My dad smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. Ashtrays were filled with squashed butts, walls were yellowed and everything smelled like smoke. Newspapers were kept in stacks for months, not because we recycled, but because they might serve some purpose in the future. He did the same with anything and everything plastic. Margarine containers, soda bottles, even bread bags were rinsed and tucked away in nooks and crannies of our kitchen in case they could be used again. Growing up during the Depression made it hard for my dad to throw anything away. He tempered his anxiety about the next big crash with nicotine, an addiction cultivated in an era when cigarettes were as ubiquitous as smart phones are today. The circumstances of his youth shaped his lifestyle, and that in turn defined a lot of my childhood.
I had it a lot better than he did, mind you, but even when I was little, I knew our house was different than those of my friends. It was not just because he was ten or fifteen years older than the other dads, or that he worked nights and thus slept all day, or that he had a short temper and cursed a lot, especially when noisy kids disrupted his sleep, or that he monitored multiple ball games simultaneously on the television and a transistor radio while watching Benny Hill and other things that would embarrass me and my sister. All of those idiosyncrasies added to the differentness of my house, but the constant clutter and haze of smoke were the most obvious and overwhelming to anyone who visited. To me it was home, but when friends would come over, I could see their discomfort, and I worried how that would make them feel about me.
Now that I have my own house, I am constantly, though usually unconsciously, battling my dad’s legacy. I get anxious if the newspaper recycling box gets too full. I compulsively clear countertops of mugs and glasses before people are done with them. I burn candles and spray disinfectants at the slightest hint of a foul odor. I have parental controls on the televisions so people need a special code to watch Benny Hill or other inappropriate things. But as much as I fight the clutter bug, I still have plenty of my dad in me. I store away useless objects that I think my kid might use for a craft project someday. I keep toys too long and I can’t throw away any book, no matter how tattered and torn the pages become. My house is full of crap (some of it still his, more than ten years after his passing) that is hidden away in baskets, cupboards and closets. I live in fear of people opening the wrong door or drawer to discover the packrat I try to hide.
When my husband announced that he wanted to have a few friends from work over for a barbeque, the crazy in me kicked into full gear. We had gotten pretty slack about yard and housework, so I had six months of leaf blowing and mulching and dusting and cleaning to do in just a matter of weeks. Of course, I didn’t really have to do any of that. Nobody really cares about other people’s dust-bunnies. But I felt compelled to go to work.
For two weeks, I alternated between my leaf blower, shop vac, mop and hose, harnessing the power of wind and water to clear away dust and dirt and grime that accumulate quick when you live in the woods. I won’t even mention the complications of living with a 15-year-old hound dog. After I scrubbed the rugs, I started to attack the stinkbugs.
If you don’t have these nasty creatures, be thankful. If you do, you know that these imports from China live and breed in all the hard-to-reach places in our mid-Atlantic homes. I found their crisp, hollow shells everywhere. The alien-like carcasses were Nature’s way of telling me that I really do need to clean out my baskets of crap. The occasional live-catch would spray its moldy cilantro musk, reminding me how they earned their name. The more I looked, the more I found. I became obsessed with ridding my home of any evidence of their invasion. In the process, I became aware of many other disgusting things lurking in the corners of my house. I hauled the shop vac into every room, searching behind curtains and under cushions, inside vases and under books. I found bugs now and again, but I also found other signs of wildlife that should not be indoors, not to mention my kid’s crumbs and wrappers and such.
I knew I was a complete freak when I started vacuuming a stack of firewood. I had brought some wood into the basement before the last ice storm of the season, just in case we lost power. Three months later, the wood was right where I’d left it, covered with dirt and dead bugs. I vacuumed the wood and restacked it neatly, acutely aware of my very special kind of intermittent O.C.D. You see I am the Jekyll-and-Hyde of housekeeping. I am a complete slob until I think others might find out how I really live. In those manic phases of party prep, I purge and toss and wash and polish until my house looks like how I think other people live. Of course, you can’t really hide your true nature, so, vacuumed wood or not, my house will never look like I think those other people’s houses do.
To make things more difficult, I live in the woods, and that means we have a lot of leaves to deal with. Because there is only so much leaf blowing you can do before your teeth shatter from the vibration, we focus the areas we use all the time and let the rest go au naturale. My kid is almost 11, so I hadn’t bothered with the swing set area yet and probably would have let it go all summer. But with younger kids from the suburbs coming over, I felt I had to ready it for tiny tots who were not accustomed to sharing their play space with hairy spiders and biting ants.
Much like the stinkbug hunt had uncovered embarrassing lapses in housekeeping, clearing the playground revealed countless new horrors that I hadn’t anticipated. In pulling up weeds, I found anthills, right at the base of the slide. In knocking down spider webs, I found bees nests, hidden on the underside of the baby swing. In blowing leaves, I found tiny snakes writhing around another pile of wood – this one was thankfully outside the house. And I wondered why my daughter didn’t use her swing set more often.
When I realized the massive job at hand, I broke out the heavy equipment. First, I used the industrial leaf blower to blast away anything and everything that moved. Then, I sprayed toxic chemicals to kill weeds and bugs and hopefully snakes. After which I hosed and scrubbed every surface that a child could potentially touch, so as to not poison them too. Finally, I covered the area with a thick bed of mulch. I stood back and admired the newly pristine and safe play environment.
I was proud of my work until I realized that I hadn’t done any of this for my own child. I knew that my real motivation was fear of other people’s children being traumatized playing in my back yard. I didn’t want the differentness of my house in the woods to feel uncomfortable for visitors they way my smoky, newspaper-filled house had when I was a kid. I was trying to make our old house in the woods more like the clean new houses in the suburbs, just like I had wished my old dad with his cigarettes and dusty jazz records could be more like the younger dads who ate granola bars and listened to the Rolling Stones.
But, my dad didn’t listen to the Rolling Stones and I don’t live in the suburbs. I live in the woods. Out here, we have bugs and snakes and spiders. We also have tadpoles and butterflies and ten thousand shades of green. The dappled light coming through the leaves at dusk exaggerates the colors blooming in our garden beds, and, the birds, frogs and crickets create an ever-changing symphony that you can’t hear anywhere else.
Differentness, while sometimes uncomfortable, is not always bad. Sometimes, it is beautiful. And sometimes, when it is covered in dust or filled with stinkbugs, it is just who you are, and that means it’s time to break out the shop vac.
Confessions of a Target Mom 