Channeling Van Halen: C'mon Baby - Finish What Ya Started

I woke up yesterday morning full of energy and hearing Van Halen in my head; sadly, the bad Sammy Hagar Van Halen not the good David Lee Roth Van Halen. Sammy was imploring me to finish what I’d started and what I’d started (kind of) was the job of housecleaning my bedroom. And I don’t mean just dust and vacuum it, I mean really clean as in Spring/Fall Housecleaning. You know the kind of cleaning I mean. It’s the rip everything apart, scrub everything that can be scrubbed, Polish-Catholic kind of cleaning fetish with which my mother infected me. I understand that this kind of cleaning harkens back to the days of coal furnaces and carpet beaters and is largely unnecessary with today’s suck-the-grain-out-of-the-wood vacuum cleaners but it’s in my genes and I’m programmed to behave this way.

Not that I actually do my Spring/Fall Housecleaning on its prescribed schedule. I used to be religious about it but life and teenagers really get in the way. The best window-washing weather in the Spring is also the best time to spend in the garden. The perfect scrubbing weekend during the Fall is typically the same one in which my husband and I decide that we are worthy of a break and head west to the Shenandoah Valley, to poke around Monticello and visit a great apple farm. Previous years have seen schoolwork (mine) and Saturday football games (Tom’s) get between housecleaning and me. Last year’s utter joy with Thursday or Friday football games and a diploma hanging on my office wall found me with tons of time on my hands and I still didn’t do any housecleaning. I swore I’d do it after our Halloween redecoration of the living room but Christmas came and went without candles in the windows because I refuse to put candles in dirty windows. I’m very good at devising rules to supersede the bi-annual fumigation ritual.

When I was told, late in the day on Monday, that I didn’t need to go back to the office and work out my notice (a phone call that I’d accurately predicted), I devised a plan for diving into my early-Fall or belated-Spring Housecleaning. Bred to clean anything from the top down, I knew I needed to start with the master bedroom. It was a horror. The top of my dresser was obliterated by a pile of sweaters that I swear I’ll hand-wash tomorrow, a bra that needs to go back to Macy’s because I think it wants to kill me, a couple of mail-order packing lists that I need to hold onto until I’m sure that those bathing suits that I bought for the three weeks’ ago beach trip won’t have to be returned. My night table is a delicate balance of magazines and library books. Jim’s side of the room is uncluttered but you could write your name in the silt on the top of his dresser.

I woke up late on Tuesday, a treat from my usual 4:15 alarm-slapping dance. I spent 2 hours on the phone with my brother while I tidied up the kitchen and living room from the teenage lay-about of the night before. I watered the plants on my deck. I did some mental calculations and convinced myself that there wasn’t enough time to do anything of real substance towards cleaning the bedroom, as I would only need to stop in a couple hours to take Kevin to a doctor’s appointment. So I curled up on the sofa with a book.

Wednesday found me delaying the inevitable once again. I had a 10:00 appointment that was going to take at least two hours out of my day, if I was lucky. Add in a stop at Sam’s Club and it was 2:00 before I came home – not enough time left to make a dent in my cleaning. So I curled up on the sofa with a book…and took a nap.

I promised Jim I’d have lunch with him on Thursday. With shower/makeup and drive time, that’s 3 hours total, right out of the middle of my day. Cleaning was out of the question but I did manage to take the drapes down and put all the shoes that I’ve kicked off at the foot of the bed back into their shoebox homes. I even put them back into the closet. And I did drop the drapes off at the drycleaner; it was on the way to my hairdresser’s appointment.

Yesterday was the day. I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I did have, though, 3 sleeping teenage boys in my house - the same teenage boys who’d left Gatorade bottles and syrup-coated plates on the coffee table. Why do teenage boys think ‘waffles’ when they think ‘snack’? What could have prompted them to dig deep into the freezer when there’s a jar of cookies on the counter? Before you answer, ‘the munchies’, I’ll tell you that these are good kids and Thomas is too wary of messing up his shot at the varsity team this year. I fully intended to make Tom and his friends clean up their mess but they were still sleeping and the plates had suspicious dog-tongue tracks on them – easier to do it myself than to let the dog knock the plates to the floor. Kevin was already up and out, leaving me a note telling me that he’d gone bike riding. Unusual, but more power to him.

I started my bedroom housecleaning orgy quietly, with general junk removal. I sorted through the magazines and library books and stashed the killer bra in my closet where, I’m sure, it will remain until next Spring. I did every quiet thing I could but there’s really not much that’s quiet about housecleaning so I woke the 3 sleeping teenagers at 10:30. I woke them up by taking pictures of them. It’s the perfect creepy-Mom way of getting them to move but, once teenage boys start to move, they start to eat. When I headed out to the clothesline with my freshly laundered blanket, they were sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by cereal bowls. And Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. When I came downstairs with the wet sheets, they were gone. The kitchen was strewn with evidence of their having ingested the most important meal of the day, as though they needed to prove to me that they weren’t going about their business with empty stomachs. I really didn’t want all three of them back in the kitchen so I just dealt with the mess myself, grumbling all the while. I make a great martyr.

The boys were lazing about in my hammock – my hammock – as I pegged the sheets out onto the line. I heard NotMyKid #1 ask, in a slightly scathing teenage boy voice, “Tom, what is your mother doing?” Clearly, he’d never seen a clothesline before and, while they’re not expressly forbidden in the neighborhood, I figure I’ve gotten around the homeowner’s association rule of “No Clothesline Poles” by stringing my line between two trees. Kudos to my kid for his reply, “She’s reducing her carbon footprint.” And then a sharp smack upside his head with his laughing addition, “She’s really just trying to see how long it takes to piss off the neighborhood.” Damn that child, for knowing me too well.

I didn’t mind all that much – I was on a roll. The venetian blinds needed more than just a dusting so I yanked them down and hauled them outside. A bucket of hot water and Mr. Clean would do the trick, but there was no Mr. Clean to be found. Bless his heart, my husband had used the last of it when he cleaned the bathrooms the week before; curse his name, he never told me that we were out and certainly never put ‘Mr. Clean’ on the grocery list. Time to cash in an I-Trust-You-With-My-Car chit and send Kevin to the store but first I have to find him. He’s wandering around the driveway with his video camera and a package of plastic army men: Spielberg Jr. is attempting to recreate a World War II battle for YouTube.

Forced to a stop by a lack of ready supplies, I started to think about this whole housecleaning phenomenon. Was I the only one who still did it or does every sane person hire it out or ignore it altogether? For a grin, I googled it and discovered that I’m not alone. I got an even bigger grin when I learned that I could have been using the messy bedroom as an excuse for not having sex with my husband. Really. According to the ideology of feng shui, clutter can “negatively influence, or even completely block, the flow of events in specific areas of your life” (http://fengshui.about.com/od/thebasics/qt/clearclutter.htm). My husband appreciates creativity but he’d have fallen out of bed laughing at me if I ever blamed my just-don’t-feel-like-it on bad feng shui. I’ll try it some time and report back.

Mr. Clean did the trick on the blinds…and the screens…and the woodwork…and the hardwood floor. Scrubbing the floor was like working one of those slide puzzles, the kind with only one empty space for you to maneuver around. There’s just not enough floor space to work with. Slide the king-size bed over, then scrub and wait for that patch to dry. Slide the bed back, move the dresser up, then scrub. It was during one of the wet floor delays that I discovered that Scorsese had made a bunch of movie backdrops out of construction paper and left a pile of little paper snippets all over the dining room table. During another delay, I learned that the Three Amigos had found the cookie jar after all and had washed the cookies down with more Gatorade. While I was upstairs getting my feng shui on, the boys were leaving little ant trails wherever they’d been, inflicting their negative energy on my chi, or whatever I have that passes for a chi.

By 4:00, I’d scrubbed and polished every surface of our room. The bed was remade with linen that smelled like fresh air and sunshine instead of dryer sheets. I’d vacuumed my way through the rest of the house and had cleaned the kitchen twice and picked up the living room three times. I’d turned off one unattended television or another no less than 5 times. I’d put a whole chicken on the stove to poach for a chicken and dumplings dinner. I was totally wiped out and dreaded the thought of trying to thoroughly clean the remaining 9 rooms and 2.5 bathrooms while the kids were home for the summer. Then I hit upon a plan: I’ll wait until school starts again! And doesn’t make sense to clean before I paint the kitchen, the foyer, and the upstairs hallway – I’d only have to do it again afterwards. And the heat wave is supposed to break for a few days – it’s the perfect time to work in my gardens. And I’ve promised myself to spend some serious time next week registering with more employment agencies and slamming my resume out to every job that interests me. And I’ve lived with the just-cleaned-last-week look for so long now that I may as well just keep procrastinating until it’s time to wash the windows so I can decorate the house for the holidays.

I’m channeling the good Van Halen today. There’ll be none of that band-wrecking Sammy Hagar yelling “Right Now” at me. David Lee Roth has me captured, I’m under his spell…so I’ll wait…to finish my housecleaning. Who does Fall Housecleaning anyway?

Bravery versus Stupidity

A man jumps into a rain-swollen river to save a floundering dog. He struggles to drag the dog against the current and the two eventually arrive exhausted at the river’s shore. Is this an act of bravery or stupidity? How do you decide? What distinguishes bravery from stupidity?

I believe that outcome and perspective determine which adjective to use. Let’s add a few more lines to my little story:

After arriving at the shore, the dog heads up the riverbank towards the road. The man climbs the steep shoreline behind the dog, drags himself upright, and, due to the exhaustion produced by his Good Samaritan efforts, faints, and falls to the ground. A passing truck, blinded by the pounding rain, runs him over and kills him. The dog walks away, tired and wet but otherwise unharmed. The man leaves behind a wife and two small children.

So I ask again, is this an act of bravery or stupidity?

Now, I’ve done a lot of brave vs. stupid things in my life. I’ve had my partying days, experienced the spins while driving home after drinking way more than a body should. I didn’t hurt anyone else along the way and suffered only a hangover as my penance. Clearly, though, this was an act of stupidity.

I’ve also stayed in a failing marriage because it was easier to do so than it would have been, at that time, to leave. I had two kids who weren’t even in school yet and no job with which I could support my family. My parents made a generous and loving offer of support if I should choose to leave…but I stayed. A year after making my choice, a friend told me how brave I was. Brave? I didn’t feel brave, I felt cowardly and lazy and stupid. I was still unhappy and the rift in our marriage wasn’t healing. It was easier, and safer, then, to stay on the riverbank than to jump in and save my sinking sense of self.

Let’s give the drowning-dog story a different ending:

After arriving at the shore, the man huddles with the dog for a moment so that each can catch their breath. He reads the tag on the dog’s collar and realizes that the dog lives just across the road. He carries the dog up the shore – not without effort – crosses the road and rings the doorbell of a large home. The owners, in awe of the man’s selfless act and delighted with the return of their beloved pet, call the local newspaper. The event and a profile of the Good Samaritan appear in the paper. Within the profile is a description of an invention that the man has patented. Large companies vie for the opportunity to manufacture this invention and the world becomes hooked on the gadget. The man becomes enormously wealthy.

Brave or stupid? Should we add ‘lucky’ to the list?

After being stupid for a while, I took some tentative steps towards bravery. After 7 years as a stay-at-home mom, I got a job. I forced the ultimate demise of my not-getting-better-but-sure-getting-worse marriage and stood up to the challenges of single motherhood. I’ll never know how much harder it was for the kids to experience a divorce after they had years of life in a conventional family. I was lucky to have a boss who believed in me and pushed me to return to school to finish my education. A friend dared me to try internet dating and, after a year of men who misrepresented themselves as tall, handsome, or just plain human, I received an email from a guy who lived in Richmond. We were married in our backyard 15 months later.

Now I’m looking at another flooded river and another floundering swimmer who needs salvation. I quit my job. Yes, in this terrible economy, with few glimmers of hope to illustrate any tiny rebound in the record unemployment numbers, I walked away from a paying gig. Brave or stupid?

I was a contractor working with a very generic, non-specific job description. I don’t blame the company for that – the position and the systems were entirely new to them and they really didn’t know what they needed or what the job would grow into until everything started to roll. I took it all in and ran with it – I did what needed to be done. This, I find, is an attitude completely contrary to what typical contractor positions demand. Contractors do what they are paid to do; employees (those folks with the tasty benefits and pay) do what the company needs them to do. I did what the company needed me to do. Further, I anticipated what the company needed and structured the systems and my work to support those future needs.

During my interviews, the job was described as having the high likelihood of becoming permanent and, after 3 months on the job, they told me they wanted to hire me. Then they told me there was a hiring freeze on. Then they told me that they’d pleaded my case as high as the President of our division and still weren’t able to hire me. A voluntary reduction in force found the company with 1400 fewer employees – 400 more employees than they’d planned to reduce. The company started hiring again and my spirits picked up.

I presented the organization with a comprehensive list of the work that I was performing. For each item, I clearly identified the capacity in which I was operating: business systems analyst, training and development, process improvement, etc. I asked for more money based on the breadth, depth, and importance of my work product. An extra dollar an hour was my reward. As well, my job description was rewritten. My work was scaled back to pure, mindless data entry. All the things I loved most about the job were removed from my scope. I’m sure that someone will be taking on these challenges but that someone was not identified or communicated, either to me or to my clients. In the meantime, the status quo never changed and I assume they expected me to just keep working and keep producing whatever was needed. I am comfortable with this assumption given my supervisor’s admission, “I really don’t know what you do.” Yes, this would be the same person who re-wrote my job description.

Remember that Howie Mandel game show, ‘Deal or No Deal’? The one with the models and the suitcases with the dollar amounts in them? Jim was a loyal ‘Deal or No Deal’ watcher for a while and I would watch occasionally when my homework was finished or when his yelling at the television became more than I could ignore from my office across the hallway. I don’t know what his fascination was with the show – for him, it was akin to watching a car crash in slow motion. He’d bitch about how stupidly the people were behaving if they didn’t cash out when the odds were in their favor. There was always a clear point where the contestant’s bravery slid right into the wall of stupidity and that’s the moment when Jim would begin to rail at the TV. He’d complain so much that I’d actually beg him to find some sporting event to watch instead.

That’s what I’ve been playing – the employment version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. I’ve been picking suitcases without weighing the odds of what might be inside the next case. I’d justify my choices by spending 2 hours each night complaining about the 9 hours I’d spent at work and trying to figure out what I could do to change a situation over which I had no control. Jim and the kids are tolerant but even they couldn’t stand it anymore. Jim’s also very intuitive and knows how to reach right inside me and pluck the string that resonates the most. He didn’t ask me to change the channel, he simply told me, “I want my wife back.”

I was a contractor who had been on the job for 22 months. For 20 of those months I operated under the expressed concept of becoming a permanent employee as soon as possible. On July 1, I was told that my job would never become permanent and that the company would continue to staff the work with a contractor. What incentive was there to stay? My staffing company has been telling me that they have positions to which they’d submit my resume...but not until I quit my current job. I get this – it’s a clear conflict of interest for them and would appear that they favored one client over another. When the conflict of interest became clear for ME, I quit. The odds were no longer in my favor – hell; the odds couldn’t even see my favor from where they were standing. For me, the next suitcase would have been totally empty.

So, brave or stupid? I’m straddling both sides of the equation now. My professional contentment level and the effect that it has had on my family is a drowning dog and I’ve just jumped into the water to save it. The correct adjective won’t be determined until I land somewhere else and look back at this decision. I’ve taken a leap of faith – and that’s a really big leap for a person who loves to be, needs to be, in complete control of her own situation. (And tries to be in control of all the situations around her or, at least, have some input to them.) In the meantime, I’ll swim really hard and rely on the teeny bit of faith that I do have and borrow some of the massive amount of faith that my husband has if I need to. He thinks I’m being really brave but I think that’s because he’s tired of watching me be really stupid. I’ve noticed that he’s been watching an awful lot of sports lately.