fling o’ rama
Having accepted congratulations for putting flylady to the side for a time, I just spent probably two hours throwing away crap in my attick hideaway.
It’s a big lovely room. That also means it’s got room for a LOT of crap.
It has been a horror since Christmas. Which was FOUR MONTHS AGO.
I can’t remember what the argument right around Christmas time was about, probably division of housekeeping labor (the fact that there is none, but we’ve settled that reasonably happily now), but I remember crying and telling my husband- – I think I’m going to start abbreviating his name CKK (Curt Kirkwood Kinda)– anyway I remember crying and saying ‘That room is ME!’
Sure, it was theatrical. But it was also true. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Good old mommy, just throw it in her room, she’ll sort it out. Or, I am the only person in this house who can POSSIBLY take care of this. I’d better put it up in my study, on top of all the other crap nobody can possibly take care of but me. I’ll get to it some day.
Since Christmas this room has been at its absolute height of representing me, I’ll tell ya. It was full of globs of wrapping paper, shipping boxes, packing materials, gifts yet unwrapped, and just shit that the entire family figured I could somehow find a good place for. My healing table (like a massage table) had turned into a work surface/catchall/hidey hole for more shit. You could not see the floor in here.
Then, obscured behind Christmas, was all of my hoarded craft stuff. I have gotten so much better over the years, but… when it comes to crafts and paper products, I am a hoarder. I cannot, cannot cannot organize or let go of fabrics, old diaries/notebooks, items that need mending that I should really just THROW AWAY, unfinished craft projects, scrapbooking stuff… It’s a horror.
Everything I keep, you see, I have to organize.
This room represents me because it takes on everything, and everything never gets finished or processed. I just say, sure! And I take on another task, or pick up another item or commitment whether emotional or physical and figure I’ll get it sorted out somehow and then stow it in my room or in my consciousness until I can’t even think. It’s very sad.
I think of this when I’m in my office, too. I am a stickler about keeping public areas of my workplace clean– tables, dusting, bathrooms– but my office is a piled up mess. My file me pile takes up a table that is, I promise you, a square yard. I’m so busy taking care of my staff and my patrons that my office never gets clean.
I threw away and put away so much. I could just about vacuum up here now.
I have two attic storage areas. My back aches from stooping to come in and out of the mini doors to those dark, miserable little rooms. When I go in there I see all the crap I have still managed to hoard, for years and years and years through over a dozen moves.
I have thrown away so much at every stop, and still here I am. I have boxes and boxes of books, diaries, photos, fancy and expensive clothes that will never, ever, ever fit me again even if they were to be in style ever ever again, holiday decorations… to me that unwillingness to throw away symbolizes fear and denial.
If I could just throw (most of it) away, that would be the energy of a person who is ready to accept and embrace abundance. The more we accept or retain crap, the more we attract it. I believe that with all my heart.
When I shut the sweetly painted doors of my attic storage, I can try to pretend all that stuff isn’t there. But I know it is, and there is going to have to be a reckoning.
What book did I just read that in? “There will be a reckoning.” That echoes in my mind– I think it was kind of comic, but WHAT BOOK WAS IT?
Ah!! Wee Free Men. One of my girlfriends put me onto Terry Pratchett for my stepdaughter and I really liked that book meself. I need to go dig up the next one.
What do you think… is taking care of me first, even when it means that something for others will not get done, still best? We said at healing school that when we show up authentically– which includes setting boundaries and caring for ourselves first– it frees others to show up authentically. But what if I don’t get my goals met at work, or what if something doesn’t get done at home? What if?
This is at the very core of one of my greatest lifetasks, I believe. We just finished Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed in my women’s book group, and it’s such a witty, insightful book. The insight comes from the main character’s sense that she doesn’t deserve– anything. It traces back to her relationship with her dad, and impacts her dating choices as well as how she takes care of herself and creates incredible self blame and psychotic post partum depression when her baby experiences problems at birth. It is just ingrained in her that she doesn’t deserve these blessings. I think that’s the spiritual root of my miscarriage a few years ago. Somehow I didn’t deserve that blessing. I’m not saying it’s my ‘fault’– I’m saying I need somehow to get in touch with that essential worthiness that is in every single human being except, it seems, me. Somehow I’ve got to part that veil.
It’s actually a species of insane egomania… it brings everything back to oneself. If you’re religious, this conviction is a sinful denial of the nature of your loving higher power and it’s holding you back from your higher power’s ultimate plan of joy for you. If you’re not religious, well, this conviction is just– a species of insane egomania that’s holding you back from joy and growth.
But it is so easy to know intellectually that one has a problem with thinking they aren’t deserving, and another thing completely to say, oh, yes I am, and in fact if I care for myself I’ll be there for my family and friends and coworkers more than ever.
What if?
There’s no answer. It’s just something to think about.
And… I can reckon, I can shift my energy to the kind that accepts abundance, some other day. I’m just glad to be able to see the floor, and I’m hungry.
today
Today’s myspace post:
just today
Current mood: 
calm
Going today up to way in the country to see the dear friend who kept shaky baby back after maternity leave ended but she was too young to go to Montessori school. She doesn’t drive these days, but even so, it’s a lot to ask her to be the one to always drive down here.
She’s such a neat person. Among many other things, like me, she abruptly left a youth of recreational drug use (although for me it was pretty strictly alcohol and cigarettes only, and she grew up a lot earlier than I did) to become a mother. She is a wonderful caring hippie mommy. She trusts her instincts and is suspicious of The Man. She is much stronger about parenting in a way she believes in… at some cost to herself, I might add. I am far too selfish and unsure of myself to be as strong as she is.
She cloth diapered. For the first few years I knew her every time I came to her house there were stacks and stacks of adorable clean cloth diapers. She cooked healthy home made foods instead of giving her kids processed foods. She breastfed for a long time. She had her second baby at home, pretty much by herself before the midwives showed up. She is staying home with her children in spite of her family’s limited income. Like me she still has that punk edge, and issues aplenty, but her babies come first.
This girl and her sister– well they are ten years and more younger than I am, but they remind me of my best friend in high school. The day I met each of them I just got this good feeling from them. There’s just that deep, real, been there done that honesty and sense of humor about them that I would like to associate with country people… but I have never met anyone like these girls.
Their backgrounds are different yet similar… trailers yes, but my best friend in high school had wonderful loving parents who stayed together and these girls had hard, harsh broken home childhood– and came out just as hard headed, beautiful and determined, more so really than my dear friend from high school. You know how redneck girls are often so much better groomed– better haircuts and makeup– than city girls? None of them went to college. They are all three very smart, big fish in small ponds who breezed through high school without having to study, but without bothering to worry about college. They all have horse sense and an ability to see through the bullshit, their own bullshit, and others’, and call it like they see it, that sometimes just has me rolling with laughter. They are nice girls, but they don’t let being nice keep them from seeing and telling the truth.
I can’t describe it. There are some people who just remind you of the good parts of your childhood in such a way that you can truly be yourself, whether you’re seventeen or thirty seven, as if those twenty years never passed.
Twenty years… I’ve been thinking a lot about that number, as my reunion is coming up this summer. It hardly seems possible. I am still just as frivolous, just as cool, and almost as stupid, as I was when I was seventeen. I hit a turning point about thirty, and another as my baby began to grow and I slowly became a mother. But inside… my essence is pretty much the same. I’m a party girl. I am deeply introverted and shy– but I need my friends and community. My imagination paints huge beautiful emotional and visual pictures in my head, and after all these years I still can’t manage to write them down. I love, love, love to work, like in the garden or cooking or quilting or on the house, but I fucking hate doing the grind of someone else’s routine if I can’t see the bigger picture.
I don’t know how it can be that this time has gone by. Time goes faster and faster, and while life doesn’t necessarily get easier– okay, I must admit I prefer my problems now to the problems I had in my twenties– not easier, but… I dunno. Anyway, life becomes more and more precious every day.
I have some deeper and darker thoughts regarding just how precious life is but I’ll have to save them for another day. I want to tote the baby quilt up there
to work on while the kids play and we talk. I want to get some garbage out of the house because it’s trash day and it’s good feng shui to keep this stuff moving all the time. I wanted to take some vegan cupcakes up there too but I’m starting to run out of time.
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Currently listening : Bareback By Hank Dogs Release date: By 02 February, 1999 |
Saturday before going on the road again
I have finally dug all the vegan and vegetarian detritus of my parents’ visit and vegetarian/vegan exploits out of my fridge– two week old nut roast en croute, ten day old vegan chocolate cake, two week old mediterranean roasted veggie lasagne, and all the stuff that was backed up behind that because I couldn’t see it in time to eat it before it went bad. It’s like having a new fridge, and it has bugged me for a while. I don’t like being to busy to hook into the little maintenance things that need to be done reasonably often to keep it comfy and livable around here.
I also made the sad decision to throw away my wonderful funky vintage 90’s Steven Cojocaru style leather shag rugs. They are so cheerful and fun, and really made my somber, somewhat forbidding black and brown living room look softer and, well, funner. But they are a nightmare to keep clean. I can’t vacuum them, I have to shake them outdoors, and they are too heavy to shake by myself or very often. Dog hair and countless other unappealing stuff gets caught in them. We didn’t pay much for them, and we would never get that money back anyhow, and it will be so nice to just wipe the lovely clean pergo floor and be dog hair free in an instant. It’s a huge shift in my idea of what is worth it and what isn’t.
I’ve been busting my butt all day to get ready for a new work week and another trip out of town (this time, to stay at an even more wonderful state park). Cleaning, laundry, packing my kid’s school bag, getting some dinners made up for us and for my husband while he’s single dadding it. I need to stop soon, though, and spend some time with my husband and kid.
Last time I went on the road, I remembered everything except– my underwear. Back in college I thought going without panties was *great.* On a business trip in the rural South, with my more substantial figure of today, however, it isn’t, so much. So this time I’m going to try to be packed tonight, before going to bed. You guessed it– the panties are already in the bag.
obsessively picking up
Is mental illness simply the lot of the working mother? The working woman? The woman?
I reckon maybe other working mothers would be glad to have this problem. And I guess I am glad that I have it. Sorta.
I mentioned that few weeks ago my husband and step kids stayed out on vacation several days longer than the baby and I did. I had this house so tidy– horizontal surfaces empty and wiped, bed made, floors swept, laundry and dishes caught up. Even on work days, I was able to easily complete the minimum routine items that kept it looking nice.
What happened the minute they got back? We, really I, began to stagger under the growing load of items we couldn’t keep up with. I’m trying not to be a martyr. It’s just the truth. When I ask for equal division of labor he says I’m the messy one, and that he’s disgusted because when he cleans something once a year it never stays clean… it was just to cover up the fact that he doesn’t pick up after himself or at least leave the surfaces I’ve cleaned clean, dammit.
It’s especially discouraging when I work all day and then come home to an untidy, unhygienic, uncomfortable home that, it seems, I just cleaned a day or two ago. I can either do the second shift that my husband doesn’t see the need for and clean it, or go to bed miserable in this hell hole.
Now that the stepkids are (sadly) gone back to their mother, I wonder if it will degenerate as badly and as quickly this time. We’ll do a scientific experiment– husband only vs. husband and two preteens.
The thing is… I am spending my Saturday cleaning. I made a little flylady chart of items that are only allotted 15 minutes and items that are only allotted 5 minutes. It should have only taken me two hours.
But I can’t stop!
I’ve been relentlessly throwing things away or throwing them into the rooms where they belong almost all day. I’ve stopped briefly to feed or snuggle my three year old or have coffe, but for the last four hours… it’s sad. But I guess it’s better than having ocd-hoarding. Well… I don’t have it too bad anyway. Perhaps you wouldn’t believe me if you saw my den upstairs which is covered in old clothes I’ve been too skinny to wear for years, self help books, hundreds of diaries from the time I was ten… but at least down here, in our living space, I am ruthless, and within the limitations of our somewhat, er, bargain eclectic decorating scheme, it looks sooo nice. It does to me, anyway.
I guess strictly speaking compulsive behavior is something you do over and over even though it doesn’t give you any satisfaction. And truly, I have to admit I’m actually enjoying this. I can see my bedroom floor and my laundry room floor. I even got out the vacuum! I threw away candy we’ve had since last halloween– why in hell did we even move it into this house? I dismantled all those piles and piles of papers and books that seem to grow organically from every surface. Every item I toss in the garbage is like, I dunno, like taking off a nasty old bandage and letting the sun shine on a wound so it can heal.
But it would also feel sooooo good to accomplish some creative writing, and/or some healing school study. But I’m sooooo tired. And we’re out of pullups (she’s potty trained but it’s a lot to ask a little one, not to wet the bed during a nap or all night) so I have to go out at some point. Maybe it won’t be so damn hot and we can go to the park for a bit to get some exercise and bond.
some guy stopped by
We’ve been in our house 3 and a half months. It’s a great house– brick, five bedroom three bath, solid, attractive– but there are many, many things that are weird, idosyncratic, and downright poorly done.
One of those items was a pile of large paving bricks around the base of our mailbox. I guess the previous owners, newlyweds much younger than we are, had made a flower bed around the base of the mailbox, and then a friend of theirs hit it backing out. So they just piled up the paving bricks and left them.
Today a somewhat weird looking guy came up my sidewalk and rang my doorbell. He walked funny, but I thought maybe it was the stepdad of the former owner and he was finally picking up the f*cking pool pump. So I answered, against my better judgement. He said, those bricks out there– I interrupted and said take them, and we’ll thank you for it. Woo hoo, yet annother item cleared away in this crazy place! I’m so grateful!
