Confession: I Like My Home When My Messy Family Isn't In It

Most parents bemoan their inability to unglue themselves from their smartphones. I am pretty sure my children will remember me stalking the house with my fist clenched around a canister of Clorox wipes. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the good old days, when the only person I had to clean up after was Yours Truly. So on the occasions when my husband is away, it is actually nice to have one less human to play maid to. In fact, some of my happiest moments in life are when my husband is away and my kids are asleep, and I am in my apartment by my own goddamn self with no one to mess anything up.

I have little tolerance for the things that take up space in my house that I don’t find worthy. In my view, this is basically anything that does not serve a purpose to, well, me. “Why do we need this thing again?” I’ll ask, pointing to my husband’s electric water pick, which (he reminds me) he uses every night. “Are you sure you want to keep this?” I’ll say, holding his high school yearbook over the recycling bin. I’m way too quick on the draw when it comes to throwing important things out – everyone’s things – and it gets me in trouble, especially come tax season. I have, however, been generous enough to allot my husband a small cubby in our shared closet, where he can keep whatever he pleases without the threat of losing it to the trash bin.

To be fair, my husband is in no way a slob. He cleans as he cooks dinner – as the best chefs do. With the exception of the “shoe garden” that grows by our door over the course of the week, and an occasional unopened amazon.com box – I have it pretty good. But that would be if I were a normal person. 

I am not a normal person. I imagine most people can move on with their lives if some folded socks haven’t been put away after a day. Not me. Even if I’m dead tired, and it’s past midnight and I know I’ll be up at sunrise, I’ll put away all the laundry, risking waking my kids to get it done. The standard of clean to which I hold my home is “Listed Apartment On The Market Ready To Be Shown By Realtor”, at all times.

The standard of clean to which I hold my home is “Listed Apartment On The Market Ready To Be Shown By Realtor”, at all times.

Long, long before I had children, I had imagined I’d have the kind of home where creativity would thrive – where there would be art stations organized by medium, musical instruments, a mini dance studio and all manner of imaginative spaces to inspire young minds. I had a space like this in our finished suburban basement when I was a kid. I figured I’d find a way to recreate my childhood “basement haven” on a small scale for my own children, when I eventually had them. 

But after seeing how much effort it takes to clean up after three humans (plus one dog), I realized that the dream of a creative oasis would have to go live in some other home, presided over by some other, more loving, more patient mother. I needed my apartment to be largely under my jurisdiction. These other people living with me? They would just have to fit into the corners and cubbies I’d assigned to them.

When people enter our apartment, they often tell me it doesn’t look like children live there – which is either the highest compliment or a deep dig at my mothering habits. Children’s artwork is strictly limited to one corner of the house – behind the front door – so you can’t see it when you first enter our place. I’ve written extensive lists to our babysitters so that they understand which bins are for what toys, and how – under no circumstances, should anything belonging to a child be left in the living room by the end of the day. 

When I’m home, “playing” with the kids, I perch on the floor, darting my eyes around the room, bird-like, for signs of toys that could be put away. “You’re done with these paints, right?” I’ll say, when my three-year-old has merely left to grab himself a juice box.  It’s a skill I believe I picked up from my own mother, who, halfway through any meal, would spray Windex around the perimeter of our plates to signal that she was ready to get the kitchen back in order. 

When people enter our apartment, they often tell me it doesn’t look like children live there – which is either the highest compliment or a deep dig at my mothering habits.

My husband has this thing he does when he comes home from work, where he pulls out one of the chairs from the table so he can take off his work shoes. Which I guess is fine, except, for some unexplained reason he does not push the chair back in. Ever. On nights when my husband is away, I like to admire my dining room chairs because that’s the only time when the chairs stay where I’ve put them, like good little soldiers.

The downsides to him being gone: There’s only one of us to handle our older son’s night terrors, and what will I do when he calls for “Dad” but Dad isn’t there? Who’s going to go into the spooky, dark living room in the middle of the night when the dog starts barking for a new toy to chew on? Or worse – who will comfort me when the dog does that creepy dog thing and barks at the corner of my room by my night table and nothing is there? Then there’s the simple fact that I find it hard to fall asleep without the weight of my husband’s body near mine. I know I’m imagining it, but sleeping without him on the other side of the bed feels like being on a seesaw alone.

Does it sound heartless to be happy when your other half is gone? Probably, but that’s only if you don’t know the full story. My husband is grateful that at least I have one reason to be happy when he is gone and that I’m not resenting him the whole time I’m left to fend on my own with our kids. The kids learned early on not to act like frat boys and trash the house, and they also know not to come between Mom and her broom when I get a certain look in my eye. And no, they’ll never have that imagination-capturing art station or dress up nook. But they’ll always be able to find their toys, organized by type (and disinfected regularly), and floors they can eat off of. And whenever they smell Clorox, they’ll feel warm and fuzzy inside, and think of me.

Originally published here. 

When Self-Care Is Not The Answer

It’s hard to read any women-marketed websites without seeing the words, “self-care” sprinkled across multiple headlines and advertising, or crammed among social media hashtags. You often see these two words in ads and articles featuring images of  toned, slim, (usually white) women, mid-yoga-pose; or a perfectly staged cup of tea next to an expensive looking candle. Today’s industry of self-care seems to have led to a near cult-like belief that the act of engaging in it will relieve us of any physical, emotional, or spiritual pains. But what happens when self-care isn’t the miracle cure-all, but in fact, is damaging to our health? What if, as I recently experienced, trying to practice self-care makes us feel worse than before?

I’d undergone what should have been a straightforward surgery, that resulted in some major medical complications requiring a couple weeks of recovery. The recovery entailed a lot of laying low, very limited physical activity, lots of popping painkillers, and a lot of sleeping. “Pamper yourself,” the ER recovery nurse had said, as I was sent on my way home. “Do whatever it takes to feel good, OK?” All I could think about was the opportunity I’d have to catch up on the six years of sleep I’d lost since having kids. As a working mother of two very “spirited” boys, the idea of resting and sitting on my ass for a week or two sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

When loved ones called to check on me, I’d trot out all the gory details that led me to the operating table twice in an 8-hour-period (fun!), and tell them about the pain I was currently experiencing from the surgery site itself. Then I’d get to what was really hurting me — on a more emotional level: Feeling guilty about not being able to play with my kids while I was recovering, and feeling guilty for not being able to work. To this, people would almost all say, “But you just had surgery! You should be taking care of yourself!” And then that would often be followed by orders to, “Rest! Pamper! Practice self-care!”

I decided to give in and take their advice, plus that of literally every health and beauty Influencer on the ‘Gram. Because what better time to do all those ubiquitously listed self-care type things than when you’re stuck inside, unable to care for your own children, and unable to work? In the first week that I could barely move without wincing in pain, I tried to busy myself in a never-ending loop of lovely-sounding activities: napping, spending time with my dog, trying a variety of face masks, binging on magazines, watching daytime TV, and dipping my toes in meditation apps.

As a working mother of two very “spirited” boys, the idea of resting and sitting on my ass for a week or two sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

As my many days of recovery wore on, and trips to the doctor multiplied, my mood worsened. Things weren’t healing as they should have been, and every procedure I endured at my doctor’s visits felt like the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, until the next procedure would top that one. It seemed that no matter what I did, my body was rebelling against me.

I still was not able to fully participate in the everyday care of my boys. I couldn’t pick them up from school, or take them to any classes, I couldn’t rough house, I couldn’t do their bath-time. The painkillers I was on made it near-impossible to concentrate on work long enough to produce anything meaningful. (In an act of self-care, I wrote to all my editors and pushed my deadlines out.) I’d wake from a Percocet-induced nap to the joyful sounds of my kids coming home from school, and see that somehow it was already dark outside – a marker of the day I’d spent selfishly succumbing to and caring for a body that seemed to refuse to heal. Still, I remained hopeful that meditation and aggressive use of Matcha tea (the most “self caring” of teas, in my opinion) would get me through the doldrums I was feeling.

I felt like I was losing my “self” in all that self-care. I wasn’t a mom. I wasn’t a professional writer. I was a bandaged, patchwork, couch potato in a twelve-dollar facemask and I was depressed. “Screw self-care,” I remember thinking to myself. “I just want to get back to my goddamn regular life.“ And as fun as it had sounded in theory to spend most of my day taking care of my body and having the opportunity for quiet and an excuse to not have to go anywhere or take care of anyone, I did not want any of it. I decided that, in the end, self-care just wasn’t for me. And for a long while, I carried around the idea that I wasn’t “the self-care type”. Even the two words themselves made me roll my eyes whenever I heard or read them.

I would have been better served to practice accepting where I was in life at that moment in time – and that place was “recovery”. 

What I realize now, many months later, is that there actually can be room for self-care in my life, if I change how I look at and define it. Self-care can have a far wider-ranging definition than a lot of the “lady” sites (whose tones are largely influenced by the way products and brands market to women) typically attribute to it. Self-care can mean pampering, meditation, yoga, or coffee-dates with girlfriends, sure. But it can also be defined as doing whatever the hell you need to do so you feel like the best version of YOU, and in order to feel good and whole.

When I was going through recovery from my surgery, the self-care that may have worked better for me probably would have been to work on accepting that life was out of my control at that time. Despite my desire to be a “Mother” and “Professional”, I simply could not embody either of those roles while I was trying to heal. The pampering and indulging types of self-care I was engaging in were escapist at best, and frustrated me every time I came back to reality. I would have been better served to practice accepting where I was in life at that moment in time – and that place was “recovery”.  

If I had really been able to have been kind and generous to myself during that period, I would have allowed myself to see that being unable to participate in my life in my usual ways did not make me less of a mother or less of a writer. To have given myself permission to hold onto my identity – to have freed myself of all that guilt during that time– now that would have been the ultimate act of self-care.

Originally published here.