“Holymessaphobia” and other homemaker disorders.

Since you have last heard from me my to do list grew, exponentially, voluntarily, and frankly exhausting!  I have also added a non voluntary to do called “dealing with the worst spring allergies I have ever experienced” which takes up way more time than I can spare.  Grant it the voluntary to dos are a lot of fun: the community theater play, wearable art show, and a walk/run for cancer in memory of a dear member of our community!  My house is suffering the consequences!  So why can’t I take my own advice and weed my to do list?

I believe it is “todomanicism”, a understudied disorder of the chronic volunteer and underemployed mothers that also suffer from “domusphobisplasia” (the avoidance disorder that causes women to volunteer to be away from the reminder that they need to do the dishes from yesterday still because they have perpetuated a cycle of to little time in the day) a very difficult disorder to dig out of.

On top of all this, it has been unseasonably nice out and I have been easily sidetracked in the ‘spare’ time I have to play outside, fish, and garden. Build a ‘greenhouse’, install address signs for the volunteer fire department… You get the picture.  I am getting buried by the home I am supposed to be cultivating, yet again!  Am I alone?  My dearest friends also suffer from the same disorders, one of them somehow manages to get her home neated up daily but she claims that is made possible by ‘holymessaphobia’.  Something else I find that we also suffer from is the procrastinated shower which makes us fresh and nice smelling in the afternoon and evening, having to ‘wash the mom off’ before our evening adult contacts, giving the illusion that we are fresh and rested when in fact we are frackin exhausted!

Add on to this the list of concerns and worries with no solution in sight pingponging back and forth in my overwhelmed brain and voila!  I have “brainfartstotia”, the side affect of all above disorders. So my dear contacts in the world around me, I apologize for forgetting about the details of your lives as I can’t seem to keep track of mine. That being said I am very proud of the fact that I have not forgotten my csa fruit/veggie box pickup for 4 weeks straight!  So proud of myself! Not to mention my potatoes are planted and I have that one haven in the yard that is winter waste free.

On top of my ‘brainfartstotia’ my daughter also suffers and told me an hour before her school music program that she needed a white shirt (never to be found in my house as the quickly become destroyed since I am just not a white shirt capable person) a black skirt and black tights, also not in the home as my daughter is a bit rough and tumble with the outdoors.  Solution?  The shopping options are limited here to basic mercantile supplies so the white shirt and black tights were a quick fix.  The skirt?  Well I happened to have a lace and satin tutu type skirt with an elastic waist that came with another, uh, item that I purchased for myself, eh hmm.  Worked like a charm and appeared totally appropriate on my ten year old sweety pie whom I will tell her at her bridal shower someday what that skirt was supposed to be for.  I can hear the laughter now.

Thinking outside the box at the last moment seems to work for me, I just wish I didn’t have so many of those moments in my life! I also wish I could take my own advice!  Every time I make a resolution and I am just starting to really get going with it some disaster derails me and sends me off course and finding my way back through the piles of to dos is daunting at best.  It seems so easy to walk outside and play in the dirt, a gardeners way of putting her head in the sand that eventually bears edible fruit.  If only the laundry and dishes weren’t the most productive growers around here!

Weed your to do list. Include sun in the daily forecast.

The sun warmed my face as I woke up this lovely Sunday morning. I stretched as I opened my eyes to find I had been joined on the bed by the little lab as she cheerfully implored with happy eyes and wagging tail if we were going to get up and have fun. My dear one softly snoring away having been called into work at 2 am and returning home sometime just before the sun fully rose.  I dose in and out enjoying this rare quiet Sunday luxury and garden in my head.

Each day I impatiently await total thaw.  The birds are singing now each morning and the sun has that extra touch of warmth and each day the sun is up longer and longer.  I am not patient.  I daydream of some sort of magical power to zap my house clean and warm the soil so I can garden my days away.  My list of daily activities contains to many undesirable duties.  I pout.

But today is Sunday and it is a day of rest, so the house is a mess?  Who cares, no one is coming over, I can do whatever I want.  I think I shall gather seaweed by the seashore for my garden and build some planters and plant potatoes, sunchokes, and peas.  The dogs will love it, and so will I.  Sometimes you need a day with no undesirable duties.  Monday is always a good day for those.

The soul’s sun is doing those things that bring you a deep warmth and pleasure, if you look at a new plant growing, maturing, and finally bearing fruit you will see that it requires 75% sun and 25% rest to really grow.  Now if you only ‘sun’ your soul a little bit, on occasion, I don’t think it can grow much less bear fruit.  To truly garden your home you must sun your soul, who wants to be in a home with a bunch of dried up shriveled souls!  Strive each day then to meditate, find peace, create, spread love, do a kindness, witness a moment of beauty and focus it in on your soul.  Weed out those undesirables to just the required, we all have responsibilities in our life that have to be maintained. But who said we need to torment ourselves with perceived requirements?  If it is a burden and not a true you need to do it for responsibility reasons, then don’t obligate yourself to those extras in life.  While I enjoy physical labor and pounding sign posts in the ground so the fire department can find the address faster another person might enjoy hosting bingo.  I might enjoy helping in the community garden while another person finds pleasure in throwing a bake sale for Head Start.

Find your joyful strengths and lend a helping hand with things that feed your soul, not things that drain it.  We don’t need to be martyrs to do a good thing.  One thing I have noticed about martyrs:  they are a pain to be around, not edifying, uplifting, or joyful! I find them down, drained and draining, shriveled up and dry!  I have been one!  Why?!  They are now worthless to themselves and their homes.  They have nothing left to give, so cut out those extras if they don’t edify your soul! Each day let the sun warm your face at some point, and grow well.

If a garden isn’t just in your yard, but your home…

It might be that the world is your garden too!  We had put some crab pots out almost two weeks ago and I was really hankering to pull ’em before… well before it was pointless.  So my stubborn self picked up the kids at 3:30 from school (I was going to go before they got out of school but you can bring more crab home with more people in the boat) ran us all home, hooked up the boat trailer to the Jeep… which died.  I swear I asked the mechanic to change the oil when he fixed my brakes… Put some oil in the Jeep and had the boat with children inserted in the water by 4:00!  Feeling proud of myself.

I have never pulled one of these pots before.  These particular pots are commercial pots, ie: intended to be hauled with mechanized device, not bare hands.  No problem!  My daughter takes the till and off we go, wind in our face happy smiles, excitement mounting, and guesses to how many Tanner crab are in the pots.

I am optimistic, I have a girl trick a girlfriend set me up with yesterday, I got this.  The trick is not slick, not sure it’s a trick. First pot is not in good shape, was that me or some other force?  I am going with other force, my boyfriend assures me it was ‘other force’.  Nonetheless, messed up pot = no crab, well and that took 30 minutes, yay.   The second pot I decided to lift with pure girl power, no tricks, no gimmicks. Okay I used my brain a little since it was clear that pure brawn was not an option for me.  An hour later and I have re-baited the pot and have 4 Tanner crab on board. Disappointing? Nope.  Perfect. I left the third pot where it was, we can deal with that on Saturday.

Tanner Crab harvested on our last outing... I was too tired to take pictures of the ones we got today.

Point?  We had fresh from the sea crab 20 minutes after it left the water steaming on the deck in the crab cooker.  Fresh, sweet and nutrient rich.  A product of my suburban farm that happens to be on the edge of a rich wilderness full of harvests for my table.  More effort than I would have liked? Maybe, but worth it today. Tomorrow I am going to shop for lighter crab pots, or a davit, or both.

A New Type of Gardening for Me

Spring days just seem to sum up life. A spot of sun, a dash of rain, a dusting of snow, a moments warmth, followed by a gust of wind moving the day through rotations of drab and light.  Having planted the seeds for my spring crops in their neat little pods on the coffee table by the sliding glass doors and replenished Harebelle the rabbit’s supply of alfalfa I think of what I need to accomplish on this sum it up kind of day.  Unfortunately I have gotten all the fun tasks out of the way and have the overwhelmingly tedious jobs of a housekeeper left to do.  Inside me screams, “I AM NOT A HOUSEKEEPER!” the frustration of not being able to find the work for which I trained and the lack of self worth at my slob looking home while I ‘sit’ at home being unproductive and unemployed.

I tell myself I am a valuable member of this household and smirk at myself, then I tell the dogs so I feel like I am not having a conversation with myself as their three sets of ears perk , heads tilt, and their loving eyes tell me they want me to do something interesting.  They’re bored, I am bored, and we all want to be out in the sun enjoying a hike to… well the ‘to’ doesn’t matter, really it’s just the going.  I feel guilty for letting the weather hold me hostage, for my house holding me in an antisocial funk of winter gunk and blah.  I resolve, it seems, each day that tomorrow will be more productive and that I will become this awesome Proverbs 31 housekeeper woman, and each day I don’t.  Well today I am trying something new.  Not a new way to do it, but a new attitude.

I am going to garden my house clean, if ‘it’ doesn’t help me or another household member grow, spiritually, emotionally, or physically, then ‘it’ has to go.  I am going to weed my house and ‘plant flowers’!  You see I love gardening, weeding, mowing- those are chores I have no problem doing, in fact I will pretend those chores are higher on the list than they should be because they are outside! So just like my garden, I am going to work in one spot at a time and today I am going to weed the bathroom, then when I am done I am going to put something that actually does grow (that I want to grow) in there to make me want to be in there.  There are some challenges to growing a plant in my bathroom that I can tackle once the bathroom is ‘weeded’ and that is all the reward I need.  Tomorrow it will be a new challenge!

If you have any fun, challenging, insightful ideas as to what I should plant in the bathroom… let me know!!