||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, partly because I’ve had a couple of opportunities to observe closely how a couple of other visiting families divide up chores without spilled blood or even harsh words and recriminations. (I love that word: recriminations and wonder about its origin. OK, I looked it up and one source said10th century French and several translations into Urdu, which I can’t understand, given that I can’t read the script. So I’ll just let that lie for now.)
I live alone and have for many years and have, apparently, divided my domestic chores according to what I like and am willing to do, and what I don’t like or seemingly can’t do. Which means there are no dirty dishes lying around. Or clean dishes either. My clothes are clean, some are hung up nicely or folded perfectly, but most, unlike the dishes, are lying around feeling unappreciated and wondering what they have done to have been treated so unfairly. Then, there are the papers, who are treated even worse. They have not been ordered, nestled with their friends and associates in respectable filing cabinets, even though there are many file containers of various materials and colors, just itching to serve the paper orphans and give them a home. Also plenty of clean, folded paper grocery bags (from the pandemic) just waiting to hold recycled papers to be removed from the premises.
So what’s this confessional about anyway? (Besides, being more than you wanted to know about me or anyone else.)
In any case, I am interested in reform, have always been, and wish I had improved a long time ago. After all, it’s frustrating that I can’t find a particular piece of paper when I want it, and it’s embarrassing when someone I barely know arrives at my door to wonder which hurricane arrived inside my house and blew papers everywhere. Or worse to know the embarrassing truth.
Anyway, I’ve been, once again, looking for solutions for my paper disorder problem and not for the first time. And it’s discouraging. Don’t remind me about books. I’ve read Marie Kondo with good intentions, watched videos of minimalists with envy. My son, when he was doing an independent study in high school photography, got a lot of attention for an un-staged photo of a pile of clothes and other things beside my bed, with an open book, titled ‘Getting Organized,’ face down on top. So mine is a long-term issue. What is different is that my brain, once well organized, has changed with age, but not my habits.
So here are a few thoughts I’ve had. (Yep, no actions.) I’ve always thought that the division of labor in families (and possibly everywhere) should be decided according to what preferences and talents each member of the family has and is good at. (Each member’s tolerance for disorder should be taken into consideration too.) And that is what I observed recently with my visiting friends.
In my family of origin, that was the rule too. My father was organized and orderly, but in our house he was outnumbered and overruled. The result was that his personal space was orderly, except for the damage his spouse and four children could wreak when we wanted to find and use something that we were unable to locate in our own disordered spaces. Our dad’s workshop was a thing or order and beauty with all the dangerous tools in their safe places, workbenches clear and clean, cords rolled and hung, floor swept. In fact, it was my favorite place except for the ear-splitting noises that the tools made when he woke them up for a little fun. Also, his chest of drawers (one of several he built in that shop) contained carefully folded clothes, with the two small top drawers holding small household tools and materials like pens, pencils, notepads, tape, paperclips and envelopes. The best thing was a pair of long sharp scissors always available to one of us to cut something not good for such shining, sharp blades, like thick canvas or leather, thin metal strips, gnarly twigs—you can imagine. We were not above using them in the kitchen or on thick cardboard with glue not fully dry. Of course, he discouraged us, but was never harsh enough to make us give up our careless ways.
Our mother was less orderly, to say the least. On the other hand, she did give birth four times, arduous tasks I didn’t appreciate until I got into the birthing business myself. I can see now that I learned housekeeping from my mother, though I admired my father’s orderly practices. I might mention that my mother always had a full time job as did my father. Hers was as college English teacher, which was unusual at the time, to the extent that I used to lie about it. I wanted to pretend my mother was at home making cupcakes and ironing like the other mothers. (At least I thought that was what they were doing.) My clothes were too badly ironed (by me) to fool anyone, but I persisted in my deceit.
The fact that she put me to work helping with her job is irrelevant, really. However, I was grading student English essays by age twelve and loved my red pencil when I could find it. Possibly, the students (male engineering and agricultural science majors) suspected, but as far as I know there was never an open problem. Oddly, there was a recurring theme in some of the papers. Many students wrote about leprosy, which interested me, and I did not notice the probability that there was a master paper shared by many students long before technology made such cheating common and easy. Twelve year old girls are easy to fool when they are looking only for complete sentences and reasonable paragraphing. Later, when I had a boyfriend who was a student at that same college who wrote a paper about leprosy, my suspicions did click in.
Well, time passed and my siblings and I all chose well organized and tidy partners just as our mother had done. I don’t know about my sisters and brother, but it was not a conscious choice for me, though it served me well until I imagined I could take care of everything myself. Wrong.
But back to my main theme. I like to wash dishes because it involves soapy hot water and not much organizational skill. I also like to clean things, like windows, floors, and occasional cars. But I am still waiting for some fairy godparent to organize my papers. I used to have a mind organized enough to get me through life and work, but age has made the paper problem more pressing. Molly the cat lives mostly in Bellingham with her sister Rose and my son. Molly works on the paper problem there by chewing any important pages into small, wet blobs, and Rose keeps a pile of shiny objects under the bed, and does not share with Molly, as I’ve said before.
I suppose the lesson I have yet to learn is to have other than cats for roommates, and that picking up and organizing the papers is a worthwhile project. I’m going to start right now.
Or at least tomorrow.
