Just Chute Me

There are many things I believe would make my life perfect. But I’ve narrowed it down for the Genie in the Lamp. It’s not winning the lottery. It’s not a a lifetime of Saturday spa days. It’s not even a husband who will say, “can we just spend a few hours talking about our feelings?” I’m not greedy. I just want a laundry chute. This simple invention would make my life breathtakingly better. I’ll even happily wash the clothes at the end of the tunnel. But if I had a hole in the wall into which I could toss any and every dirty item, and those with the suspicious whiff of ‘is it or isn’t it’, I am certain my life would be instantly improved. Imagine the time I’d save frantically finding ample spaces to shove above mentioned items into (beds, closets, behind couches) when the doorbell rings 8 minutes early. (Dear wonderful-in-all-regards preschool teacher, you may not know that at this stage in my life I use every second of every minute before any appointment. Thank you for pretending to not notice the rivulets of barely washed out shampoo cascading down my neck.) Who wouldn’t love a hole we could toss all our dirty smelly things into? And just like they say - when you want one thing, you want another. So I’d like a trash chute too. For the diapers. Bless the ambitious hearts of the vanilla scented garbage bag inventors - but you did not focus group my 7 month old’s re-pureed banana filled diaper. We’re all in this together - this ‘mothering of the young’ thing. When it gets down and dirty, we often offer each other words of support and the occasional tawdry e-card to help each other get through the day. We cheerfully raise our glass to the friend sending a text asking if it’s ok to drink a glass of wine at 3:41 pm, and then luxuriate in the mutually beneficial permission to pour our own. It’s popularly called solidarity. I call it clinging to sanity with like minded friends. In this world of self-help books that tell us how to achieve the perfect life - our real friends are the ones who laugh with us at the absurdity of the volume of these books. If any of them worked, there would be just one.

Despite differing details, I have a suspicion we all started out a little bit the same. Underneath the piles of clothes, toys, lost to-do lists, unidentifiable things, is buried a girl we used to know. She used to: -not understand the importance of sunscreen, but fully understood the importance of being tan -dream about doing things she never imagined would stay just a dream -picture a large oak tree, a blanket, a baby in lace (No bib. What’s spit up?), a book she could lazily finish -wish she was a grown up So she does grow up, and now, she is: -a coat hangar -a sous chef, master chef, food purveyor, dishwasher, janitor. At once. -(thus) food splattered in social settings - a butt wiper. Literally. We are butt wipers. -the person who shops in the Michael’s craft section for kid's projects and helplessly leaves with nothing (no? just me?) -the mom who forgets the snack. for the WHOLE class. -(and later that month) the mom who tries to pick up her child at the wrong school on the wrong day -(and at the beginning of the next month) the mom who frantically urges her son to ‘write write!’ his very first homework assignment ever while on the way to school because she forgot to check his school folder the night before (these are all just hypothetical) She wants to be: -someone that consistently wakes up early to get ahead of the madness -the girl who met the guy and stays starry eyed forever (versus the girl who tells the guy STOP SLURPING YOUR CEREAL I CAN HEAR YOU FROM UPSTAIRS) -the mom who never forgets school dress up day/show and tell/library day/what day in general it ever is -who she “thought” she’d be We’re not who we used to be, we're not who we thought we were going to be. We’re just, well, who we are. And so we try to fix THAT horrible thing. Countless times a day we tell ourselves we’re failing, we don’t have it all together, we look horrible, we screwed up, again. We are just so rumpled up and messy. We think we’d be better off jumping headlong down the chute ourselves, removed from sight. But. Sometimes. We get 10 things done in one hour. We look pretty good today. We’re on time. We have a truly wonderful brilliant idea, and then accomplish it. We play with our kids and laugh so hard we cry. We cook something new, in a clean kitchen, sipping a glass of wine for enjoyment, not anesthesia. We let the mostly good take over and push out the meaningless bad, and remember that we just need to be picked up, refreshed and dried off, not kicked around and tossed away. Sometimes, who we are feels good. Soft, even. Like a favorite t-shirt that’s been washed so many times - it fits just right.

Just Chute Me 11/15/2012 6 Comments