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gaiatheorist · 5 years

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“Does it spark joy?”

2.30am on a Sunday morning, and I’ve read yet another article on Marie Kondo. I’m coming unravelled again, and setting myself distraction-tasks, to avoid plummeting into one of my rabbit-holes. They’re holding strategies, last year I had the garden, this year, I have the house and the garden. I’ll grow some of my own food, because the UK unemployment benefit doesn’t leave any leeway for anything but bills. (I’m lucky, I ‘Won the Golden Ticket’ of an award of disability benefit, it’s highly probable that it will be declined when it comes to renewal in less than a year, despite my brain injuries being permanent.) I ‘caught’ myself moving things around a few days ago, it’s one of my anxiety-behaviours, I don’t have very much control about the external-world, so I focus on what I can control.

Moving things around. Do I want/need ‘that’? Is it of any practical use now, or am I just holding on to it for sentimental reasons? (There’s very little here that isn’t of practical use, I don’t really ‘keep things’, and I do have regular periods of purging what’s left.) There’s no ‘sparking joy’, just an awful lot of irritability. My strange friend Creepy Carpet Tile Man visited recently, and pointed to various ‘things’, saying “Why don’t you put that on eBay?” “It’s not mine.” “Surely it is now? He’s been gone long enough, doesn’t it become legally yours after all these years?” My loft is full of the ex’s ‘stuff’, and I can’t use my garden shed, because that’s packed with his belongings as well. I hate being ‘tethered’ to him, I’m sick of asking him to take things away, and him ‘forgetting’, or ‘having something on’, he’s unreliable, he always was. I’m also cautious of snapping at him in front of our son, so this is, in part, a situation of my own making. The ex is doing what he always did, “Leave something long enough and someone else will sort it.”, he’s ‘not the most useful arrangement of molecules’, as the kid once described him.

The practical thing for me to do would be to tell the ex again that I want his various stuff gone. I don’t want to be responsible for it, I have enough difficulty being responsible for myself some days. He doesn’t have the time, or the storage space, his parents aren’t well, and our son is in the final year of his degree. ‘Never a good time’ again. I’m angry at him for being generally inept, and I’m frustrated with myself for absorbing the emotional load again. I am not responsible for him, and I’m stuck in a loop of all the times he’d tantrum “I’m not happy!”, projecting his own inadequacies onto me, making himself the centre of the universe, and blaming me for not being what he wanted. I never really was, he wanted a compliant house-mouse who would bend over backwards to serve her Lord and Master, I’m not that. He wanted me to be an extension of him, and I’m a distinct entity, like Peter Pan’s shadow, I made the separation, but I’m still scrubbing away his stains, three years on.

That’s not a metaphor, I am literally scrubbing away stains. As well as being inept and egocentric, he was dirty. The lettings agents inspect the property every six months, when he was here, that would lead to me dousing the house in Febreeze and bleach on the morning of the inspection, after he’d gone to work. Housework was ‘my’ responsibility, and, apart from hurriedly shoving piles of his own worn socks down the arm of the sofa when his Dad visited, he didn’t do anything. I allowed that to continue. He never once washed the dishes, or vacuumed, and if he spilled or dropped anything on the carpet, he’d either just leave it, or blot it with one of his socks. He expected undying gratitude for mowing the lawn, and once sulked for days because I didn’t praise him for cleaning the outside of the vacuum cleaner. (No, he didn’t use it, or even empty it, he cleaned the outside of it, the man’s a melon.) At the last inspection, I asked the agent if there was any action required on my part. “No, it’s just the cleanliness again.” “Pardon?” “Well, your carpets and that, we know some of the stains were here when you moved in.” ‘Some’ of them, the rest were the ex, and his rancid dog.

I can’t remember when we bought the Vax carpet-cleaning machine, it’s not really something I’d have marked on the calendar, but it most probably was in response to a spill of some description, and it probably wasn’t me that spilled it. (I am incredibly clumsy, more so since the brain injuries, but if I spill something, I clean it up straight away, so it doesn’t set as a stain.) The Vax worked the first time I used it, and then the second time I tried, there was no suction. The ex said he’d look at it, but it wasn’t a motorbike, or pornography, or a YouTube video of UFO conspiracies, so he didn’t look at it. For years, the lettings agents would ask me to address the stains on the carpets, and I’d end up on my hands and knees, with a bucket and a scrubbing brush, because the Vax was ‘broken.’ One year, after I’d blistered my hands really badly attempting to scrub the carpet, he hired an industrial carpet cleaning machine for me to use, then berated me for not using it properly, and leaving streaks on the carpet. The machine was faulty, he said he’d ask for a replacement, but that never happened, he ‘forgot.’

The Vax wasn’t ‘broken’, it was clogged. Dog-hair, and dirt, and grit had obstructed the inlet to the vacuum, and dried in position. Unclogging it would have been more pleasant if the machine hadn’t evidently sucked dog-urine out of the carpets. His dog pissed on everything, and he said he couldn’t smell it. I could. Apart from the constant-stink, wet carpet has a tendency to absorb more dirt, between the allotment, and the ex working in engineering, there was plenty of dirt. (Also lots of sand and grit, he had a tendency to dump fishing and camping gear on the carpet, “I’ll shift that in a bit.”, then he’d assume his position on the sofa, dropping yet more crumbs from toast and crisps.)

“It was just the way he was raised.” was my old excuse for his behaviour. His family had a very traditional-patriarchal structure, the men went out to work, and the women had ‘little jobs’, and assumed responsibility for all of the housework. That was his ‘normal’, but not mine, my mother was an utter slattern, she worked full-time, she vacuumed once a week, and sporadically responded to my step-father’s desire for a basic degree of cleanliness by storming into my bedroom with a bin-liner, and a beating. Teaching me how-to-housework wasn’t on her agenda, I suppose I ought to thank her for not trying to shape me into some sort of Stepford Wife. Nobody taught the ex how-to-housework, either, when he split up with the girlfriend before me, the Mother-in-law took on his cleaning, laundry, and evening meals, lest his precious testicles fall clean off if he touched a duster. That stopped when he introduced me, and there was an assumption that I’d take over.

The first couple of months that we lived together were absolute chaos, I was working two jobs at the same time, so the house ended up looking like it had been rolled down a hill. The in-laws would ‘tut’ when they visited, and then the Mother-in-law straight-out ‘told’ me “You really need to Hoover every day, because of the dogs.” Me, not him. Some friends of his pointed out that I was ALWAYS washing dishes when they visited. I was. It wasn’t a house-proud thing, he’d always offer visitors coffee (which I was expected to make), and the mugs would all be dirty in the sink, because washing dishes wasn’t a routine thing.

I’d moved in with him in the October, and in December, I became ill. ‘Viral illness’, which is doctor-code for “We’re not entirely sure, might clear up in time.” I’d changed jobs at the start of November, and was on a temporary ‘seasonal’ contract, which wasn’t renewed when my sick-note expired. I was unemployed, and really quite unwell, but I was ‘home all day’, and the ex quickly shifted from “I don’t expect to come home from work to find pots in the sink!” to “You need to get another job, or go.” Fine, whatever, being ‘kept’ was never going to suit me. A succession of menial factory jobs followed, frequently doubling-back, and staying for the ‘afters’ shift after doing the ‘days’ shift. Oh, look, the dishes are STILL in the sink. The company he was working for was having ‘financial difficulties’, and would ‘pay him next week’, so I kept accepting the double-backs, because it was only going to be a short-term thing. It wasn’t. The company went into administration, he was unemployed, and the dishes were still in the sink.

He found another job, and we entered another period of clutter-and-chaos, kicking crap behind the sofa when the in-laws car pulled up outside. Their tutting and eye-rolling was never directed at him, their blue-eyed-boy wasn’t expected to cook or clean, he had a woman to do that for him. Except I didn’t. He’d have sporadic tantrums, usually directed at my books, or letter-writing, “I didn’t grow up in a scruffy house, YOU didn’t grow up in a scruffy house, why do you let it get like this?” Erm, I did grow up in a scruffy house, and a couple of books aren’t really the issue here. He denigrated the me-things, it wasn’t the physical presence of books, or writing paper, or bits of art-and-craft materials, it was the fact that while I was reading, or writing, or making things, my attention wasn’t on him.

He’d occasionally decide he was going to clean up, but that usually lead to him emptying all of the videos out of the cabinet, dusting the shelves, and then deciding to watch a film, he really was rubbish. I started trying to play house, to please him, I had no idea what I was doing, literally, I shrunk his laundry, scorched his ironing, burned his dinner. Psychologically, I played right into his coercive control, we’d had the whirlwind romance, which had led to me excluding most of my friends, because he didn’t like them, and I didn’t want him to be angry with me. I didn’t like most of his friends, but I pushed the feelings, and their wandering hands away. I made myself less-than, back then, I idolised him, I had made him my ‘everything’, thrown myself into him, and this rabbit-hole precipice now is because I’m struggling to ‘find myself’. (Sick-bucket, please.) I spent 20 years walking on eggshells, trying not to upset him, more than half of that time, we’d accepted that the marriage was over, and I’d agreed to stay with him to avoid unsettling our son, or upsetting the Father-in-law.

Ironically, the near-miss with my brain haemorrhage made me more aware of cleaning. My sense of smell is heightened, and I have constant visual disturbances, as well as a tendency to knock things over. Heaps and clutter are just accidents waiting to happen. More than that, nearly dying made me realise I wasn’t really living. There’s a tangent here, the ex’s mother died after a brain haemorrhage, I both didn’t-want-him, and didn’t want to be a constant reminder of his past-loss. I survived what killed his idol, she was the strongest woman he’d known, until he met me, and I really didn’t think it was fair on either of us to continue with the sham half-life.

So, I’ll continue paring-down, throwing-out, and inventing new swear-words. Does the Vax machine that I’ve repaired with brute force, twisty-wire and duct tape ‘spark joy’? Of course it doesn’t. Does the fact that I’m finally managing to remove the stains he left from the carpet ‘spark joy’? Don’t be ridiculous, it’s physically painful, and every time I get the carpet wet, it re-activates the stench of dog-piss and engineering grease, I’m ploughing through my supplies of scented candles and wax melts at an alarming rate. I have a sense of achievement that I’ve managed to Womble-fix the Vax, and I know I’ll feel more content in myself after a couple more sessions of Vax-ing.

That was the point, I don’t do much in the way of ‘joy’, an old friend recently used ‘joy’ in a Facebook private message to me, and I shook my head. Looking for joy-and-only-joy is a futile existence, I’m not as miserable as the persona I project to the world, but humans aren’t designed to exist in a permanent state of ‘joy’ or ‘happiness’. It’s a fine aspiration to explore and embrace the truly wonderful, but it’s not a realistic expectation that everything-can-always-be-perfect. It can’t. These blogs are usually negative, it’s my way of purging, I do look for the positives in life, and there are many, but that Instagram-perfect isn’t me. I do false-front, I acknowledge that, but I refuse to buy-in to this something-saturation we’re bombarded with, I don’t need affirmation that I’m ‘enough’, I don’t need-to-be-needed, wanting-to-be-wanted is a different matter.

I am ‘enough’, and I struggle with other-people pushing ‘happy’ as the norm. I’m content with I-don’t-hate-this, and accepting I-hate-this-now-but-it-will-be-done-soon.

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