My House Has Me By the Balls

I'm pretty good at looking competant at a lot of things. Mothering, cooking, animal husbandry. (wifery?) But with the house, forget it, it all leaks out, I cannot hide the fakery, it all comes sloshing around the corners as I run to try and pose, and block the landslide. All day, I could spend all day trying to organize as my three little destroyers unhinge all I have done with a simple bathing suit thrown on the floor or a spill of macaroni or a broken tooth or some other wild act where some limb waits to be broken.

I am always in the middle of something, usually involving my hands and a great deal of worry about all the other things I'm NOT getting to while my hands are busy doing this one VERY dumb task. I need multiple heads to manage all the worry - in fact, good idea, I should look into that on Craigslist, my true husband. If I had more heads, I could feel bad in more minds than just one, and that would feel pretty good, at least the space would be useful. Set up some lawn chairs and serve up the worry in a more relaxed fashion.

I snarl at the kids to help and basically let them know how they have FAILED me by not jumping up to help at each squawk I make so that now, deep in the summer (although it only feels like a few weeks) I have shown them how Mommy Cancels Fun because there's so much boring work to be done. I make them vacuum and mow the lawn and pull back the pool cover and feed the chickens and make their bed and fold the couch blankets and stop watching tv. I say things like Don't watch teenage shows because they're badly written and I don't want you to think buying shoes and wearing lipstick is what's Really Important.

I guess the house is always secondary, looming around us, a squalid shimmering mass of Undone, Unaccomplished, a gnarled, pointy finger shivering at me You Lose. I am adrift in this file-less ocean, an unalphabetized mess, piled underneath broken toys and lost library books. Someday I WILL climb to the top of the heap. I will build the bonfire and enjoy the burning of the stuff, I will be able to see the other side of my garage. Which I think is still there.

I am SORRY, house, that I've been so busy making quesadillas. Trust me, may I never see another corndog. It's that I have to manage things from the heart on down, so the building of the kids is more important than the wiping of your walls or the brooming of your sidewalk. My house will never be the palace of virtue that my prim grandmother's house was - it was always silent in her house, and undisturbed white like the inside of a starched leather shoe.

Our house is lived in like my (other, more relaxed) Arkansas Gramma Yvonne's hairstyle. She was tan and had big boobs and in her kitchen all the lemon drops stuck together in the glass jar from humidity. So you could take the whole glob of them out and just suck on the giant dome of lemondrops.

It was a beautiful world, there. I have, yes, successfully achieved the glob of lemondrops. In every corner of my house. She is chuckling in approval up there, in Heaven, jiggling her foot and flicking her ashes absently down on us. Those lemondrops taste pretty dern good, don't they? She's saying, taking a long drag.

Now go find some playing cards. (She had them stashed in every drawer of her house.) Like leprechaun gold.