to give sound medical advice. Me, not want to lie around all day? Were you planning to replace me with an alien body snatcher? Seriously.
It was all right on Friday, when I was so tired from staying up until four a.m.–having made a midnight trip to the ER and come home to find my husband watching Napoleon Dynamite and finding that I had no inclination to sleep until I watched Napoleon Dynamite all the way through to the end–that I slept for a lot of the day. Ordinarily I feel guilty sleeping that many hours during the day, but what else was I going to be doing, without the use of my ankle? You don’t realize how crucial an ankle is to so many activities until you are not allowed to use it. At least I didn’t. Anyway, that took care of Friday, but on Saturday, having gotten plenty of sleep the night before, I was somewhat at sea. Sugar Daddy took Mister Bubby to a Cub Scout activity and then had to go to a singig practice thing at the church, so I was alone at home with the other three children, who were fine, as I recall. I was lying on the couch with Girlfriend, who was watching Toy Story or something, and I was catching up on my blogs and my e-mail and my Facebook–you know, the essentials–and things just sort of went fine, and then SD came home at 11 a.m. and it all was downhill from there.
I think I’ve blogged recently about how my husband is a compulsively active person, which is a fine thing for a person to be, especially when said person is the family breadwinner, so I’m not knocking it or anything–but it does tend to make me feel inferior. So I will react in one of two ways: I will either try to out-activity him, or I will go in the opposite direction and try to be as lazy as he is active. That last one is no small feat, but it takes a lot less energy than the first one, so I usually opt for it. When my husband says the ritual Saturday/random-day-off words, “What do you want to accomplish today?” I usually say, “I don’t know.” Because if I say, “Not a damn thing,” that sounds like I just don’t care–which is in fact the case, but to say it out loud seems rude.
If I were to assess our family life overall, I would have to admit that I value my husband’s tendency to err on the side of over-activity and over-planning. It keeps us from drifting aimlessly through life. I suppose in that sense I married him for my own good. Given that I know all that, it seems ridiculous to complain. But I’m a ridiculous person, so complain I will! No, seriously, on Saturday I was glad that I had a good excuse not to do any work, but at the same time I was really uncomfortable with SD’s how-much-can-I-do-while-the-sun-shines MO. What good is a good excuse if it doesn’t prevent you from feeling guilty while your spouse is doing all the work he usually does, plus all of yours? I’d say it’s a pretty crappy excuse! So that’s why I was in such a poor mood when he pointed out that I’d been staring at a computer for three hours (alternately working on my novel and getting writer’s block and then checking my blogs and my e-mail and my Facebook) and it was probably time I did something interactive with the real world. The guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth them to the very center!
So what did I do? SD and the two younger children went out to rake the leaves, and I cleaned up the lunch table and put in a load of laundry. Then I started addressing the Christmas cards. I had to make a few trips up and down the stairs to get the laundry and then to find the Christmas cards and then to find the stupid address book. Why did I go up and down the stairs so much when I was supposed to be staying off my foot? Well, I’m not sure, but if you’d asked me at the time, I probably would have said, “Lay off, *****, I don’t have to justify myself to you!” Which is why it’s good you didn’t ask me. The Christmas cards more or less occupied me the whole time until we had to go to the ward Christmas party, which was another adventure in itself. But if I go there, I’ll go off topic (again).
Certainly my husband had no intention of pressuring me into climbing up and down stairs when climbing up and down stairs was inadvisable. He just wanted me to do something that didn’t involve a computer screen, which was fair enough. He specifically thought I should be interacting more with the children. But I don’t really know how to interact with the children when they’re not interrupting me. When they’re leaving me alone, my instinct is to let them leave me alone, not to start playing with them. That might make me a horrible person, but to me the joy of interacting with children is more joyful when it is a spontaneous achievement rather than a goal. If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I suck at achieving things I set out to achieve. I’m much better at achieving things by accident.
So if my children were not hovering around me and asking for my attention, I had to be engaged in something, and if I couldn’t think of anything to do while lying down, I had to get up and do something and walk around because that is what I do when I don’t want to feel guilty. I walk around and do stuff. There’s always plenty to do. It’s not like I had to go searching for chores. The chores are ubiquitous and omnipresent. They live in my mind, too. Hence the guilt. At these times in life, when one ought to be grateful that one has the luxury of lying down while someone else tends to the most pressing responsibilities, I am thinking that when this gig is over I will have built up such a load of family-service debt that I will have no choice but to declare moral bankruptcy.
This is a completely twisted view of marriage and of human relations in general. Certainly when I am doing something for someone else, I am not thinking, “You are soooo going to owe me later.” Because I don’t think of other people as lazy, mostly-useless slobs, but that is how I view myself. Any time anyone asks me what I like least about myself, my answer is that I’m lazy. I know my tendency is toward sloth, not industry, and so I end up overcompensating for my natural tendencies, when I’m not overindulging them. When I can’t overcompensate, I feel helpless.
On Thursday night, when I was still unaware that my ankle really was sprained and probably deserved medical attention, I was at this progressive dinner and putting my shoes back on for what seemed like the hundredth time that evening, and a woman who works in the church library with me said, “Oh, your ankle is hurting you, isn’t it? Let me tie your shoes for you.” And actually being in the process of tying my second shoe, I said, “Oh, no, I’m fine.” And this dear sister turns to someone next to us and says, “She’s one of those mothers who won’t let anybody do for her.” And I wanted to say, “No, no! I do let people do for me! I have housekeepers and a part-time nanny. I love having people do for me so much that I pay for the privilege! The least I can do is tie my own shoes!”
And today I went up and down the stairs a dozen times before 8 a.m. and at one point I was doing a modified “Monkey Dance” with my two youngest children–because they wanted to do the Monkey Dance, not because I got up this morning wanting to do the Monkey Dance–and I walked Mister Bubby to his den meeting whilst carrying my three-year-old, and I’ve been bustling around all day doing nothing particularly strenuous but nothing particulaly considerate of my ankle’s feelings, either, and that is why my ankle is complaining.
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