Housework, a website client, Satsang stuff… eek! I’m glad it’s spring or I’d be depressed with all the stuff I need to do.
HOUSEWORK… The house situation is out of hand. I have three days worth of dishes from three eaters to do. I’ve already done two loads and I am barely halfway done. Is it wrong to want a fucking dishwasher?! Or a little help? Brett doesn’t do dishes every month or so; he does ’em once or twice a year. I have grown to hate the never-ending drudgery of washing the fucking dishes day after day after day. Argh!
The whole house, as always, needs to be dusted, swept, and tidied. And now I have two men to pick up after, so it’s twice as much work. They’re both from the same planet – you know the one: it’s where they sit on the couch listening to you clean until you’re all but done, and then wander in blinking with innocence and ask, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Well, hell, not any more! And you know it quite as well as I do, thank you, or your timing wouldn’t be so perfect night after night after night. You also know that you would not have done it yourself in any case, so there’s no reason to even bother the nicety of the lie. Just keep your mouth shut and go reinstall your ass on the couch in front of the television where you apparently think you belong.
Brett hasn’t emptied the burn barrel for me, even though I’ve been asking him weekly for a month and a half. I have eight bags of garbage sitting around that I can’t get rid of. He seems to think it’s not his problem; that I should go dump in all in the LISCO dumpster, but I think they’d notice nearly two month’s worth of household trash in their dumpster, not to mention that I really don’t want to drive that much stinking trash to town in my leather-interior vehicle, thank you very much.
I’m out of laundry detergent because I mis-gauged… Mike does laundry too, so I ran out earlier than I expected.
The rugs and towels from the recent flooding are still dirty and they smell like hell. I put them all out to dry, so at least I can carry them… I need to take them to the laundromat I guess.
There’s no split firewood so we’re wasting propane like crazy. Brett never really did split enough wood this winter, so when he or Mike feel like it they go out and split a few logs, but there’s no effort to make sure there’s enough for when they’re not home.
I have no money to go buy any groceries or landry detergent. Or to visit the laundromat. (It’s Super Expensive Time of the Year again. Yippee. Property tax, balloon payments, oh my.)
Yes, I’m feeling pissed off about housework. I know I shouldn’t be, because this is the agreement that Brett and I have made (he gets to be a pig and I get to work part-time) and Mike’s our guest so I should be honored to do a few piddly chores for him, but I’m resentful anyway at having two men to pick up after.
I’m a black-hearted bitch, essentially.
WEBSITE… A nearby Coop is hiring me to build their website. Hooray! I’ve got to fax over a quote this weekend. The timing is perfect; that money will probably feed us during this, the Super Expensive Time of the Year. Praise Amma.
SATSANG… Mother will return to Iowa this July and I’m one of the seva coordinators as well as being the webmaster. This means I get a flurry of emails every day and I’m spending a lot of time already dealing with hosting the tour stop. It’s only March! Will I have time to even breathe in June?
It’s freezing in here, so my kindling fire probably went out. Plus I’ve got dishes to finish, and dinner to scrape out of what little remains in the pantry. Ciao, all!
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…of course, mere hours after I make a post like that, Brett and Mike get home from work and Mike, seeing me make dinner, inquires, “Anything I can do to help?”
And I reply, “No, I think I got it. …Thank you for asking, though.”
Buh!
Boys are funny. Adam went to the trouble of unloading the dishwasher while I was a work today, loading up the few dishes that were in the sink, then made himself lunch and left the greasy ass pans and plates right there on the counter. Lord.
You either have to let this go, or find some other way of managing this work, because the resentment building in you will turn to resentment of him, and that’s a tough position to recover from. I hope it’s productive to vent about it here…
You two have been married how long now? Dig it: if he was going to change, he would have done it by now. You either have to raise the stakes sufficiently to motivate change, or accept that it isn’t going to change.
You’re already starting to get on yourself about bitching about it–instead of doing that, why not focus on the negative trip you get into noticing all this, noticing him not noticing.
You clean because you care enough to clean–that’s something intrinsic to you, MUSH, not yer husband. These are things you care about enough to actually do–and this is way more prevalent in you than it is in your husband.
(And, yes, I remember that we have already had this conversation: if you stop doing it, he gets offended. That’s just mendacious and contradictory–it’s one thing to not think cleaning is important, it’s entirely another to think that it’s important someone else do it all the time.)
Here, we break down on a basic respect issue–either you demand the respect you believe you deserve (and be willing to dole out consequences for not getting it), or you deliberately choose to decouple those emotions and quit growing this seed of resentment. It’ll eat you up, and eat away at your marriage–resentment’s bad juju.
Mush, you should put your foot down and demand a dishwasher in the new kitchen.
Ah, the ranting helped. And you guys’re awesome. The house is clean now, my hubby was a doll when he got home last night, Mike split a few days worth of wood without being asked, and there was plenty of food to cook. Sometimes a girl just wants to bitch a little.
I still haven’t entirely recovered from the basement flooding; things like that always sets me off.