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The State of My House

You should see my house this morning. I was going to take pictures but then thought better of it. I should wait until after the hurricane hits and then blame it on that. Hey, maybe if I leave the windows open tonight the wind might actually sweep everything off to one side. It could not make it worse.

I am desperately trying to find the punchline in piles of clean laundry, toys, game pieces, books, magazines, assorted scraps of paper, grocery store flyers, broken bouncy chairs, empty boxes and all manner of stray shoes strewn across my main floor. I would just put it all away except the playroom has every single bin and basket overturned, toys a mangled pile in the centre of the room, and it’s a full day’s job just to organize it all. Ha ha ha. Is that the punch line?

Or is it in the dirty clothes on my bedroom floor that I can’t even reach to put in the hamper because of the mother effing ceiling fan in a box in the middle of the room. Will we install it? Won’t we? I don’t know! I’m paralyzed right now by all of these decisions. I desperately want to clean out the junk and get organized. I want to streamline. But with every hour spent sorting through a box in the closet, there’s an hour the rest of my house is being torn apart by rabid badgers. (I can only assume, since I raised my children to be blessed little angels who would never, under any circumstance, open up five to ten board games and scatter all the pieces and cards and money and dice everywhere.)

No, no. The punch line is the state of my pantry and fridge, so disheveled and overflowing with a small museum’s worth of moldy specimens in tupperware that I can barely even find space to put away fresh groceries. I mean, it’s no problem to just clean the fridge and organize the pantry except then when do I find time to actually cook the meals? And how do we clear off the table to eat if somebody doesn’t just pile all the crap onto the buffet? And then how am I supposed to find the god damned school library book when we’re rushing out the door in the morning?!

Ah, such belly laughs.

Okay, I need to get my girls and feed them lunch. Then I really should do some paid work while Mary is napping, but I think we can all agree that my sanity is hanging in the balance here. So I think I’ll spend the rest of the day cleaning.

By Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

Rebecca Cuneo Keenan is a writer who lives in Toronto with her husband and three children.

One reply on “The State of My House”

I’ve asked my husband to pick up some live badger traps on his way home. I could never figure out how it happened at my house either…much thanks for solving the mystery. ;)

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