Chapter Three-- page 2

A day or two after Glynis and her Kamikaze Cleaning Crew had stripped the scales from my eyes Holly came to see my house. She was as astonished as I was at the difference. While Holly never suffered from the same Pledge-commercial-Brady-Bunch-Barbie-plastic-turkey delusions that I did, she struggled with a messy apartment. Holly had been raised in a clean home, but she had not learned how to do housework when she was a kid. As a full time working single mother, Holly found herself battling messes and clutter just like I did. She marveled with me at the deep-down-cleanness of everything. Who knew that a drain board could be scrubbed with Ajax? We both thought that brown gooey stains on the dish drainer were inevitable. Like me, she never thought about whether or not toaster crumbs could actually be cleaned out of a utensil drawer. Both of us were smart enough to know that our homes did not look like others we had seen, but neither of us understood what needed to be done to gap the difference.

Somehow, in my mind, things looked good when they were new, and then, over time, they got dirty. I possessed some very rudimentary cleaning skills: I knew that a vacuum cleaner should be plugged into a wall, turned on and moved back and forth across a carpet. I knew that I was supposed to spray Pledge on furniture and wipe off the dust. I understood that, when all the drinking glasses were dirty, and I found myself getting a drink of water out of a wide mouth Mason jar, it was time to do the dishes. I did not understand, however, how to have a clean house.

My eyes were gradually opening to the possibility of a different way of life. When my girls were babies, I taught needlecraft classes and sold needlecraft kits and accessories at in-home parties. Once as I was passing around a beautifully framed needlepoint picture, a customer casually commented that she preferred to make her stitcheries into pillows because then she would not need to dust the frame on her wall. Dust the frame? Dust the frame? People dust frames on their walls? What a fascinating concept! I told Holly about it, and she said that she had never gotten the frame-dusting memo, either.

Chapter Three-- page 1

Chapter Three

Throughout those years I had two friends, Sue and Holly, who were allowed into my messy, confusing world. Both of them were busy single women who worked full time, hence my secret rendezvous with the Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer guy. I am not really sure what either of them thought of my poor housekeeping because neither of them seemed bothered any time I shoved a pile of laundry off the couch, so we could sit down for a visit.

Sue had been my college roommate. Along with another friend, Mary Jo, we shared a two bedroom, two story townhouse, which was located just a short hike across an abandoned graveyard from the university. Sue and I could not have been more different from one another. She was level-headed, studious, quiet and neat. I was none of the above. We ate a lot of Baskin Robbins, drank a lot of coffee, stayed up all night way too many times, sledded down the staircase on flattened cardboard boxes and forged a lifelong bond that still holds true to this very day. The fact that Sue loved me, and still loves me, is a testament to her longsuffering spirit. We shared the same bedroom: Her bed was neatly made with hospital corners on the sheets and topped with a color coordinated quilt and afghan. Mine was not. The clothes in her closet were hung neatly on hangers in separate sections. Mine were not. Her desk was neat, organized and equipped for actual use. Need I say this? Mine was crammed so full, and piled so high, that I usually pushed aside a pile of clothes and sat cross legged on my unmade bed to study. My messes, both organizationally and emotionally, did not bother her. She seemed not to notice the chaos that surrounded my existence when we were living together, nor did she give it a second look after I got married.

Holly is my oldest friend. I think we met for the first time when we were five. I do not know for sure when we first became friends, but I know we flew up in Brownies together because I have the Polaroid to prove it. In fourth grade we suffered through the same reading class, the intermediate reading group, with a crabby old teacher who spent her days rolling her dentures around with her tongue and pleading with God for retirement. We were too smart for the remedial group, but too busy daydreaming and talking in class to be placed in the top group. Holly and I always had that in common. We became best friends in junior high where we were seated in alphabetical order. Her name started with Mi and mine with Mo. Depending on whether we were seated A to Z or Z to A, the teacher was always looking at the back of one of our heads while we whispered and passed notes in class. We were Chemistry lab partners in high school, and worked together on the student creative writing magazine our senior year. Twiddlers and silly-hearts to the end, neither of us ever made first chair clarinet in band, or topped the honor roll, or got elected Homecoming Queen.

Chapter Two-- page 16

When our second little girl was born, the unthinkable happened. The Bible study ladies wanted to pamper me, to throw a baby shower for me, to bring me meals and to clean my house. It was their tradition: They did it for all the new mothers in the group. I had personally cooked meals and helped clean for some of them. Now it was my turn. I just could not let them see my house. During the week after I came home from the hospital, Dan ran interference for me. He picked up the meals from my friends on his way home from work to “save them the trouble” of driving all the way to our place. Luckily, they held the baby shower at another lady’s home. I put off the house cleaning visit for as long as I could. I told Glynis, “No, thank you.” I told her, “No need to trouble yourself.” I smiled sweetly, secretly clenched my fists, and said “Really, I’m fine. I don’t need any help.” My fingernails dug little bloody marks into the palms of my hands as I politely resisted and resisted. When the baby was about a month old I caved. Glynis and I set a date. I was supposed to take my two girls for a lovely outing, while she, Debi, and a couple of their helpful cleaning cohorts ravaged whatever dignity I had left.

The day before my friends were supposed to come clean my house, I worked harder than I had in my entire life. I picked up everything in the yard and pushed it away from the open shed door. I stuffed piles of magazines, toys, and craft projects into closets and under my bed. I washed all the dishes and pans and put them away in the cupboards. I made sure all our laundry was done and hung up in the closet. I vacuumed, swept and mopped. I stayed up well past midnight getting the house ready for the ladies to clean it.

When Glynis, Debi, Rachel and Donna showed up at my door the next morning I was showered and confident. I loaded the girls up in their double stroller and headed off to the park. I tried not to be nervous about what was possibly going on back home. The babies and I enjoyed a picnic lunch, visited the local library and headed home a couple of hours later.

When I walked in the door, I could not have been more shocked. The ladies were gone, and the house was CLEAN. I mean sparkling, shining, Pledge commercial CLEAN. The difference was so remarkable, I was dumbfounded. The kitchen sink was completely white. The edge of the linoleum around the bottom of the oven no longer had a greasy, crumb infested film around it. The drip trays on the stove were covered in fresh aluminum foil. The ladies had hung the curtain in the front window. The floor behind the toilet was no longer yellow. There were no toaster crumbs in the utensil drawer. The rubber dish drainer mat beside the kitchen sink looked like new. They had scrubbed off the slimy brown film with Ajax. Worst of all, the dish drainer was full of freshly washed baby bottles, nipples and rings. Up to that point, I had not known that baby bottle caps came apart into two pieces. Black slime grew between the rubber nipple and the plastic rings, and I had been giving my babies water out of those bottles! How could I have not noticed? I wanted to scream.

Something weird and new and wonderful and horrible happened inside my soul. I felt as though scales had fallen from my eyes, and I could see my life clearly. Ever since I was a teenager, I had been working at fitting stray puzzles pieces together, trying to build a picture that did not make any sense. My home, my dreams, my efforts ultimately looked nothing like the real me.

Chapter Two-- page 15

The ladies were all so nice to me. We went out to lunch together, and sometimes one of them would invite Dan and me over for supper. Their houses were clean, their lawns were manicured and their time seemed relaxed. Back at my house, the manager of the mobile home park was leaving threatening notices on my front door to clean up the mess in the yard.

Dan and I worked together to build a bigger shed. We needed the spare room and the crib because we had another baby on the way. As quickly as it was erected, it was filled up with stuff. In went the box of ironing, the pink taffeta covered cardboard dresser, the three gallon spaghetti pan and the piles of couponing and refunding junk. It all could have stayed reasonably contained, if only we had finished the project by adding a door. More space in the shed just meant more stuff. No door on the shed meant that our little mobile home lot looked like a perpetual flea market. The key word here is “flea.”

Somehow projects never got finished. The shed did not have a door. Our yard had a garden, but no lawn. I made curtains for our front window, but never hung them. Dan got a course and a half of brick laid for a planter, but ran out of mortar before the job was done. In December of that year, we took a wonderful drive up to the mountains with my family to cut a Christmas tree. We brought it home and left it out in the yard until the needles fell off sometime in March. It seemed that we never had enough time to finish a project before the next one came along. With my husband gone to work all day, another baby on the way, and an infant who split her time between sticking everything in her mouth and pooping her cloth diapers, I felt helpless. Even if I had the time to hang a door on the shed or put up the Christmas tree, I totally lacked the skill.

Now as a full-fledged adult I was right back to where I had been on my eleventh birthday: My house looked like crap, and I did not understand why. Nobody else in my circle of friends had homes that looked like mine. I felt different, and somehow wrong. I tried to keep a positive attitude. I worked harder and longer every day. I went to Bible study every Wednesday and smiled. My struggles were my secret. I was sure that if any of those Bible study ladies ever found out what a mess my house was, I would be back to calling the Adolph’s recipe hotline.

Chapter Two-- page 14

My messy home kept me isolated. Any time someone came to the house, I would push back the overflowing debris and stick my face out a crack in the door. We were active in our local church, but obviously we could not invite any other young couples over to dinner. I was very lonely. My refunding newsletter listed an Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer 800 number which featured a recording of a new recipe daily. Home alone with a only a nursing baby for company, I secretly called it three or four times a day, just to hear an adult voice on the other end of the line. A woman from church kept bugging me to go to Wednesday morning ladies’ Bible study with her, but I felt trapped by my own failure. If I could not keep the house clean with the time I had available to me, how could I spare two hours away from home every week? I told her that I could not go because I had too much housework to do. She promised that she would come help me, if I went with her. There was no way that I was going to let her even see my house, let alone clean it! I agreed to go with her, just so she would leave me alone.

The ladies at Bible study seemed to have it all together, especially Glynis, the assistant pastor’s wife. She lived in the parsonage next door to the church with a tie-wearing husband and one very tidy child. Everything in her house was white, and she organized her spices in alphabetical order. I once asked her casually how she kept her house so neat even with a small child at home. She told me that, unless her daughter was in eminent danger, Glynis made her wait until she was completely done with her housework before she allowed the little girl to interrupt. Another lady, Debi, had three children, the youngest of whom was the same age as my baby girl. Her house was immaculate. She was also exceptionally stylish and good looking, but Debi said that she did not breastfeed because she could not bear to sit still and to hold the baby that long. Another lady, who sat beside me every week, lived her life out of a day planner. I had never even heard of a day planner before, but this gal could flip a few pages and tell you where she was going to be in six months and how much she spent on gifts last Christmas. Even though we shared the same faith, I felt like I had almost nothing in common with these people. Nonetheless, they were better than the Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer recording.

Chapter Two-- page 13

Setting my mind against the inevitable disillusionment that followed took every ounce of my energy. I was happy at home. “Happy!” I say, “Happy!” What I was unhappy about was finding that, at the very core of my being, I was not the woman whom I had dreamed that I would be.

My mind had deluded me into believing that I was the Pledge commercial lady, but my soul was kind of a leftover hippy. I planted the biggest garden that I could in our little rented mobile home space amongst the debris that trailed out from the lean-to. I breastfed the baby full time, and I used only cloth diapers. My mind and my soul were in a constant battle: My life did not look like I had imagined it would, but I could not change who I really was deep inside just to please my imagination. I could not bear the thought of strapping artificial paper and plastic diapers on my baby and suffocating her sweet little bum. She wanted to be held and nursed constantly. Feeding her a bottle of artificially produced soy formula would have been nothing short of betrayal. I felt the same way about prepackaged food for Dan and me. I cooked fresh from my garden as much as I could and determined to spend as little as possible at the grocery store.

I started reading books on how to live on less. I clipped coupons and signed up for a newsletter that kept me up to date with the latest manufacturers’ rebates. I had seen people on television who used “couponing and refunding” to buy $500 worth of groceries for $4.32. The trick to doing this, however, is to keep every package, bag and wrapper from every product that you buy, to ask all your friends and neighbors to give you theirs and to dumpster dive for the rest. The baby was sleeping with us, so I used her crib to hold my refunding stash.

I really wanted to have a shiny clean house, but my time was consumed with nursing the baby, loading her up in the stroller with the diaper pail balanced on the back, and walking to the Laundromat every day. In my spare time, I went dumpster diving for cereal boxes and green bean labels. I worked in the garden and cooked nutritious soups. I even tried to clean the house. I hustled and hustled, but nothing ever seemed to look right. Sometimes I would still be vacuuming when Dan came home from work at 4:00 p.m. I left pans soaking on the back of the stove and cried myself to sleep every night.

Chapter Two-- page 12

Those very early days of our marriage were a blur of lovemaking, fighting, working, lovemaking, sleeping late, eating out at restaurants, watching movies, visiting friends, dumpster diving, going to church and lovemaking. Doing housework? Not so much.

Both of us were disorganized and messy before we were married, but together we created a catastrophic chemical reaction. Our stuff seemed to multiply faster than two jackrabbits on their third date. Dan built a little open-air lean-to behind our home to hold our belongings. Whenever we needed to get something out of storage we would have to pull out a dozen other things. Usually we were too busy fighting, working, and lovemaking to put things back where they belonged. Much of the time, stuff was left strewn in the yard.

Added to our mess was our miserable compulsive tardiness. Right around the time we were supposed to arrive for a movie, a birthday party, or an appointment we were just finishing up fighting, sleeping or lovemaking. We were habitually half an hour, or more, late to everything. Our friends and family started telling us that every event started an hour sooner than it did. Silly them. We quickly got wise to their tricks and showed up even later. We were blithely in love and uncaring about anyone but ourselves.

The spare bedroom did not stay spare very long. Our first baby was born nine months and an hour and a half after our wedding. (I like to tell people that we had a great wedding reception!) I quit work to stay home with her. I had finally achieved the greatest goal of my life: I got to be a real stay-at-home housewife and mother! I was going to be the Pledge Commercial Lady; Dan would be like Ward Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. He was going to come home from the office and sit on the couch in his tie and sweater vest smoking a pipe. Our child would sit neatly in her high chair eating strained peas and smiling. All this would magically happen because I willed it so.