[Photo by Westley]
In the space of just a few hours, the tasks I had been doing with a cheerful willingness (if not quite joyfully) became heavy, oppressive.
Fuck this, I thought. I'm not doing it.
But not folding the laundry as it came out of the dryer meant clean things just kept piling up, until a new land mass—Mount Laundry—had formed. This made it difficult to get dressed and access the coat closet, and it cluttered up the already-chaotic living room. Not exactly good for housewife/life morale.
So after much silent complaining and carrying on about how awful this all was, I sorted, folded, and put away half a dozen loads of laundry. It only took about an hour.
[Photo by Westley]
Sure, you can let The Thing—whatever The Thing is—make you miserable if you want, let it clutter up your space, or you can just face it. Deal with it now. It won't even be that hard! Of course, because this is life we're talking about you're going to have to address The Thing again at some point (possibly in just a few minutes from now). That part isn't fixable; eventually you'll have a bad day, shit will hit the fan, the boulder will roll back down the hill, whatever.
But if you face The Thing now, you won't have to scale Mount Thing later.
.....................................
7 comments:
I just wanted to let you know that your post on being a homemaker has changed how I go about my day. Just about every day for the past week or so I've gotten down to it and done something domestic. I'm FINALLY feeling sorta kinda human so I wanted to get back to "doing my job". Thank you for putting it into perspective. I hope that you can find joy in it again.
Get out of my head!! You are reading my freaking brainwaves lately with everything you're posting, I swear.
I find myself getting all pissy and resentful that I'm a housewife and don't have a real job, and then boycott doing housewifey work. Except then I remember that I kind of enjoy housewifey work. Folding laundry, vacuuming, doing dishes - these are all really calming activities for me.
My beautiful new (to me) purple desk is now Mount Thing with its piles of bill and assorted bullshit. I really need to plow through it so I can see some purple again.
One more thing - Is Westley part faerie? Because that picture looks like it was taken by faeries. I dig his style.
Westley might be part faerie. I haven't ruled it out.
This is the weirdness: I enjoy the housewifery thing...when I stop resenting it and just do it. It's like exercise, that way. Before I work out, I HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE exercise. But after about the first 10 minutes or so, I'm all, "This isn't so bad. In fact, this is GREAT! Look what I can do! Awesome! High-five, self!"
Dude. You just wrote what The Lesson that my first year in my 30's seems to be about. I have had to learn to grow the hell up tackle Mount Laundry both literally (I created a heap that took over 3 hrs to dismantle) and figuratively. My Lesson of Thirty - just fucking do it. It isn't that bad. In fact, I kinda like it. So weird. Even weirder that you wrote this post and not me. Weirdo.
This is something I just came to terms with...however you've put it much more eloquently than I could have ever imagined.
Yep, dealing with this exact thing often. Here's to not scaling Mount Thing and trying to enjoy the (very important) work we do for our families!
We just moved and The Things stare at me in every cluttered room. Argh!! Love this post. I have been tackling each Thing in small pieces but there are so many pieces here!
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