A Mom…Not HIS Mom
I’m in the kitchen, cooking dinner. I’m tired, but I’m in a groove. Finish this, eat, and then I’m done for the day. Adam is sitting on the couch in the living room and he can see me cooking.
“Anything I can do to help?”, he asks, and I am incandescent with rage.
The first time, I just answered the question - no.
The next few times I laughed it off.
Then it became a joke.
Then it started to really piss me off.
I know how to cook. I cook well. I plan meals that I’m reasonably sure that I can make with the amount of energy I will have at the end of the day. I also (generally) ask for help when I need it.
So what, exactly, is the point of waiting until I’m halfway through making dinner and then asking if I need help?
Turns out he felt bad sitting there watching me cook. Okay, fine.
THEN YOU DO IT. Plan a meal, shop for it, cook it. I will happily watch tv at the end of the day while you do. But what you’re absolutely not going to do is make me soothe your guilt while I’m also making dinner. Sir. No.
(That was about 15 years ago…it’s better now…)
I’m deep cleaning the house.
The kids are with my in-laws for weeks so I have time to move slowly, to go room by room and really scrub everything. I’ve made lists for each room because my memory is a Long COVID addled mess and I don’t want to miss anything. But the gist of it is, take everything possible out of the room, Clean the room from top to bottom, outside to inside. Clean the things I removed. Put only the things that need to be in that space, back into the space.
It takes hours. Everything aches and my body simply doesn’t have the strength it did before I got sick. I take lots of breaks and I move slowly, sometimes there’s a soundtrack of grunts and moans as I go but I try to cover that up with music. More and more I feel like my home is shaking off years of illness right alongside me.
Except for this pile of…stuff…in the library.
While I worked on the living room yesterday, Adam went into the library. He started removing tape that had been on the floor from when we painted the cabinets, years ago. I didn’t pay too much attention.
This morning there is a big pile of furniture, toys, and assorted things in the middle of the floor. Two things have been crossed off of the list for that room. It was hours and hours of…something going on in there, but I have no idea what was done.
Every time I look in there my blood pressure starts to rise because it makes no sense. I cannot see the logic that got us there. And I’m trying to remember that in the middle of my cleans there are multiple points when things look ridiculous, but they are actually part of a logic chain.
I’m breathing.
But I know what happened.
He’s seen me doing my deep cleans and he feels guilty that I’m doing this work when he’s not so he decided to jump in.
He didn’t decide to google how to deep clean a room, or to follow the list I made for each room. He didn’t stop to think about how I’m only doing one project each day, paying attention to my energy and strength, and asking for help when I need it.
Nope. He had some feelings and started piling furniture in the middle of the room to ‘help’.
If this had been one of my children, I would have stopped them as soon as they started. We would have talked about their ‘why’ and I would have helped them process their emotions. Then they either could have actually helped me or gone on about their day.
I’m a mom. But I am not HIS mom. His mom is a lovely woman named Cindy who does Zumba.
Maybe I’ll be surprised when he gets up. Maybe he was just stopping in the middle for some reason and he has a plan to finish the room on his own. I doubt it.
Today I am finishing some work I need to do for Whole Human Mama. Then, I’m tackling the kids bathroom and finishing off each of their rooms. That is all I’m doing today.
He’s a 46 year old man with multiple degrees. He can figure this out.