Housekeeping
I came back from the circuit-breaker of my trip away and looked at my house properly for the first time in years. It was like one of those knife-edge moments that can happen with someone close to you. They say something or do something one day that makes you look up and you see them. It startles you. You realise how often you hear their words and treat their presence as background noise, and how much has gone unnoticed. There are dangerous choices in those moments. When your mind is loud and full, the temptation is to look away again: it feels safer. Back to the steam train of your own thoughts, pulling you to somewhere that feels more urgent. I've done that too many times before.
We live out of four small rooms, a cupboard kitchen and a cupboard bathroom tacked onto the back. I can spend weeks and months here, with only odd hours elsewhere, and so I try to make a big life in this small space. And that is admirable until the day you realise that your ‘living big’ has turned back into living thoughtlessly again, with more panic than intention. Too many tired, reactive choices accumulated over time and now I have lost all capacity to care for this house, or myself well within it.
A change then: a change made slowly before anything else and one I've had to make many times before. Nothing else is going to happen well until I right this again, and so I have made it my focus this week. Five minutes, or even two minutes of movement, action, love, and then a long rest until I’m ready to go again. One cupboard, one pile, reach, try, rest, reach again. Despair kicked in early on - at how long it takes me, and at the sheer overwhelm of everything left to manage - but as with everything, once I find the right way to think about something, I feel better and I know what to do.
Maybe this isn’t a chore, but an act of mutual care? I do a little, and then the house holds me safe as I rest and recover, and then we swap who’s caring for who again while I take my turn. Back and forth, a soothing, rocking lullaby. I love you and you love me and it’s all good, it’s all just right, and there’s no rush because this isn’t a one-time thing. As I rest, I see its accommodating nature and its safe walls: it promises to help me to do all the things that matter most to me. As I tend, I see its vulnerability and what a difference I can make to our life together.
Once you realise that in giving care, you create chances to receive it in turn, the idea of burden or labour begins to dissolve. Once you realise that in being helped, there will be moments when you can give something too, any shame you carry can fade. Joy creeps back in to fill all these spaces you’ve opened up. And isn’t that the whole point of it all, in the end? To enjoy what we have? To enjoy each other?
Back to it then, without resentment or guilt. A few days in and things are starting to look much better. It always makes me laugh how everything finds a way to teach me more about love.