misplaced mama

My mother used to iron my father’s cloth hankies.  I think about that now, as I pull B’s crumpled clothes out of the dryer, button downs that he has to wear for sales meetings that look like elephant skin.  I don’t even own an ironing board and don’t ask me where the iron might be stored.  My mother use to fold and press, fold and press, creating a perfect square of a hankie, steam it all over and set in a small white pile of others that would soon be covered in my father’s snot an stuffed in the back pocket of his trousers.  She did this every morning while she sipped her coffee and listened to music.  She did this after she fingered the rosary but before we were up and had to make us breakfast.  She’d play her music, which was alternate elevator music and old Rod Stewart, and iron things like hankies and clothe napkins and tableclothes and underwear.  Yes.  Underwear.

In a million years I would never do anything like that.  I hate housework.  It makes me feel like I’m drowing.  I think I figured my mother must have hated all if it too because why wouldn’t she?  She was just a product of being brought up in an era that cleaned like a maid.  I’d imagine that she took up her days with housework, ironing and pleating, mending, and dusting, windexing and vacuuming to escape her real life; a life she never got to hold onto because she was the full-time, stay at home mother of seven children.  But now I see it a little differently, and I see she wasn’t escaping anything, nor was she being forced by cultural norms.  She was just living it.  In each fold, in each press of the steam button, she was living it.  And now I’d guess that was her form of spirituality, her practice; being in the clean of all things.  What I’ve been known to call OCD was probably more like my mother finding god in each moment of scrub and scour, press and fold.

And here I am in the rush.  I whip the clothes outta the washer, throw them in the dryer, too lazy to run across the property and hang them on the line, although in my heart I know that’s what I want to be doing: enjoying the morning sun while i carfully pin up the clothes, each baby piece cuter than the next,  noticing how soon the baby will be grown out of the clothes.  Instead, I  take what’s in the dryer and throw them in the basket, lug them upstairs to the couch in my bedroom and dump them out.  Done.  Laundry done.  Dig through the pile when one needs clothes.  I take the spray bottle of vinegar and lemon water and a bit of soap and start spraying like a madwoman.  Here there and everywhere I just spray and wipe, trying to get the crud off surfaces, but really I never do and am just fine with letting clumps and lumps of whatever stick the to granite top table.  I hand-pick big fuzzy shit off the carpeted parts of the house.  Not really interested in looking for the special vacuum cleaner bags that I need to replace the overflowing one in our vacuum.  One more day without vacuuming will be fine.  Depsite all the husky hair.  I wash my face half-assed, no gently circular motions or patting dry.  Get dressed without even looking at what I’m putting on.  Stir the oatmeal for Mia while thinking about the assumed struggle between how much honey she wants in it and what I am willing to allow.  Stressing over the garden while I gaze out the kitchen window. It is still not ready for the next season of growing.  Cracking an egg for Sula while cursing my husband for not finishing the chicken coop yet so we can stop buying organic eggs.  Always on to the next moment.   Always insulted by the present.  It seems this is where I am these days.

You know the ridges on old cabinets?  We have original cabinets from when the home was constructed, built right into the house.  They have a lot of area and corners and little ridges to clean.  I hate those spots and so I let them gather with dust and dirt and wildly flung coffee grinds and dog hair.  My mother had the same kind of cabinets.  She’d sit on the floor, humming along to the radio, with a little rag on her finger.  Never was there an ounce of dirt on her cabinets. I think back now and I can see her, in her act, never rushed or hurried or annoyed she had to do it.  She just cleaned it.  The look in her eyes, now that I remember, was a look of thanks, of gratitude.  She like to clean she liked her house.  She made love to her cleaning, cleansing the space she created for her children.

I drag myself to the pile of clothes on the couch.  I pick up a few shirts and hang them on hangers.  I try to be thankful, thankful we have clothes, happy that my husband has a job to wear them.  I pick up my new skirt, a fast favorite, take it between my hands and snap it in front of me. There.  Nice and crisp, just like ironing, practically.  I am grateful for this skirt, too, made locally and sustainably.  I take the rest of the clothes and carefully hang them on hangers, I make love to each move and moment, each piece of clothing I look at and feel, notice loose threads or stains that need to be dealt with.  I put them on the hangers in careful way so they won’t just fall off once I hang them on the rod in the closets.  I hand each of them one at a time.  I don’t hurry or rush.  The baby is sleeping.  The girls are having fun brushing their teeth.  I can be here in this, this can be my practice.  I am trying to like it more and even if I can’t, it can still be what I do fully.  It feels good.  My shoulders drop.  My breath comes back. 

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I guess we all have our own spiritual practices that somehow we have to find while we mother full-time.  For my mom it was getting the dirt out,the wrinkles out, the stain out.  For me?  I guess I am still exploring.  Back here I had it down a bit better.  Right now I am still just living, wondering when my a-ha moment will come.  I spin my poi, feeling ready for another night of lighting them on fire.  I dance.  I sing to the baby in sankrit.  I write.  I love.  I cut fresh flowers from our garden.  I water each plant throughout the property my hand. I wipe faces and kiss owies, and change diapers. I make a million snacks that never get eaten.  I think of mother carefully folding the hankies, so thoughtfully and easily.  So proud of her piles and so grounded in her job.  While I was home last week my mother said to me, I can’t wait until this {the chemo} is all over.  I want to have everyone over for dinner and make all the food myself and then clean it all up with no help.  I can’t wait.  I think of all this was taken away from me, my ability to mother and take care of my kids and my house, perhaps making love to each moment is all I need and that right there, is all the practice i need i right now.

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*thanks to Matt Sevenau, the other half of urbanearthmama, who described his wife to me as a person who ‘makes love to everything’.