Last month I wrote a post on becoming unreachable due to housework. This is a different angle on the changes described in that post.
For the past year, I kept leaving the house when not on childcare, because all it takes to get sucked back in is hearing my baby young toddler cry hard, or having her reach for me. Sometimes I’d get off shift at 6pm and grab my boyfriend to say, visibly wild-eyed, “We should go somewhere. Anywhere.” I’d feel my sanity return as we puttered around in some clothing or lamp store we picked as our destination on our way out of the house.
There’s nothing wrong with my room, but it’s right next to one of my creature’s main hangout spaces. The space in the house that is most distant from her usual haunts is the garage. My painting setup lives there, but I haven’t seriously painted in there since moving because the space is terrible. Sick of being driven out of the house at 6pm every third day, I decided to make it less terrible. I converted it into a little 6x9 foot office (the size of the rug I put on the floor). I bought curtains and tension rods so it looks like an enclosed space, and hides the clutter and car right outside of it.
Boring home improvement stuff. So boring. I describe this as a concrete example of the kind of thing that now devours most of my brain. Building a space for my kid and also building a space where I can be away from my kid has forced me to occupy physical reality ten times harder than I occupied it before.
Once the baby was crawling I went OH SHIT, things need to be clean and findable. I’m buying two different types of floor cleaner. I need to know more about cleaning fluids in general. I want a good cutting board. I want to make the awful back yard safe for her so she can play. And maybe things should be… pretty… too.
I used to mostly live inside my head and outside my house, bypassing the middle zone. Now I live in my house so much. I’m obsessed with my house.
I’ve never made things in my living space pretty before. I thought it was preferable to have blunted senses to the prettiness of a space (or the niceness of one’s clothes), because it makes your happiness more robust against poverty. This was very important to me as a kid – I wanted to cultivate joys that could be had anywhere, for cheap, and anticultivate the other joys. My big fear was going blind because I couldn’t proof my joy against that calamity.
One friend, upon hearing this, thought my younger self was repressing the suffering of living in an ugly space. But I did not suffer. I remember walking into beautiful houses or office spaces and being unaffected (if I noticed at all). “Huh, the colors here match – I guess they value that for some reason. The art on the wall is actually beautiful – almost as nice as the infinite variety of art I can see on my computer.” But now that I’m cooking once or twice a day, I notice what my countertop looks like. I’m older and creakier, so the slope and softness of a chair matters more. When I’m in my living room repeatedly tuning into physical reality to check what my toddler is doing, I notice the contents of the walls in a way I never did when most of my living room time was focus time.
I now want my house to be nice, because I live in a house more than I have ever lived in a house before.
I’ve had other circles of protection crumble (in order, I started desiring expensive food, travel, clothes) but the corruption didn’t hit my personal home life until this year. And now I’m definitely, unambiguously, used to rich person standards of living. It got me. I am now constrained on a new axis. Motherfucker!