Now, to play Zoeyjane cleans you’ve gotta find a…
floor!
Spring cleaning (aka move as little shit as possible in 30 days and find peace with minimalism in your new suburban home) officially kicked off this weekend. Now, if you’ve never, with OCPD, spring cleaned/moved, here’s a quick breakdown of the steps:
- Take the ex’s stuff, pack it up, find a place to stash said packed items where a) toddler will not screw around with them or break them (cuz you know who’d get blamed for that, right?) and b) where you’re not looking at them constantly, occasionally with pyrotechnical thoughts in your head.
- Go through every. single. drawer. cupboard. shelf. box. bag. and throw out anything not used in a year, not worth keeping, too small, too ugly, too stained or warped. Basically keep only the stuff you’d buy over again or can’t afford to replace and need. DO this while keeping in mind step 3.
- Once you know everything that’s now dead to you, assess what might not be dead to other people. Hand me downs? Craigslist-ables?
- Then you start packing. You pack every single thing that you know you won’t need in the next month and you pack it as soon as possible so that you have an asston of unlabelled boxes to trip over or find a home for. Make sure that all but two of each dish is packed, cuz later, you’ll need a third one and it will be too efficient if you leave packing things you’re using until the end, like a reasonable person would.
- Then comes the CLEANING FUN. Make sure you tackle the most asinine areas first – like, the grout in the tiled counters of the kitchen (just so that you can spill some spaghetti sauce on it 27 more times after bleaching it) and the ceiling fan in the bathroom (after you scrub the tub, floor and toilet directly below it). Really get in there and make those triceps burn. So that you have little to no energy or motivation left for a nice, easy, basic wet mop after your kiddo throws tomato soup on the floor.
- Moving day is coming up soon. Make sure all of the groceries are eaten (cuz you’d like to shop on the actual moving day – with a tired, hungry, cranky toddler yelling, ‘nack!’), the laundry is all washed with only the bare minimum clothes out (you’re guaranteed to need the opposite season’s stuff. Which is packed.) and that, you know, you have a new home to move to.
- Everything else left over the night before moving day? Throw it into as few boxes/garbage bags/totes/reusable shopping bags as possible and be ready.
Today, 75% of JDawg’s stuff got picked through, packed into the smallest and least valuable (in terms of my moving) boxes and garbage bags, and was dropped (gently) into a spare storage locker downstairs. I even locked it. It took most of naptime, with a few sit-downs (I’m old, there’s three flights of stairs, I weigh 100 pounds, I have a hemoglobin count of less than 95 – take your pick of excuses), a snack and a smoke or two.
The rest is either in the cupboard above my fridge – hello, climbing! – or already packed on my kitchen table and waiting to go in the locker.
I felt a mixture of things. Purity – like I was being cleansed of, well, his crap. Wilstfulness, as I read the words I’d written him in some of my 14 page letters and any of the 20 cards I’ve given him, ‘just because.’ I started to feel like maybe I hadn’t tried enough – if I loved him as much as I’d said I did, then it shouldn’t be this easy to walk away without feeling like my soul was dying, right?
And then I psychologically slapped myself awake.
And realized that I’d written those words to the real JDawg, not the guy that’s been hanging around for the past couple of years. The real JDawg? I may still even be in love with him. But the new Jdawg? I can’t be around him for long without wanting to punch/clean/explode/drink/smoke/sleep/cry/scream. And that’s just not healthy.
Perfect world? JDawg gets the crap kicked out of him in court, goes on a major bender and hits rock bottom. And comes up to the surface sober, and tries to stay that way one minute, hour, day at a time. And then, well, the new JDawg wouldn’t have any vitamins to run on so he’d disappear. And maybe I might stand a chance to see that sensitive, loving, intelligent, responsible, funny person I wrote letters to.
And after thinking that? I looked at my floor and thought, “well holy shit. Look at only half of the crap I’m going to throw out. I would never get to do this if he were here.”
And the OCPD part of me? Totally pumped her fist in the air.
