Like an Adventure...But Boring and Dirty

As I've been picking through my garage (a.k.a. the Pit of Despair) lately, beginning what promises to be a very long process of cleaning, sorting, and discarding, I've found myself thinking of the late George Carlin's routine on "stuff." I think I'm in the right frame of mind to be working on this task, because right now, I'm feeling very strongly that this "stuff" that I thought was so important to store (or at least was not willing to deal with in the moment, and thus chucked in the garage) is all sh*t. I have to admit, in the last couple of weeks I have entertained the notion of tossing a match on the lot of it, but I won't for the following reasons (not in order of importance):

• Objectively speaking, there are items of worth in there that can be donated and be of use to someone else.
• The garage is attached to the house, and therefore a fire in it could be less useful than I might otherwise suppose.
• The kids don't really need to see their mom go to jail for arson.

Due to the weather being hot and the garage generally being filthy and spiderwebbed, I have been working on cleaning it out in (very) short bursts. I tried to make these daily, but one day of a higher-than-average number of PTA emails and calls blew that plan (and my diligence has been sporadic ever since). Nevertheless, I've made some minor progress while causing an explosion of stuff all over what remained of the visible garage floor.

I started out by cleaning out the cabinet just next to the door into the house. When we moved into the house, the previous owners had used this tall, relatively shallow cupboard to store old paint and other chemicals, which my father pointed out was perhaps not the best idea given that it is right next to the water heater. Over the years I had filled it with old toys, empty boxes for our wedding china, spare tiles for our bathroom, half a bag of concrete mix, and various other odds and ends. In emptying it to restock the shelves with things I had definitely decided to keep (for now, anyway) and which had good reasons for being easily accessible from the house, I unearthed delightful items such as a rubber ball found years ago in a hedge, which had actually gone sticky from being in our overheated garage for many summers.

As I expanded my range I found items that I had once put away on the theory that I might want to use them again some day. However, standing (on average) knee-deep in old junk brought me the clarity to realize that I was never going to reinstall the brass toilet paper holder that I thought was too ugly to keep in the half bathroom. Likewise, I had stored some of the boys' old lunch boxes on the theory that if they lost their current ones, we would have backups. However, I cleared out the inventory because a seventh grader is more likely to choose starvation over using their old ripped first-grade Cars lunch box.

Not everything I found went into the trash. I took several bags of random old baby clothes and other oddments, plus the high chair, over to Goodwill last week. (Don't ask me how I keep finding baby clothes around here--I thought I had done a very thorough purge after Son #3's babyhood. Since I found a few more items AFTER my trip to Goodwill, I'm beginning to suspect the baby clothes are sprouting in the dark like mushrooms. Or else someone is messing with me.) On a day when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed and indecisive, I salvaged my cleaning session by dumping a large pile of old proofs from a year-old proofreading job in the recycle bin.

Finally, I sent my husband to the household hazardous waste center with more dead batteries (!) and an assortment of old electronics, including a TV antenna he guessed was from our apartment in Berkeley (and therefore completely incompatible with modern TV technology) and a cordless phone set we discarded because the rechargeable batteries in the handsets would no longer hold a charge. My husband, while not thrilled to go on this particular errand, I think accepted it as the price he has to pay for not having to sort through the junk himself, particularly given that he is not fond of spiders. Good thing, too, because I know there is a dead Xbox out there somewhere, and as long as we've waited this long to clean the place out, we're going to do it properly.

So I've made some reasonable progress on the reboot of the 1,000-Pound Project, as follows:

50.8 pounds donated clothes, shoes, household items, and high chair
19.8 pounds recycled proofs
11.6 pounds trash (including WTF items like the sticky ball noted above)
13.8 pounds batteries and e-waste

Total: 96 pounds

The bad news is that this hardly looks like I did anything at all, except make a bigger mess by tearing apart the carefully stacked piles of boxes and bags to investigate their contents. In eleven years of living in this house, we've transformed from a family of three with barely enough furniture to provide something to sit down on in each room of the house, to a family of five bursting the house at the seams with all of our stuff. The mess in the garage did not happen all at once; it grew gradually out of a series of decisions (or indecisions, as the case may be), which resulted in a growing accretion of papers, toys, appliances, sporting equipment, holiday decorations, luggage, and yes, out and out trash.

Do I wish I'd thrown more stuff out along the way? Bought less? Recognized when things that had outlived their usefulness here needed to head on to their second life somewhere else? Yes, yes, and yes. But I didn't, so now I get to enjoy my karma.

Karma always seems funnier when it is happening to someone else.

Getting Over Myself to Accept a Favor

One day about two weeks ago, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. She was headed off to the hazardous household waste disposal and wanted to know if I had anything I needed taken over there.

Boy, did I. I have been saving dead batteries for years, knowing that they didn't belong in the regular trash. However, I never quite managed to get them to any one of the not-so-conveniently located disposal facilities, so they piled up. So what started out as a small plastic bag of dead AAs and AAAs became a larger bag, which then finally ended up as a 25-pound box of batteries. (Yes, I weighed it before I handed it over to her.) To her credit, though my friend was visibly surprised when I lugged it out to her car (I think she was expecting a few CFLs and maybe a handful of batteries), she gamely took it, even when I expressed doubt that the facility might have a limit on how much material you could turn in at once. She reported "mission accomplished" via text about half an hour later.

Here's the crazy part of this story: When she called to ask if I had anything to get rid of, I almost said no. While one part of my brain immediately started trying to figure out where in the garage that box had been stashed, an internal counterargument immediately kicked in, which sounded something like, "It will be a lot of trouble for her to take care of that for you. You should do it yourself. It will be too embarrassing to show her how long you've been putting this off." It did take a slight effort of will to ignore that inner voice and just take her up on the offer. After all, she was just offering to take something along to a place she was going anyway--so why did I feel like it was such a big deal to let her do me a favor?

There are two answers, one simple and one more complex. The simple one is that whatever that box physically weighed, its weight in guilt was enormous. It was a pretty potent symbol of the domestic things I do not manage to get done, and getting rid of it appropriately was, from an emotional standpoint, a pretty huge favor.

The other one, though, left me wondering about the nature of friendship. I realized that I often do not ask for favors from my friends, even when I need them, even when the task is simply accomplished, and even when I know the friend who I would ask would be more than willing to help out. But the part that gets really screwy is that I don't mind being asked for a favor when the situation is reversed.

I found when I first moved to L.A., over 12 years ago, that making friends was harder than I expected. My main avenue for meeting other women was through my kids, and I rapidly found out that sometimes all I had in common with them was the fact that we both had kids. It took a long time to find anyone with whom I felt comfortable discussing more than the superficial dishing that parents do with one another on short acquaintance about lack of sleep, the nastiness of dealing with diapers (and the related discussions on green poop), and Odd Things That Children Put in Their Mouths. It felt kind of lonely to constantly be communicating at the level of cocktail-party banter, all amusing anecdotes low on substance.

In those early years, I made some rules for myself to help weed out the acquaintances that I knew would never end up in the category of Friends I Call for No Reason Whatsoever When I Need to Talk. One of the first rules was to avoid flagrant violators of the unwritten Social Contract of Sisterhood in Motherhood, which states that when someone tells you something unflattering about their child, you do not respond by talking about what a perfect angel your child is. For example, if I told another mom about how Son #2 got into the laundry room and dumped a cupful of cat food into the fountain-type water dish, necessitating a half-hour cleanup and a superhuman effort on my part not to swear in front of him, and she responded with an anecdote about how her similarly-aged daughter insisted on putting her own dishes into the dishwasher immediately after every meal, then I'd know she wouldn't make the short list. You are supposed to then relate how your child did something similar (i.e., telling a tale about how your child is apparently using the scientific method to determine exactly how large a toy can be flushed down the toilet before it stops working entirely and a plumber has to be called) so that your friend can feel assured that her child is not the only one in the world who does stupid/mischievous things.

The other major rule was to avoid the What Did Your Little Devil Do to My Little Angel types. These people are pretty easily spotted when their kids are in preschool, because preschoolers tend to get in spats where everyone involved has done something wrong (i.e., Child A grabs toy away from Child B, Child B responds by whacking Child A). In a perfect world, Child A's mom would explain to Child A that while it was not okay for Child B to hit them, it is also not okay to grab toys away from other people, and Child B's mom would be giving the reverse explanation to Child B (with perhaps a soupçon of "hitting is worse than grabbing" thrown in). Ideally both moms would then talk to the kids about the appropriate way to interact. With the Little Devil/Little Angel types, what happens in practice is that whatever your kid did was wrong and whatever their kid did was okay, thus throwing all the blame on to your child no matter what the situation is (i.e., Child A's mother insists that Child A had been waiting a long time for that toy and just can't be expected to wait forever, and Child B is a monster for hitting them). These people are impossible to deal with, and while the situations get more subtle as their kids age, the basic M.O. is the same. 

The rest of my friend-selection strategy simply has to do with time. I don't have a lot of it, so I'm choosy about who I spend it with. I love to read and I hate reality television, so I'm not likely to have much in common with someone who reverses those preferences. My idea of a luxury shoe buy is a pair of Dansko clogs (so comfortable...), and most of my friends similarly favor comfort over style in their footwear. In short, I do consciously what we all used to do unconsciously in our youth--find my level with people who have similar interests and attitudes.

Luckily, in the nearly eleven years we've lived in our current house, I've gotten to know a number of women I would describe as good friends. So why do I hesitate to accept help from them when I need it? And why do I almost never ask? Have I simply lost the ability to instinctively know who to trust after all those years of holding people at arm's length until I could determine if I could relate to them? I'd describe this as a personal problem except that I see my friends do the same thing all the time. Not all of them, though; clearly the "rugged individualists" among us need to take a cue from the moms who are more willing to connect and ask for help.

I'll remind myself of that the next time I hesitate to take up a friend when they're offering me a hand. After all, what's 25 pounds of dead batteries among friends?