Its all in the dust...

Cooking and cleaning can wait til tomorrow,
for babies grow up I've learned to my sorrow.
So settle down cobwebs, and, dust go to sleep,
Im rocking my baby, and babies dont keep!
- Anonymous

This quaint poem hangs in every cluttered, messy home I've ever been to. Whether cross stitched or cast in plastic, it's guaranteed to be covered in dust. It's touching, for sure. A message of relief to the overburdened mother responsible for a household containing children. I remember it hanging crookedly in our living room growing up, next to massive harvest colored yarn Gods eye on the living room wall, which was also covered in cobwebs. It was a favorite of my Mothers. It still hangs in her home, though the children (and grandchildren) are long since grown. It doesn't stand as an excuse when the children are no longer there, but yet, it still hangs proudly with a layer of detritus consisting of pet hair, dirt, old skin, and carbon from countless burnt dinners.
Over the past 40 years or so, I've seen it hanging on the dingy wall, offering a rationale for the environment, a reason for the conditions I found myself raised in. Over the past four decades, I have begun to resent the poem, and its presence in people's homes. I've begun to blame it for ...everything.

There were seven of us kids in that tiny three-bedroom, one bath house. Two parents, and at least three to four indoor pets at any given time. Our parents were the basic package- stay at home mother, working father who had weekend hobbies. Early in their marriage, they bought a brand-new ranch style home in a newly developed rural area. I was born and raised in that home. They drove a used vehicle that got bigger and bigger, just as our family did.
We went to church, religiously. It wasn't your average religion of course, it was one of the 'different' ones, and our folks were actively involved in it, teaching classes and offering home visits for those who could not attend. It was wholesome, and kind. Our parents were perceived as moral and upright, aka good people. By default, I felt like a good person too. I was their child, after all.

It took longer than I'm proud of to realize that we were different, but once I did, I couldn't stop thinking about it. My parents produced a child, on average, every two years. I was the second born of the seven, so I remember more than many of the others. I remember having my own room until I was four, when a sister arrived and was assigned to share my space. The next child was another girl, so soon there were three of us crowding the tiny bedroom. By the time I was twelve, the fourth girl had arrived, and I'd begun to get anxious about where she would fit. Already our small room was bursting at the seams with bunkbeds and laundry and toys. Where would she go? As it stood, we had to step up into our bedroom, atop the mass of stuff littered about the floor. Broken toys, dirty laundry, even uneaten food stuffs were strewn about. My friends didn't have rooms like that, but also, most of them didnt have to share a room, so they were able to be tidier. When I'd been younger, I'd had friends over for sleep overs, and I'd been to come to theirs. But after the clutter began to build, the visits, and invitations, stopped. This was difficult for me, because I very much enjoyed the time I spent at other peoples homes. Everyone lived so differently than we did.

My best friend had a gregarious mother, full of life and energy. Unlike my mother, she wore make-up and worked. She as always busy and always bringing home fun clothing to try on. She owned a women's resale clothing store in the city. She was everything my mother wasn't, and she smoked like a chimney to boot. Her home was always tidy. Not impeccable, but definitely presentable. Furnished with modern appliances and couches. Throughout junior high and high school, I spent loads of time over there. When I would return home, my mother never failed to make a comment about how I smelled like an ashtray and how she didn't know how I could stand to be in a smoker's house with that stench. I wondered if she really couldn't smell the smell that emanated from the filthy carpet, stacked dishes and laundry amassed in our household. I could smell it on my clothing, and frankly I preferred smelling like stale cigarette smoke.

When I was seven, I remember my father converting the two-car garage into three separate rooms. Two of which were bedroom sized, the other serving as the laundry room. I whole heartedly believed he was building my older brother and I our own rooms and was ecstatic about finally having my own space. But I was mistaken. The rooms were built to divide my parents 'stuff' into personal spaces. My mother now had a 'sewing room' (she didn't sew) and my father had his do-not-enter room- containing Vietnam memorabilia, and the ever present food storage their religion encouraged/required. I know what these rooms contained because it there was so much stuff, they couldn't shut the doors. It was all the same stuff that had crowded the garage for a decade. The boxes and stuff that never allowed the garage to have a car parked in it. Not once.
Given that, it made sense to convert the garage. However, if the boxes hadn't been opened in more than a decade, why did we need the stuff? I wondered.

As I grew into a teenager, my resentment deepened. By then, I knew other people did not live the way we did. No one else I knew had to clear a spot before finding a place to sit. No one else had to shimmy their wet bodies into dirty clothes post-showers because there were never any clean towels. No one else had to kneel down to pull items out of the washing machine because the laundry room was 3 feet deep in packed dirty clothing.
My grandmother knew. My mothers mother knew how we lived, and I could tell that it bothered her, but she never said anything. They lived close, within 4 miles, and we spent a lot of time over there, but she would never come to our home. I would occasionally complain to her about the condition of our house and how very much it bothered me. She would gently encourage me to do what I could on my own to keep it tidy. But she didn't truly understand.
Our mother wouldn't let us.
She had restrictions on what we could do, when. I wasn't allowed to use the washing machine until I was twelve, and that was only because none of us had any clean underwear. Not one of us. She had just had yet another baby and was too exhausted to do the laundry, yet we weren't allowed to. I took it upon myself to dig through the hoards of dirty clothing, find all the socks and underwear I could and do a load. She was furious. What if I'd broken the machine? Then what would they do? It was not a toy. Not something I should be playing with. Could I afford to fix it if I broke it?
In retrospect, I think she was embarrassed. I had made a clear point that our needs were being neglected, and she did not like to think she lacked as a mother in anyway. And truth be told- in what was important to her, she did not lack. We never lacked for church books to read. We had an entire library (floor to ceiling wall hung bookshelves loaded) of faith-based books, that were earnestly added to, every season. She enjoyed cross stitch, so the girls were all supplied sewing kits with lessons from our grandmother. She enjoyed music, so we all had piano lessons. But when it came to the daily needs of a household- she taught us nothing.

As the oldest daughter, one would think I'd be writing about how I was expected to do everything. I was the housemaid. But I was not. None of us were allowed to wash dishes because she felt we didn't do it right and she' have to do them all over again. It felt futile to try to sweep or vacuum because there was so much in the way, you had to move things to get access to the carpet.
The issue was there was simply too much stuff. The problem with that was we weren't allowed to throw anything away. My mother had to 'sort' everything that came into, and out of, the house. I've never understood why. Why would she want the responsibility of other peoples 'stuff?'

When I was in the seventh grade, my mother was pregnant with the youngest child and got incredibly sick. She had a blood clot in her lung that was threatening to move to her heart. They encouraged her to abort, but she couldn't do it. Instead, they put her on bedrest. There is no such thing as bedrest when you have six children at home, so she was hospitalized for several weeks.
My father worked full time, so my grandmother would come stay during the day while he was working, helping out with the kids until I got home and could take over. I had never seen our home so tidy. Even with the boxes and stuff crowding the corners of every room, the dishes were done, and the floors were clean. I had matching socks for the first time since I could remember, and there were towels on the shelves in the bathroom. It was ... incredible. My grandmother helped me go through the toy s in our bedrooms, and throw away things that had no purpose, or were broken. My mother wouldn't let me throw anything away because it may not be mine, or it may be a missing piece to a game, or it may be useful to someone else if not me. This kind of logic quickly makes for clutter and garbage. My grandmother didn't have time for that, so she tossed what looked broken and useless. She didn't dare touch my mother's stuff, but the kid toys were fair game. Or so she thought.
When my mother returned with a baby in hand, we thought she'd be ecstatic about the help she'd been given. The house looked so much better! It even smelled better! But she wasn't. She was seething.

I was happier than I had been in a very long time. My mind felt free of the daily burden of wondering what clean clothes there were for church or school. I didn't worry about having to turn my underwear inside out to have a 'cIean' pair. I didn't wonder where my things were because they had a place and were put away. There was a cleared dining room table to eat at or do our schoolwork for the first time in years. It was a small semblance of order, and it brought me a comfort I hadn't known before. And yet, she was angry.
The message I received from this was that she didn't want us to be happy. We didn't deserve the feeling of comfort. We hadn't earned a good home life. What she wanted was the only thing that mattered. She needed to control everything. This pivotal moment changed our relationship.


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