Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think we all have something that we use as a reference point for the state of your life. When I worked full time, it was the level of clutter on my desk.
Now that I’m home, it’s the griminess of my kitchen floor.
The more cat hair, dog hair, baby spit-up, orange juice splatter, dirt and various and sundry debris that covers the floor, the more frustrated and less in control I feel about life. Every time I walk into the kitchen, which is about 8 billion times a day because it’s at the center of my not-very-big house, I magnify its problem areas (like around the high chair or in front of the fridge) and magnify my own deficiencies as a mother and housewife.
When I showed it to Brad he said, “That’s not even a big one.”
I know what you’re going to say: Maybe I should consider cleaning the floor more often.
And therein lies the problem. My kitchen floor is this giant expanse (and it becomes even giant-er in my brain at the prospect of having to scrub it) and it takes at least a half hour to tackle with a scrub brush and sponge (a Swiffer-esque mop is simply not tough enough to tackle the caked on grossness) and I know a half hour doesn’t sound like much time, and I know, in reality, it is not that much time. But in my reality, when the girls rarely nap at the same time and the few minutes their sleep schedules do overlap has to be devoted to my freelancing duties, a half hour might as well be a day. (And you wonder why I don’t think I’m every going to finish my novel. This is why. The damn kitchen floor.)
Eventually, when the floor funk begins taunting me (which is when the sticky patches start growing fur) I cave and find some scrubbing time.
Last week, in order to clean the floor, I was forced to cash in some highly valued currency: “101 Dalmatians.”
Lily is obsessed with “Dalmatians! DALMATIANS! DALMATIANS!!!!” right now. So the other day when Jovie actually fell asleep in her crib, rather than attached to me in the sling, I ignored the guilt pangs of planting Lily in front of her precious dalmatians and succumbed to the guilt pangs of my kitchen floor.
And oh it was glorious. Gone were the splatters of regurgitated milk and pasta sauce, and muddy paw prints and cat phlegm (Bart the cat has snot-blob producing herpes which flares up when he is faced with stress. Things that cause Bart the cat stress include the two small children and one new cat we’ve acquired, meaning he’s been perpetually snotty for the past two years. Yes, it’s gross. But on the bright side, not contagious!)
The vet says he got it from his mom. That’s science.
Where was I? Oh right, a kitchen floor that doesn’t turn my feet brown when I walk on it? It was really lovely. And probably remained clean about as long as my little “My cat has herpes” aside.
And now, I’ve spent 40 minutes writing about the kitchen floor, which is longer than I’ve spent cleaning it in the past month and I didn’t even get to the point of this post, which was going to be about how much I hate how women are portrayed in “101 Dalmatians” and how I hoped to write better female characters to give a strong example for my daughters.
I think my brain needs to be scrubbed of this clutter. Self-righteous feminists rants will have to wait for another day. Off to bed.