Category Archives: life in the key of happy

life in the key of happy

Aug1

Unfucking my Habitat

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Unfucking my Habitat

Anyone who’s known me for any decent amount of time knows that my housekeeping is not, shall we say, Martha Stewart-like. It’s not on the level of someone who would qualify for Hoarders, or anything, but if I still had a mother-in-law, there would be a frenzied rush of a few hours, stressing the fuck out getting everything put away & scrubbed before she showed up, in an effort to avoid embarrassing myself & getting passive-aggressive remarks tossed in my general direction.

Generally, I ignored the clutter, did laundry when I needed to, washed dishes as we needed them, and made an effort (sometimes failing miserably) to keep wet towels off the carpet. I’d vacuum when I thought about it. Laundry would sit, clean, in baskets for a week or more. Dishes would sit, clean, in the drain, getting pulled as they needed to be used. Workbooks were strewn about, library books scattered everywhere. Nothing unsanitary, there were no mice carcasses under the dining table (though some crumbs may have been there for a while), no cat liquified under a 20-year-old stack of accumulated newspapers that had tipped over three years ago. Just the house of a busy mom with ADHD.

And then, on Friday, I came home after some time away. The boys had been with their dad for two weeks, and were scheduled to arrive back that evening. Fruit flies greeted me. Hundreds of them. Swarms. Everywhere. I’d remembered to take out the trash and recycling before I left, but had forgotten about the compost. Portland does an awesome job of collecting food waste from every household in the city, as part of the waste management program, but it’s the first place I’ve ever lived with this program. Out of sight, out of mind, my bin was under my sink and I forgot it. An honest mistake, but one that snapped something in my brain.

For the next few days, I scrubbed things. I vacuumed fruit flies a dozen times a day, sucking the fuckers up the hose and delighting in fewer & fewer of them every day. At the same time, I discovered a tumblr blog, unfuckyourhabitat.tumblr.com. Bookmark that site now. Seriously. The woman who runs it has developed an iPhone/iPad app that I’m considering buying for myself, because it’s amazing.

She has challenges, like “look around. Find 10 things that are out of place and put them away.” That’s not so hard, right? How about “collect all the dishes in the house and bring them to the sink. Bonus points if you wash them or load the dishwasher.” Simple. Clear, concise tasks, broken down into simple steps. She advocates taking a break after every cleaning session, 10 minutes after 20 of cleaning, 15 after 45. She also acknowledges that sometimes you don’t have the energy (mental or physical) to clean something for 20 minutes at a time. That’s ok. Do 15 or 10 or two. Something is better than nothing. This concept, quite frankly, was new to me.

Cleaning, when I was a kid, was always a stressful event. My mother, may she rest and her name be for a blessing, had some major OCD tendencies. I don’t mean checking light switches & whatever other idea of movie-style OCD you have in your head. The woman did not sit still if there was something that could be cleaned. Once, when she was visiting me at my house, I was drinking coffee. I set my cup down to go to the bathroom. When I came out, it was in the cupboard. She had washed, dried, and put away a cup of coffee that I wasn’t done drinking yet in the time it took me to piss. I did community theater for nearly ten years; it takes me about 12 seconds to piss, 16 if I’ve been holding it a while.

Because of my mother’s OCD, my room was a constant battle. I had a lot of stuff, a short attention span, and hated cleaning because why bother if it couldn’t all get done at once? And I would have to do it all at once in order to be able to go & play with my friends. It sucked. It would take forever, I’d be tired when I was done, it was never quite good enough, there wasn’t enough space for everything, and I grew to hate cleaning.

I carried that hatred into adulthood. If I can’t get the entire house done in one swoop, why bother? I have two kids, they make messes, why bother? Cleaning sucks, why bother?

That, my dears, is where that tumblr I mentioned comes in.

She makes the point that even two minutes of cleaning leaves the area cleaner than it was before, and that is ok. She makes the point that we need to let go of perfection. She makes the point that if we just put things where they go in the first place, cleaning won’t take so long next time.

She’s also profane and, unlike that insipid FlyLady woman, doesn’t insist that you wear lace-up shoes inside the house and thank your family for giving your life meaning because without them you wouldn’t have anything to clean and a clean house is a blessing.

You know what’s a blessing? Being able to pay someone to come to your house once or twice a week to scrub your toilet & floors & windows for you. Until the day when “housekeeper” is a line item in my budget, I’m going to keep unfucking my house, 20 minutes at a time, my own self. Because the gal at UFYH is right: 20 minutes at a time is better than nothing. I may not be OCD like my mom was, and I don’t want to be, I don’t want the low-level anxiety that comes part & parcel with my ADHD to manifest itself that way. But I want to live in a clean home. And 20 minutes at a time, throughout the day, has been enough to get us there.

My kids are old enough to help, which makes things easier. I fold their clothes, give them each a basket & use that chore as a stick, paired with the carrot of time spent watching Netflix. Those kids will get that chore done fast if the Electric Company or Batman are waiting for them on the other side. I remind them to put their workbooks away, and they do it. We have a designated spot for library stuff now. We make folding the blankets they use to make forts a race.

So, if you’re in the same boat as I was, challenge yourself. Don’t try to do it all at once. A little bit is better than nothing at all. One stitch may not be much, but repeat that stitch 25,000 times and you have a sweater. 20 minutes may not be much, but repeat it enough times and you have a clean house.

Happy Unfucking!

Jun25

On friendship and being behind the curve

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On friendship and being behind the curve

My mother, may she rest and her name be for a blessing, was a wonderful, charming, creative spitfire of a person. She was generous and pulled no punches and left an impression on everyone she met. She was not, however, particularly fashionable and she enacted incredibly strict and controlling standards about appearance. I was not allowed to wear makeup until I was 14, except on school picture day, when she applied it for me. The result of that combination was me, as a teenager, not knowing how to do my makeup and her never teaching me. She thought blue eyeshadow, a la “Totally Hair Barbie” was a good idea well into the 21st century. I learned how to do stage makeup from my years in community theater, and I knew better than to ever use blue eyeshadow (at least, not the way she did), but I didn’t know much of anything else.

I picked up a few tricks here & there over the years, enough to look decent when going to job interviews or weddings, but my skin became increasingly sensitive and I became less and less concerned with that sort of thing. Until one day, a few years ago, I realized I was in my late 20s and there was this knowledge base that my friends all seemed to have picked up 10-20 years before and I was clueless. You mean you’re not supposed to use the little sponge applicator that comes in your eyeshadow box? What are loose mineral shadows? There’s a difference between under eye concealer and concealer used for blemishes? What the blue bloody fuck is primer?

My darling friend Jeannine came to the rescue, with Face Enhancement 065: Remedial Application Methods. From her, I learned how to do a basic smokey eye, how an eyelash curler is used (I still haven’t purchased one), and precisely what primer is and how it makes everything better.

What I did not learn, however, was how to choose products best for my skin tone, eye color, etc. Having sensitive skin complicates issues, because I can’t just go to the store & get a set made for blue eyes or whatever, because most of those products lead to a reaction ranging from flaking skin to OH GOOD LORD WHY ARE MY EYELIDS ON FIRE THIS IS BURNING ITCHY BADNESS, GET IT OFF ME NOW. Yes, the caps lock is necessary.

I flailed about this issue on twitter a few days ago, because I’m going to soon be in an environment where looking at least semi-professional/put-together is going to be required, and on-campus interviews & internships & jobs mean more days where makeup is recommended as part of a “professional” appearance. I flailed because, despite my success in Face Enhancement 065, I never progressed to Face Enhancement 101: Basics of Product and Color Selection.

Enter the wonderful friends I have made over the years, many of them with literal or figurative certifications in basic and advanced cosmetology. Erica, who I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person, hated seeing me so anxious about this. And really, I was. Still am, a little. There is so much information available. Tutorial videos, blogs devoted to different “looks,” entire (enormous) stores dedicated to makeup. As someone who needs to know ALL THE THINGS, it’s a near-paralyzing amount of information. Going to one of those stores is intimidating, at best. I’ve gone, with friends, to the M.A.C. counter to get my face done, and they always do a great job. I usually walk out with at least one purchase, but that’s a really roundabout way of doing things, and sometimes the ladies in the shop are done up in a way that makes me think, “please don’t let her near me with an eyeshadow brush, because she is scary.”

So Erica, who is not scary at all and always has flawless makeup, offered to make me a little kit. She & I wear the same shade of foundation (which she knew by seeing my pictures, but I had to read the label on my stuff because all I know is I’m pale). Samples of products she uses & loves, brushes, that sort of thing. That kit came today and I am verklempt. There are instructions and everything is labeled, and she even included mini notecards & fun pencils & elephant-shaped sticky notes for my kids, because she is so very sweet and thoughtful like that.

My friends have taken over where my mother, great as she was, fell down. I may be learning it all 15 or 20 years later than most American women learn this stuff, but I am learning it, thanks to very patient friends, some of them more than 3,000 miles away. I cannot express how grateful I am to them for this. For all my flailing, and all your patience, I appreciate your efforts.

Jun6

Wherein this becomes, temporarily, a “Mommy blog”

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Wherein this becomes, temporarily, a “Mommy blog”

Boogermonkey will be in first grade in the fall, and for a long time we’ve known that he’s operating on an academic level well above his peers. The official label for kids like him (99th percentile in reading, 91st in math) is “Talented and Gifted,” or TAG, and that distinction is fraught. You’re accused of bragging about your kids, teachers don’t often understand or have time or want to differentiate (even though state law says they have to provide work on their level & at their pace), and then people try to say that you are saying their children aren’t smart or whatever. “Everyone is gifted,” they’ll say. Or they don’t believe you when you tell them, “He’s reading The Graveyard Book.” They say you’re making it up to make yourself feel better, that you think you’re better than other families.

And you know what? FUCK THAT NOISE.

My kid is really fucking smart. And that is a fact. Just like he has curly hair and a wicked sense of humor and brown eyes and runs really fucking fast. I’m not trying to make anyone else feel bad when I say that he knows how to tell time & understands the concept of fractions, and if you do perhaps you should look into fixing those feelings of inadequacy because they are categorically not my problem.

What is my problem is where my child attends school. The school he’s at has very low ratings, both objectively from the state and subjectively from school ranking sites. There are kids in his class now, at the end of Kindergarten, who do not know how to count to 100 or write upper and lower case letters. Even average kids are getting shafted in a situation like that. Kids like Boogermonkey are going to get bored. He’s already getting bored. His teacher says he’s “very chatty” and doesn’t sit still very well. Only 15 minutes a day of recess will get any kid antsy. Jeez, lady. I can’t fix that. Did I mention there hasn’t been a single parent-teacher conference all year and there has only been one field trip?

Lucky for Booger, and for kids like him, our school district has a public charter school for TAG kids and he’s enrolled for first grade. A girl from his class is going to be his classmate and we went to the meetup at the school today. Dudes. There is a vegetable garden next to the playground. There is a Lego Robotics club. The PTA goes to Salem to lobby for better school funding (hello, legal issue close to my heart).

I can’t fix every school. Every school should have a garden and longer recess time and extracurriculars and frequent field trips and all the awesome stuff his school in Eugene had and his new school in Portland has, too. I can’t really do anything about the other schools until I’m part of the PTA going to Salem & lobbying for improvements, but I can and will celebrate when this one thing goes right.