something alarming is happening where I don’t want to write blog posts or make art or write fiction but I do urgently want to clean the house
now. you’d think that I, person who really needs to clean their house, would be happy with this change. but instead it feels like the start of a bimboification arc which freaks me out
I am an ungrateful neurotic
the main thing consuming me right now is finding an intermediate fix for damaged and moldy windows that I am not happy with the baby touching. this is a fair amount of research and DIY. but also I’ve been buying a lot of secondhand furniture, obsessing over aesthetics. I’ve looked at all fifty pages of Target rugs
there are 1.5 rooms that are approaching Distinctly Nice To Exist In and I’m like holy shit can I have more of that
I’m afraid I’m going to enter an unending spiral of home improvement and it’ll suck away so much time and so much personality (and money obviously)
I feel like parenting has effectively removed a lot of my personality and I feel protective of what is left. do I really want to give it to home improvement…
I find it worrying that I have not wanted to write recently. for baby months 0-8 it felt like I would (largely cheerfully, although with regular brief plunges into despair/boredom/misery) do childcare and then lunge for the computer the moment she gave me rest to Get The Thoughts Out
and now… no thoughts? am I dead? is this it?
ok I guess I do have some nascent posts about this exact housewification arc but it might piss off other moms. war flashbacks to the time I tried to reference Beauvoirian reproductive vs productive labor to a mom I wanted to befriend and then (when she hadn’t heard of this) bungled the explanation badly enough that she got kind of offended and thought I was denigrating her work
(60% shitpost) sorry! you gettier cased me as not valuing women’s labor!!!!! I was actually trying to neutrally explain a useful-feeling feminist concept…
interjection from friend: my prior would be that you go through phases where you want to do this thing or that thing and perhaps you currently have a phase about house cleaning?
yeah I think this is what is happening
there are a few acute childproofing/cleaning problems that have come to a head (at least to me, my partners feel less urgently). as well as some routines that are almost established, which I’m impatient to make Fully Established. I want to stop living in doubt about when I am going to do laundry
but my ingrate brain is like “actually this is bad. as you’re going to get trapped in a standards cycle where the nicer the house is, the nicer you’re going to want it to be, until you are too addicted to cleanliness to have any time to write” (I am afraid of standards cycles because it happened to me with clothes, and oh no.)
cleanliness: not even once
you think you’ll try vacuuming just to “see what it feels like” and “because the other moms seem to vacuum sometimes” and bam it changes you neurologically and you’re doing it like twice a week henceforth
(reassuring self voice) at least you’re showering less…
anyway I’ll be normal about this
I think it’s fine to Write(/Paint) Basically Nothing for… 4 months? and I’m 2.5 months in. I’ll reassess whether I’m a domestic servant in early April and run screaming into the woods with my laptop if I am