It struck me last week. I am my mother. Okay, first things first: This is not a bad thing. My mother is awesome, sorry to brag. She’s got this West Virginia twang, and she’s sassy and funny and says things like “Behind every dark cloud, there’s another one” when she was trying to say “Every cloud has a silver lining.” She put up with my teenage temper tantrums and when I thought I might be a lawyer when I grew up, instead of cheering and thanking God that I might make a decent living, she asked whether I thought that job would allow me enough creative agency.
I am not funny like she is, and I am not the survivor she is. And I probably would have slapped my little teenage self silly, and I don’t know if I could be as supportive as she’s been. There are, however, a million things I catch myself saying, a million little habits I find myself repeating, that could be examples of how I am just a quirkier, moodier, more over-the-top version of my mother. But the real clincher was my decision to change how I approached chores.
My mom stayed at home with me when I was a kid. She homeschooled me, always had dinner on the table at 4:15 sharp, and cleaned the house on a weekly basis. Not just kept the house clean on a weekly basis. But cleaned the whole house–every week. My childhood memories all smell like Clorox and clean laundry.
(Lest you think my mother is Martha Stewart, she once painted one of our living room walls the most insane color of bright pink you could ever imagine. And we will never let her live it down.)
So, last week I found myself in the “underemployed” category. Lost one job out of two, and the second has been sporadic with the hours. At first, I’ll be perfectly honest, I was dismayed. And not so much because of money. More because my pride was wounded. The moment I lost the first job, I was sitting at my computer, working on some query letters. And when I got that email (as nice as it was, as full of phrases like “the current economic situation” designed to cushion the blow), I just stopped. I had no motivation. All I wanted to do was sit around and cry. Suddenly, I understood exactly why people who lose their jobs get depressed and end up in their bathrobes at 3:30 on Tuesday afternoons, watching TV shows they don’t care about and eating the last of the chocolate chips in the pantry that had been bought for making cookies. (Not that I, ahem, did those exact things…well…okay, I totally polished off leftover baggies of two different kinds of chocolate chips, and they were both stale and kind of tasted like plastic. And I ate them anyway. And I didn’t care.)
So, I melted down for the afternoon and whined to Jesse about losing a job I’ve been complaining about for nearly three years, and was feeling very sorry for myself because they don’t love me, and Jesse said, why don’t you just take this time to work on your writing? Why don’t you do the things you want to do but don’t have time because of work? Something else will come along.
At first, I thought, I can’t do that! I need to contribute! And then eventually I realized that, as always, he’s right. And he’s being indescribably cool about this whole thing. So, I’ve been writing proposals and query letters and I’ve been revising the book again and reading all about agents and contests and grants and all sorts of fun things like that.
But this post is about becoming my mother. One of the things I’ve decided is that to “contribute” more, I’m taking over most of the household chores (Jesse still takes out the trash because I hate the big trash can outside–it stinks and it gets heavy when it’s full). Jesse works full-time plus freelancing on the side to bring in extra cash, so it makes sense that I take on the house stuff. What I hate, though, is doing a bunch of cleaning all at once. So, I’m splitting up the chores like this. On Mondays, I do laundry and linens. Wednesday is for floors. Friday is for the bathrooms. The dishes get done daily, and I clean the kitchen counters and sink each day. Tuesday and Thursday are for whatever other chores need doing (dusting, cleaning out the fridge, killing fire ants–outside, of course).
Then I remembered, this is exactly what my mother did when I was a kid. Of course, she cleaned a lot more thoroughly than I do. But, she started at one end of the house at the beginning of the week, and by the end of the week she had done the whole house and was ready to start again. There’s something oddly enthralling about cleaning the house like this. Instead of having everything in various states of dirty, things seem to be in various states of clean. And nothing really takes longer than a half hour at a time (except laundry does kind of monopolize the whole day in little spurts). And nothing gets especially dirty, either, which is rather exciting.
Okay, I realize that not everyone gets quite as excited as I do about chores, but frankly I can’t say I understand why not.