Aug
7
August 7, 2007
Today the sheet rock is going up in the addition, and if there’s anything that can fuck up your whole house more than sheetrock dust, I don’t know what it is. Oh wait I do know, it’s insulation foam, which was splurted into various places over the weekend and has been occasionally breaking loose and gently drifting down from the exposed kitchen ceiling ever since.
JB’s parents were visiting last weekend, and JB’s mother kept telling me how well I was handling the remodel. “Well, you sure seem serene about all this,” she said, which instantly made me paranoid that she really meant, “Way to not even try and keep things clean, slacker.” Which I don’t think she did. Except . . . well, there was that odd moment when she fingered the coat of dust on a nearby houseplant and . . . ah, fuck it. I’m sure that’s not what she meant.
(?!)
Anyway, what else can a person do when their house is being gutted but succumb to the chaos? I hardly even notice the workers trampling around the kitchen in the morning while I’m hoovering down my increasingly large bowl of Cinnamon Life (hello, and welcome to my craving of the week) anymore. Hell, I make my coffee in the bathroom right now, what’s the use in getting worked up over a little insulation foam in my cereal?
Besides, there are far worse concerns at hand. It’s August, and maybe some of you know what that means. That’s right, it’s Giant House Spider Mating Season. And oh jesus god, I had my first encounter yesterday (after I had just recovered from reading Megan’s G.H.S. entry, too).
There it was, just lurking there on the carpet. I don’t know what made it catch my eye, maybe its sheer girth and audible footsteps. It was so big and horrifying I actually felt my brain trying to shear lose from the confines of my skull, possibly trying to escape to safety through my eyesockets.
I immediately scooped up Riley, not so much out of a fear that he would somehow be bitten but more from the deep and shameful knowledge that if he touched that godawful thing, I could never kiss him again.
I was frozen in indecision for a moment, standing there with a bemused toddler dangling from one arm, but it was apparent that in JB’s absence—he was off in the shop, too far away to hear a terrified squawk—I would have to deal with T. gigantea on my own.
When you’re a person with a bit of a spider phobia to begin with and you’re faced with an arachnid the approximate size of a fucking dinner plate, you don’t just get some paper toweling. You need long-range weaponry. I didn’t really want to squish it into the carpet, but my other options seemed equally unappealing: spray it with oven cleaner, get out a revolver and pump it full of bullets, set the entire house on fire, etc.
I ended up dragging Riley with me into the utility room where I grabbed a broom, deposited Riley on the floor and told him “STAY HERE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE”, and rushed back to the carpet where I summoned every ounce of courage and used the broom to whack frantically at the spider while simultaneously shrieking a cowardly, girly squeal of fright mighty war cry. I swear I felt that broom bounce harmlessly off the thing’s back a few times before he seemed to succumb, legs curling inward.
I used another broom to kind of sweep it onto the first broom (while being occasionally overcome with massive, full-body shudders) and I threw everything out the back door. The spider’s body rolled off the broom and lay there on the concrete. Motionless. Thank god. I went back inside and proceeded to experience the sort of heebie-jeebies that make you scream and recoil from the dark thing on the counter before realizing that ha ha ha, it’s a hairband. Ha ha ha . . . whatthefuckisthat?!?
Of course, about an hour later when JB came in and went to get the brooms, he noticed that the spider was in fact NOT DEAD. No. ALIVE. That thing took about fifty-three smacks with a broom and it was still LIVING. Still slowly, painfully crawling its way along the patio and towards the back door, surely on some dark mission of revenge, despite its many wounds, planning to limp all the way into our house and onto our bedroom ceiling, where in the dead of night, with its very last shred of strength, let itself drop down, down, down, down, into my open and snoring—
Well. Anyway, JB squished it flat. The end. I think.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, now that I’ve written all this down and relived it I have some very important activities to engage in, mainly involving batting wildly at random, invisible things nearby and lunging at various body parts in order to scratch at myself like a cracked-out baboon.
Aug
6
August 6, 2007
In this weekend’s issue of Gender F in the Seattle Times the topic at hand was women and the workplace, which included the inevitable focus on work/family balance. I found the entire piece really interesting, but I was particularly struck by this statement made by Pierre Kaplan, mother of a 4-year old and a VP at Nintendo:
But to me, whether mothers should work or not work is a hollow question for women who have that choice. What you need, no matter what your circumstance, is a passion for life you can demonstrate to your kids.
I need to learn how to cross-stitch, because that deserves to be hung on a wall in my house and contemplated daily.
I have felt guilty for not wanting to stay home full time, and I have found myself feeling paranoid that those who do stay home are better mothers than I am. Despite everything I strongly believe about individual situations and individual choices, there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m not as dedicated of a parent for choosing to be apart from my son three days a week—for not doing everything I can to make staying at home a priority.
I’ve also been thinking about how our lives are going to change next year, and what it’s going to be like having two kids in daycare (other than expensive, that is).
The truth is, though, in our current situation and for the foreseeable future I don’t want to stay home. I want all the benefits that my job gives me and my family (I wrote about some of them here). If I were at home full time, I know I would be unhappy, and that’s not the kind of parent—or person—I want to be.
I love Kaplan’s quote because it’s both reassuring to me and inspiring. Lately I’ve been feeling so run down, so uninspired at my job and so bogged down in tedium at home, and it’s hard not to moaningly think, oh, things are always going to be like this. But I can’t think that way, because if things really and truly don’t improve there are steps I need to take to make things better. A new job, more work-from-home freelance work, a side project, more activities with Riley, parenting classes . . . something different, something to change the picture.
This is my responsibility, to give my life passion. I don’t exactly know how to get there, what risks and choices might be involved, but I believe the process of seeking it out is integral to becoming a stronger parent. I know I am a more patient, creative, and happy mother when I feel like I’ve got some momentum going on, when I’m not just treading water and hoping to stay afloat.
There are days when I allow myself to feel burdened by parenthood, as though all the exciting options life has to offer are now closed to me. Like I am trapped on some dreary path littered with sippy cups and diapers, with no exit in sight. And it’s so foolish, really, to be that myopic. To lose sight of the fact that yes, life is busier now and filled with chores and tasks and moments of tedium, but it is also impossibly full, in ways I could never have achieved on my own.
Life is rich with promise. It is expandable.
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