I’m in the middle of a few books right now. I try not to do that. Really. I try to finish one with the next one giving me a come-hither from the nightstand before I’ve quite finished. But this season with travels and libraries and non-renewables and “I did not expect this thickness…” episodes on repeat, well. I’m in the middle of more than a few books right now.
One that I’m listening to, Sand Talk, just went through…not even an explanation, as once the author started he acknowledge it would leave you in bed for three days as your head reconfigured. But an introduction to the offer that time and space, in his culture, and his language, weren’t time and space. They were spacetime. Or timespace. That a question like “what time" actually also meant where. I’ve been falling into this gladly.
I feel my brain trying to stretch when my love watches Nova or something else and it’s about how quantum physics are proving that space and time are the same thing. It tries. And it snaps back to three dimensions with a sigh of relief. But this way, I am submerged into the warmth familiarity of timespace and find myself making up words to fit. Like “wherewhen” or “thenthere.”
So that was a really long tangent before my intended topic.
Anyway…
I was at a friend’s house today. (Isn’t it nice to have such things again?) And we three women, of the cis-het-married types that we are, were talking. It was the timeplace of putting on boots and standing in entries and I was musing what my love may have gotten up to while the kids and I were away. Mostly when we’re away, it’s a workday and he’s working. Today, a Sunday, he didn’t have wage-work to do. He’d video-gamed a lot already, as our youngest might never stop asking him in every free moment if he wants to play together. And I realized, aloud, smiling so much that I half-laughed:
“I bet he cleaned. And shoveled. And when I get home I won’t have a prolonged internal debate between more cleaning or something else that needs to be done or *gasp* something else I actually want to do that isn’t ‘contributing to the running of the household.’”
And a friend laughed and said, “My house will be messier. Especially the kitchen. But they will have had fun, I hope.”
I just don’t think I have it. I don’t think I have that in me. To be The Cleaner. “The” because there’s only one. Marie Kondo was quoted in the last few days. Admitting that she has “given up on tidying so much” now that she has three kids.
<insert sound of screeching record>
You mean to tell me, that you thought you would give tidying advice, to an entire globally interested group of folks, and explain how to keep a home tidy so easily…because it was only YOU in the house? I may have missed that part of your explanation, when reading your book, or maybe listening to it. (It was during the season of overwork for me, commuting to college classes for him, and double daycare for our then toddler and infant - so no, I don’t remember.)
I did come home to a cleaner house. And a shoveled walk after the daily snow. And freshly brewed coffee and the best-smelling warm neck to nuzzle into and mumble a kissy hello into.
I hope you get that. I hope you give that if you aren’t already. I hope you find it in you to Do The Thing to show love to your loves in a way that they feel it. And I hope you know you deserve it back. Again and again and again. However that works for you, for them, for your “us.”
Sounds like us💙