Madness and mess

Or how women are always the ones picking stuff up over and over again until they die

It has taken me fifty years to realise that my eyes function in a different way to my partner’s eyes. I notice more stuff than he does. I’ve mentioned this before in fact. And it’s not fun stuff like a butterfly sunning itself on a rose bush. Or a cat nuzzling up against the back of a knee. No it’s mess.

MESS.

Summer has started in earnest, and the children are home for the next six weeks (with a small week away here and there). I will be working for some of this ‘holiday’ and already the familiar gut churn has started. The awareness that not only will I be responsible for working, but will also be dealing with 75% of the mess that is created over and over again.

Last night I came home from seeing the ‘Barbie’ film with my eldest daughter. I was still thinking through some of the core themes of the film (and how it was entirely grown up and had a lot of stuff to mull over in terms of the patriarchy). I was also thinking about how so many women get a bum deal (to say the least), and how Barbie doesn’t have a messy house.

After a long, fractious journey on the bus home (me starving, my daughter sugared up to the gills) I got in the house holding a bag of chips which I planned to stuff into my face in a dark room, on my own, just breathing and eating chips and not having to listen to requests for Prime, popcorn, and weird gherkins in a plastic bag (has anyone else noticed how these are being sold as treats alongside all the usual sugary fare?)

The kitchen looked as if a bomb had gone off scattering cup cakes, bowls, felt tips, paper, shoes, and mismatched socks all over the floor. I put the chips down, and my daughter and I argued about who should have the most chips, but in essence the anger was misdirected. I was angry at my partner who was lying on the sofa watching golf. He was relaxed, so relaxed in fact, that it looked as if his spine had been medically removed, and he’d fused his body with that of the sofa.

I took myself upstairs with my hard-won chips and sat on the bed. My heart was going hard. I was furious. So mad. The cat looked at me and seemed to raise one eyebrow.

I came back down, started to empty the dishwasher (I’m yawning as I write as this stuff is so so tedious), then I put a fresh load of crap in there, put the pens away, tided away all the food on the floor, threw socks in the washer, stacked everything away again, quickly hoovered with the hand vac and then, only then did I sit down in the front room.

I will not say anything. He has done baking. He has looked after the other kid. He has put her to bed. But still this restless, maddening anger brewing. How is it possible? HOW CAN ANYONE RELAX WITH THIS LEVEL OF MESS?

I have thought a lot on this issue because it is a common one. The issue is that women, most of the women I know cannot kick back and chill when the house looks like a crack den. They can’t. It’s physically impossible.

Sure when I was a teenager I’d happily lie on my bed listening to INXS, and imagining I was married to Michael Hutchence with mugs of half drunk tea and bowls of soggy cereal all over the shop. I’d let dirty clothes fester in piles on the floor, and blobs of coconut hair gel go solid on my bedside table.

Then, once I hit my twenties and had a boyfriend and we lived together I just took the role of ‘The Tidy- Tsar’, the mistress of anti-mess. Sure he did the washing up and he sometimes vacuumed, but I was the chief chambermaid and he was my lackey. He didn’t have high standards, and he was happy to let spaghetti dry in the pan till you had to pick it off with a fingernail. He was happy to let dried budgie poo rest unattended. Or leave ashtrays overflowing. And I realised I wasn’t. I realised that there was something in my chemistry, my biology which meant I could not sit and listen to ‘The Orb’ with mess and chaos. That I couldn’t accept a bong when there was a dried up tissue nestling in a mug next to the bed. That I’d rather get dizzy with tiredness than rest and let the mess live on.

‘Why did you leave the kitchen in such a mess?’ I finally blasted at him this morning.

A morning where I’d sat on the anger for several hours, brewing it up until it had become a burning hatred, the kind where you scare yourself by the intensity of the bad feelings towards the other person. I started to imagine harmful things happening to him in disgusting, novel and terrible ways.

‘What do you mean? I filled up the dishwasher!’ he said, his anger and indignation matching mine immediately.

He tried to wrestle a saucepan out of my hands that was filled with crusty risotto that I’d neglected to tend to the previous night, the one thing I’d left when I’d retired upstairs, and vented my feelings on my own face- cleaning it so rigorously that it stung from over-cleansing, and still looked sore and red this morning.

IT IS NOT ENOUGH! I felt like screaming. THE STANDARD IS NOT HIGH! IF YOU WERE A FUCKING CLEANER YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN SACKED YEARS GO! IT IS FRANKLY SHOCKING THAT YOU CAN WATCH GOLF WHEN ALL AROUND YOU IS THIS LEVEL OF DISGUSTINGNESS.

We both walked off. Intent as many parents are not to show anger in front of the children, and to instead file it away inside so they learn something more damaging perhaps- that feelings have to be squished rather than vented so you can keep others happy.

I am curious, always curious that many partners can’t seem to see the mess in the same way as their other halfs. The same evening my partner had stepped out of his shorts and left his pants still inside. They were standing on the bed like an invisible man was kneeling inside them. Literally standing up like the opposite of one of those cheerful towel sculptures you get on the bed if you go away to a nice hotel. This invisible man did not exist but I imagined in that moment that he could speak, and would maybe say exactly the things that I wanted to hear.

He would say something like: ‘You look tired my love. Your face looks sore. Let me go and clean the kitchen whilst you watch some reality TV. Let me do a really good job. I won’t leave anything undone. I want to do the equivalent of a deep clean down there. Like you’d do if you had a lot of time and energy. And let me also pair up all the clean socks. I won’t leave them dried up in balls on the radiator as I usually do. And after that I will pick the hair out of the bathroom plug, and empty the bin next to the loo which is full of rotting banana peel, and things that are too frightening for any human to face. Have some peace and quiet. I love you. All is well.’

I close my eyes listening to this fantasy beast, this creature of my imaginings, more sensual words have I never heard in my entire life and my blood tingles in my veins, with the faint whisper of hope and new things.

I love you oh fantasy swan sculpture. Man with pants inside shorts who is invisible but sees it all.