[I have to admit here that summertime brings with it an added feature to the chore of laundry: a great feeling of personal smug satisfaction. This is because we have added to our tiny townhouse and patio combination, a clothesline. And every single time I take the time to hang out our clothes, using the sun's energy instead of the electricity, saving energy, using solar energy, there's a great deal of personal back-patting. It's more than laundry. It's personal fulfillment.]
And then we went shopping for groceries, so that I can make dinner tonight. A new recipe! That I plucked from the pages of a nice magazine! Something healthy yet yummy! Does my amazingness know no bounds??
I feel absolutely like I am a better mom and person for this. And you know what? I shouldn't. I do, but I shouldn't. I have often said that my mother taught me that I could have it all, that I could have children and a family and run a house and have a career and have a personal life as well. And that this was great teaching, it taught me that I could have everything I wanted, that it was possible, that I didn't have to sacrifice. It made me strong. It made me work to fulfill my potential, to have as interesting a life as possible.
What it also gave me was a deep sense of inadequacy. Inadequacy for those days when I'm too tired to really work properly, inadequacy for those days my child runs rampant through the house while I ignore him in pursuit for just a moment of peace. Inadequacy especially for the days that the house is a total pigsty, that there are no clean dishes, the sinks are filled with vegetable shrapnel and dirty dishes, there are no clean clothes, when my husband gets home to a wife who is frazzled and about as far from sexy as is humanly possible, who goes to bed instead of spending time with him. Because if I *can* have it all, that means that this should never happen. I should be 100% all the time, at work, at home, as a mother, as a wife.
Because my mother could. And I look up to her, still.
But at the same time, I don't think I need to stop congratulating myself on days like this. I think we don't have enough self-praise in this world. If I want to feel good about sweeping my floors, dammit I will.
What I need to do is sit back and not condemn myself for those days when I just don't feel like it. To remember the dust piled high on my mother's stereo and my sister's coffee table, remember my mother breaking the frying pan one night and screaming "damn! damn! damn!" at the top of her lungs (although the reason I remember this particular incident is because it was so shocking, so unusual for a mother who rarely lost her temper in such a dramatic fashion.)
The fact is that 'having it all' is a fallacy. Something has to give. So often for mothers, it's the mom. The mom stops taking care of herself. I do this. And this really isn't healthy. It needs to be ok that sometimes, the thing that falls through is the laundry. Or the dishes. Or work.
Or the damn floors.
Which is why I'm sitting here during naptime blogging, and not tidying / cooking / cleaning / doing any more damn laundry, even if it does give me a smug smile.
1 comment:
I can see how you might get a complex from that :P
I feel like a failure in one area or another on a fairly regular basis: SP is watching too much TV/reading too many comic books/eating too many hot dogs; I am hideously behind at work; I spend too much time on the Internet; the work-in-progress is not progressing sufficiently, or at all; the house is dirty/untidy/disorganized/cluttered/all of the above; the laundry heap is threatening to take over the bedroom; I am slothful and corpulent instead of being fit and slim and active; I should be doing more eco-friendly things; my kid's friends are being taken on holiday to Europe or camping in Algonquin Park while mine is going to Canada's Wonderland and on a road trip to Michigan; mine is the only kid who has not yet learned to swim/skate/play an instrument/do karate/print neatly/tie her own shoes; I have been looking for an agent for over a year and haven't found one, which must mean my writing sucks; we eat too much food that comes in boxes or bags; it's my fault SP is such a pathologically picky eater; we're in too much debt; etc., etc., etc.
Our bath is very dirty, because we never clean it. And I keep thinking how when I was a kid, everything was always clean. Not necessarily tidy, because my mom is actually a very untidy person -- a fact she totally didn't realize until I moved out and the house did not magically become tidier overnight and, in fact, got worse -- but always clean. My mother, I kid you not, cleaned both toilets every single day. Insanity!! And gave big dinner parties for which she cooked all the food herself (or with my help). Of course, when I was little, my mom only worked part-time; and when I was bigger, we were a single-parent family, and the house stayed clean and dinner got cooked because (a) we had a cleaner every two weeks and (b) my mom enlisted me as substitute wife.
So, yeah.
We should all be nicer to ourselves, because having it all is a big, fat, hairy lie.
Not that I'm cranky about it, or anything :P
Post a Comment