Of Dust Bunnies, Spiders & Natural Selection

Laura makes a plea to save the baby dust bunnies.  It reminded me of my early parenting days.  I was a single parent of a special needs child and going to college.  I was driving myself crazy trying to be the perfect mom, the grade-A student, the best apartment-keeper, the perfect everything.

Eventually I showed signs of cracking — I think it might have been as obvious as cracks in my face from dehydration and lack of sleep.

So I bravely squared my shoulders and stepped into the university’s counseling office. It would not be my last time paying for a friend to listen to me using professional mental health services, but along with beginning work on all the performance, anxiety and validation issues I had (have?), she actually gave me some practical advice I could take home and implement that first visit.

It wasn’t quite as corny as the no one puts “I wish I had dusted more” on their tombstone or places “passing white-glove treatment” on their bucket list, but what she said struck home with me and that day I began to relax about having the perfect looking dwelling.

I stopped vacuuming every day & scrubbing the bathroom every other day, and went to once a week and as needed. Sometimes, like when the daughter was in the hospital and I had finals, I went so far as to just let everything but the kitchen and laundry go until the circumstances changed for the better. I used humor to calm myself down about the state of things –  I began to name the dust bunnies. And talk to them.

(In my defense, I was living alone & uber stressed-out; what were my options? Yes, I did tell my counselor about that; no straight jackets were ordered or mentioned.)

Anyway, that’s when I relaxed about being the perfect housekeeper.

I even came to make deals with the spiders living in my home.  Since they predatorily keep other bugs at bay (they don’t live there unless they do have stuff to eat, so they serve a function), I decided that they could have the top 1/3 of the walls to themselves.  If they came down to ‘me’, then they got the old shoe smush. I figure that was part of natural selection; those dumb enough to come down to my level would be removed from the spider gene pool in our home.  Otherwise they lived and ate happily — unless company was coming and then any visible webs got wiped away.  That seems fair enough to me; I pay the rent, yo.

And that’s how I discovered that life’s too short to create an environment that’s for magazine photo-shoots and not for living in.

I may have taken it a bit too far…

Now I suspiciously eye those with immaculate homes.  No book out for continued reading?  No shoes by the door?  No stray mitten or sock peeping from beneath the couch? No board games or DVDs piled sloppily on a shelf or the floor?  Where do these people really live?