When I lived with my father, I wasn’t allowed to clean.
To clarify: I wasn’t allow to make a mess; I wasn’t allowed to touch any mess that my father had created. Ultimately, my neurotic need to have things in order, precisely filed and straightened was punishable by manner of corporal and emotional abuse. Well, just about anything was, but you know how it goes…
Since I had a little bit of space to call my own, after the age of nine or so, I compulsively cleaned my bedroom. I segmented what toys and books went where, and moved the furniture around as frequently as I could without fear of wrath for potential wall dents.
Once I moved out to my own place, it was worse for me because now I controlled the entire environment and anything out of place was testament to how erratic my mind was. To hide the scattered thoughts and instability, I cleaned and polished, wiped and laundered. More rules developed for cleaning, like my previously blogged bathtub cleaning ritual, and managing a home became something to do when I was up late at night.
It wasn’t too rare to find me at three am, scrubbing grout with a toothbrush.
When I started working full time in administration jobs, this came in handy. My desk was always spotless, my files colour-coded and up-to-date, and my work prioritized in similarly colour-wielding splendour. I got the job done, and it looked good while I was doing it.
Enter motherhood and my ability to cope fell fast, quickly, because there was no grand filing system, and I couldn’t stay up until whenever, assured that I would have uninterrupted cleaning time. I couldn’t put down my daughter to wash dishes for the first nine months of her life, never mind file the bills that were being continually paid late. I couldn’t micromanage motherhood, because with the exception of the efforts her father put out, it was all on me, 24/7.
I started to fantasize more often about a life of less stuff. About minimalism as a means to have less to stuff to control, instead of letting go of the need to control anything, period. I became hopelessly hooked on interior decorating books and magazines, and Real Simple became my bible.
Funnily, I didn’t have the time or mental energy to handle any of the tips and tricks they were throwing down.
Now, I have more time, but I also have a new awareness of how much ADD effects me. Peel off a layer from this mental onion, and find another, I guess. And I started, really committed initially, to sticking to a strict schedule.
It was a glorious week, when I got everything done that I needed to, and I spent quality time with Zoë for the hell of it, not because she was demanding it or I felt she was owed it. Then I overbooked my work-week and promptly feel off of that wagon hard.
Now, here I am, back at overwhelmed with the checklist of things to be done, and realizing that yes, I do need that schedule and god, if only life could be like my jobs used to, I could manage every damn aspect of it, down to the font size on the label of ’story before bedtime’.
Life isn’t like that, and motherhood sure as hell ain’t, either. So what do I do?
I admit that I need something to micromanage me, maybe. I get back on the routine, as soon as possible… tomorrow. I start eating better and treating my body better and respecting myself more for all that I can and do accomplish.
Most of all, I choose to remember every day, starting today, while I look at the furniture that I’d like to move, or the tiles in the bathroom that scream for a thorough scrub, that I have something more important to do: not micromanage my daughter into time slots.
Not afford her a specific 30 minutes between the laundry switch and the dishes on Wednesday afternoon, even though both need to be done in a timely manner. Bake with her on a day other that the Sunday I’ve scheduled on the calendar. Instead of answering emails, lay in bed with her after breakfast even though the dishes are still on the table, reading page after page of Alice in Wonderland.
Despite the fact that she’ll never give me a promotion or a raise – or ever start paying me in much more than hugs that manage to shut off my airpipe and kisses that involve a way-too-open mouth – I’ve nearly always looked at motherhood as a job to do strive to do well, to keep clean and tidy, without major errors or misfilings.
Really, I should have seen this life for what it has the ability to be: medicine.
This post was inspired by the book Just Let Me Lie Down by Real Simple Editor Kristen van Ogtrop, and was written as part of the Silicon Valley Moms Group book club. You can join in here. Completely unnecessary (legally) disclosure: I received a free copy of the book as part of the Book Club.
Taking a page from old-school Miss, today you get esoteric lyric elucidation. No one should be surprised by the artist. Seriously. If you are, you don’t know me at all.
Plane by Jason Mraz
Drain the veins in my head Clean out the reds in my eyes to get by security lines Dear x-ray machine Pretend you don’t know me so well I wont tell if you lied Cry, cause the droughts been brought up Drinkin’ cause you’re lookin so good in your starbucks cup I complain for the company that I keep The windows for sleeping rearrange And I’m nobody Well who’s laughing now
I have to vacate my thoughts of you. Two sentences was all it took for me to backstep into possibility and since the silence has been deafening, leaving me standing alone. I can’t let myself get caught up again, so I’m so affected, dry eyes are an impossibility. I’ve travelled this road so much, I know its back country, road signs and the place to sit and think for too long, getting sunburnt in the process. I’m in a dry, arrid country, and you don’t have a passport or a sleeping bag to curl up next to me and protect me from the poisonous things that scurry in the dark. Once again, here I lie alone, seeing phantom scorpions, when really I know that I’m the frightening, metasoma-wielding apparition to them. I’m leaving your town again And I’m over the ground that you’ve been spinning And I’m up in the air said baby hell yeah Well honey I can see your house from here If the plane goes down, damn I’ll remember where the love was found If the plane goes down, damn
So I’m taking off from this spot. I’m choosing to board again, walking through the channel with determination that I’m on a one-way course. All it took was those two sentences, and you wove a reality in the blink of my eyes. But I can see, a few blinks later, that this mirage isn’t the truth of my existence. But that doesn’t mean that I’m flying unfettered or without pause for how we got here and why I’m leaving again. And that doesn’t mean that this isn’t bittersweet, this Neverneverland that I must pan my way out of. If I crash along the way, and sidestep once again, well then that seems approporiate, given the frequent flyer miles my soul’s been racked with. Damn, I should be so lucky Even only 24 hours under your touch You know I need you so much I cannot wait to call you And tell you that I landed somewhere And hand you a square of the airport And walk you through the maze of the map That I’m gazing at Gracefully unnamed and feeling guilty for the luck And the look that you gave me You make me somebody Ain’t nobody knows me Not even me can see it, yet I bet I’m
You were the person who got my everything and it’s bruising me that you’re missing out on so much growth and invention. I don’t have that, now, the sight of you laughing at my overenthusiasm as you remove the candy from my hands and emit your own kind of fantasy into mine. As hard as it’s been lately, I hurt so hard that I can’t share it with you as the fire dies down, so that you can see that the burns are only the first-degree kind. Once you strip off the dead skin, it’s fresh and new underneath. Some moments, I just need to exfoliate you from my mind; some days, I wish you could see the baby-smooth that’s been borne of this unintended coercion you’ve masterminded. You would appreciate it most, while you were loathe to watch it unfold. You would be most caught up with it all, even as you ran away, frightened. I’m leaving your town again love But I’m over the ground that you’ve been spinning And I’m up in the air, said baby hell yeah Oh honey I can see your house from here If the plane goes down, damn I’ll remember where the love was found If the plane goes down, damn
But I know you too well, even if I expect you too well, too. I can trust in a Jekyll and Hyde at the same time, happy when the monster’s caged and sadly expectant when he emerges. I know the constant backtrack of your feet, the mental mambo you do between self and other, well and sick, rich with love and alone in silence. The topography of your heartbreak is one you’re largely creating, with every ONE-two-three-cha-cha-cha, and whether I’m suffocated by your spaghetti arms or not is entirely up to this baby. I can see the dance floor we’ve glided over os many times, and I can smile at the spot where I stepped on your toes, and we both rotated at the precise wrong moment, nearly making our brains live in each other’s homes. But I can’t sway with you anymore. You keep me high minded You get me high
I thought, convinced myself that it was merely your obtuse transparent infatuation and your addiction to me that kept me casting off your galley. But every time I moored, I was more seasick than the last, and every time I raised the sail again, I became less the captain and more the crew. Sailing with you meant climbing the mast, seeing stormy weather ahead and hoping it wasn’t the perfect storm, yet thrilling in the waves as they crashed around, even as I wondered when I’d go overboard and never reach the surface again. I miss the ride sometimes, but I’m thankful that I own a life jacket at this moment. Flax seeds, well they tear me open And supposedly you can crawl right through me Taste these teeth please And undress me from these sweaters better hurry Cause I’m keeping upward bound now Oh maybe I’ll build my house on your cloud Here I’m tumbling for you Stumbling through the work that I have to do Don’t mean to harm you
It’s broken you a little more with every goodbye we’ve spoken or left unsaid. This one was entirely mine, you didn’t even know that I was leaving. And even if I could blame you for it, I won’t, for the fact of the matter is, you’ve opened more than you’ve jigsawed. If you were to become a traveller again, I don’t know what I could do, but invite you as quickly as I could, before the vacation ended. But right now, the creation of me isn’t allowing visitors of your stature, even if your build is exactly what I crave to sweat less. Who do you Think you are, are, are, are To keep me so oh cold, cold You keep me high minded You keep me high minded
With so much condemnation possible, I still have to think of what you’ve made me, and who, and how all of these are good made out of destination. I should shout silently that you’ve wrecked the very epitome that existed, or I could claim full guilt for that myself, but instead, I’ll hold onto the positivity that I can, and find gratitude that you helped make me strong, even if it was accidentally, while you wished my spiritual demise.
