Late-night confession . . .

I refuse to look at the time, but suffice it to say I was drifting off into this lovely feeling of slumber when lo, my thoughts started to get too focussed and my brain started to whir and now here I am, wide awake and needing to chat.

I realise I have not posted in forever, and I have many excuses as well as much repenting to do for this. I can explain why later. Right now, I've come to tell a particular story.


So, over the past few years I've been struggling with this issue, this concept, if you will. I've found that even though I am approaching 32, and I'm in charge of actual beings, my children, and finances, and wellness of others, I'm still somewhat not really believing in my life. I mean this in the sense that, when I toss around terms like 'my husband' or 'my mother-in-law' or 'my neighbour', my internal dialogue or feeling is always one of being a giggling imposter. That secretly I'm still 11, and I'm so surprised no one else has caught on yet that I am not in fact the adult you see before you, I'm only her stand-in while she's on a coffee break, and she'll be back any minute now. In the meantime, I'm just supposed to play the part. Does that make sense? It's like an inability to accept wholeheartedly that I give a crap that my upright washing machine irks me, or that I'm supposed to be organised enough to remember to bring snacks when we go out. That when friends bitch about domestic stuff, I can join in with the best of them,and yet a part of me inside is saying "What are you TALKING about Caelen??? Jesus, you're eleven for heaven's sake, all you care about are clothes and making up dance routines in your bedroom to songs you've recorded off the radio, remember?". That it just feels surreal. Anyhoo, it is in this vein that I often find myself unaware of domestic things I think I'm supposed to care about. That my neighbour comes over and happens to look up at my ceiling and notices cobwebs in corners and on our ceiling fan, and makes a silly joke about them being leftover hallowe'en decorations. And I think "oh crap, this is a domestic no-no, you're supposed to be on top of this stuff, it's society's expectation of your gender, you must care if your ceilings are clean or your baseboards are grime-free". And then right away, when no one's around, I fix the problem, vacuuming the ceiling or cleaning out the fridge of the rotting vegetables, hoping I'm adequately covering up my crime so I can keep my stand-in job and no one will know I'm actually totally not up on this domestic scene. And so over the years this has gone from throwing myself wholeheartedly into giving a crap, being organised and uptight about cleanliness, being stressed and snarky and anxious about keeping up appearances, to a new and fledgling attempt at being relaxed and realistic, while still maintaining the expected status quo. Trying to hang out with my kids, instead of forever saying, in a lame and nasal-y voice 'sorry, I've got laundry to do". The thought that in years to come my kids will hear this refrain so often that they'll truly believe it IS in fact the duty of my gender to give a crap about domestic whip-cracking that they'll believe that's all there is to me makes me want to throw up, or cry. So I'm trying to unwind, to be laissez faire about it all. And it was going alright for awhile there. I accepted my limitations, I settled for what we all were happy with, and started taking more books out of the library to read, just for me. Sure I often had bowls of compost sitting out on the hottub, waiting to get dumped in our bins in the alley. They'd get dumped eventually, and no one's getting hurt while they sit there, right? I'd recently admitted to two girlfriends that I haven't mopped or washed our floors in any way, at all, for 3 years, and they were fairly aghast. "but they look so clean!" they exclaimed, "how can this be?" and I said "exactly! if they look fine, why stress about cleaning them?". I felt my newfound perspective of realistic acheivement was the road to freedom, and that I could possibly think of keeping this stand-in job, with confidence, and be okay with not knowing how on earth you clean silver (I don't actually have any, but if I did I'd be clueless as to it's care) or how to make a mustard plaster for a congested chest. It would be okay to let Mrs. Cleaver die in the past, where she belonged.

And then a couple months ago, before our neighbours left on holiday, I was in our yard with Sonya, my neighbour, chatting about this and that. And I unconciously noted movement in the bushes to my right. We have grey squirrels who use our yard as a thoroughfare on an hourly basis, and so I'm used to seeing them scamper along this exact path. And my neighbour said "oh my, a rat". Excuse-me-what? A rat????!!!!!! Okay, I'm back in my 11 year old hiding in an adult's body place again, realising I've flunked whatever Western culture test of class there is, if I have a rat in my back yard. I assaulted Kit that night as he came through the door "we-have-a-rat-the-neighbour-saw-it-holy-shit-the-whole-neighbourhood-must-hate-us'. Of course, he was cool as a cucumber. Next week, I woke up and gathered all the bowls of compost off the porch and schlepped them out to the alley. On my way back in I noticed a huge rat, dead, on our patio. omigodomigodomigod. The cat had killed it. What if someone saw it? The whole town will start egging our house, we'll be accused of spreading disease. So I put a bucket over it and went and pestered Kit. He said oh it's our compost, it needs flipping, I'll handle it, blah blah blah. okay, fine. So some months go buy, and suddenly our aging cat is having a bout of youthfulness, because she brings a dead mouse (?) to the back door one morning. I get mildly grossed out, and throw it away. Then she brings another one. blech! Then she brings one inside the house to my office/the playroom. oh man, this is gross. But somehow in my head, they were mice (I never thought of them as small rats), it was gross, but cat's are carnivore's and hunters, whaddayagonnadoaboutit? So then we go away to Vancouver for our little holiday weekend. I've left unfolded laundry on the sofa with no guilt, the house needs a vacuum but I'll get to it eventually, right now I have life to live, you know? And when we come home, and I go into my study, I notice right away that it stinks. like poo. human poo, dig? and I call Kit in to confirm my olfactory findings. But where? The room is hardwood (I'd recently rolled up the area rug to accomodate my new desk placement) and there was nowhere really to 'hide' such a thing, nevermind how it got there or who's it was. (did I mention this post was going to be gross, really gross?). We look about, can't figure it out, chalk it up to a house being closed up for 4 days, open the windows` and get on with life. A few days later (oh god) a friend is over, and she walks into my office and says 'holy crap it stinks in here'. I'd forgotten or gotten used to it, neither of which is an okay reality. She says 'when I had a dead rat in my vent it smelled just like that'. well fine but we have no vents, we have nowhere for it to 'be'. When I'd rolled up that carpet, I hadn't carried it out to the shop yet to store it, I'd merely shoved it under my desk for the time being. One whiff of the end of that roll tells us things are not good within. Kit (see how I totally defer to gender stereotypes here and never deal with the rats myself? Gloria Steinem'd have my ass) takes the rug outside and unrolls it, and yes, dead rat. jesusjesusjesusjesusjesus. I'd been sitting above it at my desk for like 3 days! The cat must have brought it in, not yet dead,and it found a great hiding spot to go die in. At this point, I am thouroughly, wholly unhinged about this whole thing, and start to panic. I pull stuff out of our kitchen cupboards, deciding to tackle our poorly laid-out kitchen dynamic and re-new with vigor a bit of domestic sanity. All I really accomplished there was making a huge pile of stuff in the kitchen, to match the pile of laundry on the sofa. I go to bed, chastising myself for the messes and deciding to attack them all tomorrow while the kids play with our neighbours who are home from vacation. So we all get up this morning, it is also Hannah's birthday party today, I have a cake to bake and I need to get my brain organised for all my tasks of the day. Kit is at the table eating his breakfast, the kids are on the floor amidst big towers of tupperware and boards games and craft supplies, playin a board game and amusing Ivy with tupperware lids. I'm making their toast and chatting with my mother-in-law on the phone. We've been in this scenario for about 20 minutes, when I turn around and get a view of the room I'd not yet had that morning. And (big profanity warning here) HOLY FUCK!!!!!!! There is a HUGE dead rat under the kitchen table, not 14 inches from where Ivy and the kids are playing. fuckfucfuckfuckfuck! I shriek into the phone, and lie, saying something's burning on the stove so I can hang up and I stutter to Kit as my soul floats away from my body 'there's a fucking rat behind the baby'. He needs to move piles to find it. I am standing still, looking away, losing my mind. jesusjesusjesusjesus. This cannot be happening, I'm a nice middle-class wifey in a very middle-class town. Rat stigma has never really played a part in my life, but suddenly it is here and it holds a status far worse than my cobwebby ceiling fan. I am a woman untethered. Kit tosses the rat (double-bagged of course) and bleaches the floor. I work on the denial necessary to cope with the rest of the day. C'mon now, I'm hosting a birthday party in a matter of hours, there's no time to give this the total anxiety attack it is warranting in my books. I wonder to myself if I can justify giving the cat away, because SHE is the one creating all this drama and vermin in my house. Okay yes, we're the earth-loving hippies with the hand-made compost bins, but really now, the CAT's the one to blame here. I test out the idea on the kids "maybe Bodhi should go live with Nana", but they exclaim "No!" and squash the idea right there. I put on my slippers, the best defense against noticing your floors are dirty, and turn my mind to baking Hannah's cake. Eventually all thoughts of rats leave my brain, and my day carries on in it's former manner. It is only as I fade off to dreamland tonight that images start flashing in my mind, gross gross images. And suddenly, I'm WIDE AWAKE. And feeling fairly crappy about my domestics. And yes I can rail against the fct that it isn't only MY job to care for our home, but really, I can argue about that or I can just get the dang job done. So I came on here for some soul-cleansing confessing, and tomorrow we're going to get all hands on deck to clean this place up. I have a freezer full of ice cream sandwiches to motivate the young crew, and a bittle of vodka for Dad. It may not happen often, but we're going to get things tidied up enough that I can actually clean these damn floors. And possibly muzzle the cat. Is that legal? I imagine it is.