Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A Dent.

We have done something awful to our home. It started with my husband having an idea. He wanted to move around some furniture. I tried to distract him from his idea, and it worked for a long while; however, eventually, he decided to start moving furniture around.

My husband has great ideas, but he has a hard time following through with them. He started moving the furniture around in our house, but he never quite finished. There are living room components in the bedroom and bedroom parts in the kitchen. Everything is in a constant state of discomfort and disarray, and it seems that we have finally given up. There is trash, dirty laundry, dishes...everything, everywhere. For a while, it drove me crazy. I don't care anymore. I think my antidepressants have taken the edge off nicely.

Much of the mess is my husband's. I have managed to keep my laundry from being everywhere like some kind of lunatic confetti. My mess includes books and papers, but it's a pretty isolated area where I've stacked the books, waiting for a bookshelf to emerge out of the wreckage. Because it is his mess, I am reluctant to begin dealing with it. It's one of the cardinal rules of recovery...never do for the addict what the addict can do for himself. This is a mess my husband has made, and it should be his to clean up.

However, it is disheartening to come home and see the wreckage. It makes me kind of sad and tired. He says every day that he's going to clean it up, and he doesn't. He doesn't even begin. In fact, it gets worse...more clothes go everywhere. More dishes pile up in odd places. It's pretty crazy.

So today, I made a dent in the mess. I started in a little corner and put away what I could. Some clothes went into a laundry basket. Some shoes went into a closet. Some trash went into the trash can outside. My husband was a bit upset with me for starting. He was worried I'd put his shoes in the closet in a wrong way...although the shoes were lying willy-nilly all over the house, underneath boxes and trash and crap, he was concerned that I might crush his flip flops underneath his boots by putting them away. I assured him that I'd not hurt them, and kept cleaning.

I worked for about 30 minutes, but it did make a little difference. If I work for 30 minutes or so a day for the next million years, maybe at the end of it there will be a real house there, like people live in instead of wild animals. We'll see.