The weird thing was, I liked to cook. I liked being in my kitchen measuring and mixing. It was one of the few times in my busy days that I could be completely focussed on the task at hand. Cooking had a zen quality to it. I would close the oven door on a casserole and realize 45 minutes had passed without any awareness.
It wasn’t the cooking I resented. It was the time it took me. It was all the mental work leading up to it.
How much of my week was spent on that one small (apparently invisible) thing — simply feeding my people? And don’t even get me started on the laundry.
So many of these chores were solitary. I stripped beds, ran loads of laundry, vacuumed floors. Even if I wasn’t alone in the house, I usually found myself doing these things by myself. It was funny because I didn’t remember signing up to be the sole toilet cleaner / cat litter box scooper / person in charge of pulling hair out of the drains. But there I was. I fantasized about an idyllic time in ancient history when women lived in clans and gathered together at the river to slap their husbands’ wet Levi’s against a rock, laughing and telling each other secrets. The best I could do now was stick my air pods in my ears and listen to a podcast about perimenopause while I picked dried toothpaste off the bathroom sink.
On bad days I’d wake up with a feeling of distance from my own life, a feeling of separateness from the people and things around me. Like I was in a cellophane wrapper, my own thoughts louder in my head than the voices on the outside. If someone asked me what was wrong (which did sometimes happen, bless them), I tried to identify the feeling. I would say I just needed a hug. But not just a regular standing-up-in-the-kitchen, two-second hug. I’m talking a lying down hug with blankets, with someone big spooning me in the fetal position. The warmth, the safety, the comfort of some other person acknowledging the stupid, trivial, useless, uninspiring activities of my day to day existence and saying “Yes, you’re not wrong. Close your eyes and I promise later it won’t feel so pointless.”
Is this what hormones do? I wished I could see inside my body and watch the fluctuations of different juices coursing through me. I wished I could step back in a lab coat and say “Ah, there’s the problem, your estrogen is low today. That makes a person feel despondent and tired.” And after consulting my clipboard, “You’ll feel better in three days when the estrogen starts flowing again. Actually, in ten days you’re going to feel amazing and you won’t care about any of this!”
On good days I kind of enjoyed cleaning my house. I liked folding laundry, I liked shining my bathroom mirror with Windex. I would look around my tidy home with satisfaction, thinking Look at me! A grown up with a whole house! Maybe I just needed to learn the trick everyone else seemed to know: how to not get distracted by the dirty boot prints tracked across my hardwood floor.
I mopped my floor every day for ten minutes, which, when you add it up, is 3,650 minutes a year. That’s sixty hours each year of my precious time on earth spent washing a floor that inevitably had the outlines of shoe soles tracked across it at any given time of day. Some days I would see those prints and my mind would just go completely blank. I would stare until the pattern of the shoe soles became like modern art; just a configuration of tiny squares inside an oval shape. If I made an effort I could pull myself out of the blankness by associating that pattern on the floor with the shoe of someone who lived in my house with me. And then with a little more effort I could picture that person’s foot inside the shoe, and then the legs, torso and face. A face that was as familiar as my own face.
The face would either belong to a person I met long ago and was drawn to, delighted by, and then consciously decided to see every day for the rest of my life. Or it would belong to a person that I dreamed into existence. Someone fervently hoped for, whispered to, carried within me first as an idea and then as a physical presence. A person whose face was more dear and beautiful to me than anything else in the world.
So then how could I feel such despair wash over me at the sight of these footprints? These innocent, meaningless footprints that could easily be wiped away in 10 minutes? How could I resent the existence of those footprints with such a hot rage that I sometimes had to close my eyes and wait for the nausea to subside?
It felt like that footprint was stealing something from me. It was the evidence of a thief in my home who, with absolutely no intention or thought of me whatsoever, was trampling my hopes and dreams, my precious time, the finite moments that I had been given on earth to think, sing, write, dream, fantasize, learn and truly exist in my own life. To experience the world before I died.
And then immediately behind resentment flared an intense guilt. How could I ever resent this home and family that I so carefully and intentionally built? A feeling of injustice was bubbling under the surface all the time.
It was the housework of course, but not only that. It was the burden of responsibility for caring for all these people, their schedules, hopes and dreams. Encouraging them, anticipating their needs. When they were hungry at 6 pm they all looked to me to be fed. What’s the plan? What’s for dinner? Which seems so simple, why would anyone be resentful of that? Dinner happens every night. But the dinner for me started on Sunday when I made the plan for the week, looking up recipes, thinking about what everyone liked to eat, trying to keep things interesting. Looking at the calendar for everyone’s activities so I wasn’t planning a lasagna on a night that no one would be home for dinner. Then making the list of ingredients that needed to be purchased, and then driving to the store and spending an hour gathering all the things. Checking prices, remembering items that weren’t on my list (or could I get that next week)? Then bringing it all home, putting it away in the pantry (a task I hated as much as putting away laundered clothes or emptying the dishwasher). Oh and also, each morning remembering to take the meat out of the freezer or prepping the crock pot. Then at 5:30 pm leaving whatever I was doing to chop vegetables, mix sauces, and put it all together.
And all of this to serve the meal that I paid for with time from my precious life, for my loved ones to eat, talk, carry their dishes to the sink, say a quick thanks, and move on to their next activity. I would sit alone at the table after they had all gone. I would feel bad, but I would try to be reasonable. Seriously, did I expect them to kiss my feet? Did I want a musical interlude where my teenagers expressed their gratitude in the form of interpretive dance?
Well, YES.