The "oblivion principle" - perks of a privileged childhood

It’s such an obvious reality that I don’t know how it can still surprise me, but I'm sometimes amazed by how hard I can work and how much I can accomplish without my family having any inkling of what I’ve done.

And it’s easy to become resentful of that. I think often of the recurrent image from the “Rose Is Rose” comic strip by Pat Brady, in which every once in a while Rose descends into her Dungeon of Resentment. How is it that I spent all morning cleaning all four bathrooms and no one noticed? Do they have any idea of how much pollen would be piled on the windowsills right now if I hadn’t dusted this week? Where do they suppose the clean and folded laundry they regularly find in their bureau drawers comes from, anyway? Yesterday we were out of milk and today we have plenty of milk: did anyone notice that I spent two hours at the supermarket and then carried in five bags of groceries myself?

I know there are various ways to address this issue, and I know there are plenty of parents who think I should be more proactive as far as expecting contributions of help from my children. But they do tasks that I consider age-appropriate – they’re almost always responsible for unloading the dishwasher after it runs; they bring their clothes hampers to the laundry room when I ask them to; they clear the table after dinner; they would have helped carry in the grocery bags if they’d been home at the time – and it’s not really a matter of my wanting less work on my hands. It’s just the frustration of how invisible it all is to them, how they never seem to actually see me do any of this or notice what I’ve done.

But when I start to descend into the Dungeon of Resentment, I have to remind myself that this life I’m living in my own choice. I’ve chosen to raise a family, to live in a house, to do the kind of work that generates the kind of salary for which buying groceries is not a problem but having abundant paid household help would be.

What helps more than that, though, is to reiterate to myself my belief that being oblivious to the work your mother does is actually one of the privileges of a comfortable childhood: a privilege that will ideally be passed down from generation to generation. Like my children are with me, I was equally oblivious to how hard my mother worked to keep our household up and running. But every now and then I’ll look back on something from my childhood and be curious enough to ask her. Earlier this summer I found myself thinking about the evening cookouts we used to have once or twice a week at our family cabin in the mountains during our month-long Colorado vacations. The cabin was about thirty minutes away from where we stayed in town: we’d often drive there for dinner, sometimes just us five but more frequently with guests, spend a few hours, and return to our place in town for the night. I remembered happy evenings around the campfire with grilled hamburgers and toasted marshmallows and songs and jokes, but I didn’t remember anything about the sleepy return to town at bedtime. “How did you get all the dishes washed after we got back?” I asked my mother last month. “Didn’t it take hours to unload all the food and cookout gear?”

Of course it did, but I didn’t think about that at the time; it was one of the privileges of my happy childhood. My children may be oblivious to the hours I spent yesterday morning cleaning the house or the 45 minutes it took me to prepare yesterday’s picnic which we took to the pond for an early dinner and swim, and that’s a gift I’m giving them. If they someday choose – and are fortunate enough – to have an adulthood similar to mine, with families of their own and lots of opportunities to have fun, they’ll do this same thing themselves.

Yes, it’s good for them to help out around the house and do age-appropriate chores. But if they’re blind to just how much effort it sometimes takes to make vacations and holidays memorable, to keep the house clean and organized, to be generous hosts to friends and relatives, and to keep everyone safe and happy so much of the time? I may just have to consider that a privilege I’m happy to be able to give them.

Extreme De-Cluttering: Yes, it's morbid, but it works for me

I love reading articles like this one from the Washington Post about housecleaning. I especially like reading about de-cluttering. It’s the lure of preaching to the converted, I realize. I’m good about anti-clutter. In fact, I’m almost to the other extreme. A new acquaintance visiting our house for the first time once used the word “barren.” I prefer to think of it as minimalist, or Shaker, but the fact remains that my spouse and I both favor clean, bare surfaces rather then clever arrangements of knickknacks.

But I still love reading decluttering tips. I always think maybe I’ll pick up yet another one that will make it even easier for me to keep picked up. And sometimes I do. In early January, I read an article that discussed the value of putting aside just fifteen minutes a day for little household projects rather than stockpiling them for a rainy day. “With fifteen minutes a day, you could finish 30 projects by the end of the month,” the article proclaimed. I didn’t keep count, but I did find it useful. Now I spend 15 minutes each month clipping out articles I’ve had published and putting them in plastic sleeves, one 15-minute session putting photos in my photo album, one 15-minute session each week entering credit card receipts into our electronic checkbook, and so forth.

I have one more de-cluttering tip to add to the list. I concede that it’s a little bit severe, but it has served me well. If you were to die suddenly, would you want someone else to have to deal with this particular mess?

The first time I remember thinking this way was one early evening when I was taking a run around our old neighborhood in Framingham. That neighborhood was full of smallish houses close to the street, and one day I happened to glance over and see what must have been a two-foot-high stack of dusty and faded folders piled lopsidedly against the window. I didn’t know anything about the house’s occupant, but at that moment the thought came so clearly to me: “Whoever those folders belong to is never going to sort through them or do anything productive with them. No one is going to touch those folders until their owner is dead and someone else is charged with cleaning out the space.”

Of course, I couldn’t have known this. Maybe the owner of the folders had every intention of sorting through them, or maybe they were the kind of records that you are supposed to keep for a prescribed amount of time and then discard. Even more likely, maybe the owner was nowhere close to his final years and would sort through them himself upon the occasion of moving out of the house, rather than dying.

Maybe. But for some reason, the sight of those folders had a lasting effect on me. Now, whenever I come across a pile of unsorted or out-of-use items in my own house, I ask myself the same thing: am I just leaving these here for some distant day when someone else has to decide what to do with them? Sometimes the answer is no, such as the kids’ school papers, which I store in paper bags but weed through occasionally to keep what I think best represents their work for any particular year and recycle the rest. Same with books: I might stockpile them for a few months, but then I pull out the ones I don’t want anymore and bring them up to the library’s yard sale. But other times I find items like clippings of travel stories on destinations I’d love to visit and think, “No; these could sit here forever.” And then I try to get rid of them.

If this was a sport, would we call it Extreme De-Cluttering? Probably. No doubt there are more upbeat ways of decluttering that don’t dwell on morbidity, but for me, this provides the last and best measure of what to keep and what to toss. And our closets, shelves and file drawers are a lot tidier because of it.

Keeping the Sabbath

Recently our minister gave a sermon on the topic of keeping the Sabbath, a tradition that dates back to the opening pages of the Old Testament. Our minister rather humorously described the evolution over the past four generations from “the Holy Sabbath” to “the Sabbath” to “Sunday” to “the second half of the weekend.”

I think often about how best to organize my time. For me right now, the challenge is not getting necessary tasks done but fitting in downtime, specifically downtime for reading. I have mentioned often that for me, the symbol of luxury where time management is concerned is reading the Sunday New York Times. If I get through the Times before the next Sunday’s edition arrives, I feel that I’ve been generous with myself, and fit a little decadence into my week. Most weeks, this doesn’t happen. I fit in everything else – housekeeping, cooking, time for my children and my husband, writing and other forms of work, exercise, community involvement, visits with friends – but the one item I never seem to get to is whatever I would do if I didn’t have to be doing anything else.

So over the past several years, I’ve given some thought to how I can create a Sabbath for myself. I’m not looking for a full day of rest; I’m trying to figure out the best way to ritualize a small pocket of time every week when I’m not writing, exercising, housekeeping or focusing on anyone else’s agenda. That’s not to say I need to be alone; I love the idea of a family reading hour, or – as happens frequently during the summer – finding my time while watching the kids swim or play on the playground. The point is just to find time that’s free of all my usual daily list items.

In the past, Sunday afternoons have seemed like a good time to try to do this, and so have Sunday evenings. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to be fluid in my definition of Sabbath. Maybe it isn’t even Sunday. But beyond than that, maybe it’s not a singular event. Maybe Sabbath – time of rest – can be best defined not by what I'm doing but what I’m taking time off from doing.

For example, I always try to be done with housework by dinnertime on Sunday; it just seems too much like drudgery to be scrubbing countertops and vacuuming in the final hours of the weekend. But that’s often when I sit down to the deskwork I didn’t do the previous work week.

Moreover, I’ve often acknowledged to myself that I could have more downtime on weekends if I did some of the housework during the week – but I feel strongly about preserving my weekdays, when the kids are off at school for seven hours at a stretch, for writing and other tasks related to my professional life. If I am to consider myself a nearly full-time freelancer, as I do, I have to use weekdays for work, not for housecleaning.

As far as errands, in general I fit those in after the kids get home from school, because then I don’t feel like the driving-around part of the day is eating into my writing time. My daughter usually opts to come with me, so it’s a chance for us to be together for us as well. I used to be opposed to highly opposed to shopping on Sundays: again, to me that was an important part of the traditional Sabbath model. But recently, to my surprise, I’ve found myself in something of a shopping mood on Sunday afternoons. It’s not like we’re hitting the mall or the big box stores (though I don’t know why I say that judgmentally, as if my kind of shopping somehow has more integrity that that); it’s that Sunday afternoons recently have found me happy to take a leisurely stroll through Whole Foods or an unhurried trip to the drugstore. Yesterday, my daughter and I had fun together perusing the post-Halloween shelf for items to send in a care package to my niece, who unfortunately was sick and couldn’t go out on Halloween this year. CVS on a Sunday – by choice and not necessity? By a traditional Sabbath model, or even by my previous standards, that would sound heretical. Yet I liked the mellow pace of it, knowing we were in the middle of a free afternoon and could take our time as we examined the witch candles and plush black cats.

So now I’m starting to think Sabbath might, at least for now, mean more a state of mind for me than an hour of the week. It’s reading the newspaper during Sunday afternoon football; it’s focusing on writing while ignoring the laundry on a Tuesday morning; it’s shutting down my computer on a Saturday morning so that I can throw myself into housework without the temptation of checking my e-mail. Keeping the Sabbath is a good idea, and I do suspect for me it will continue to be an evolving model. Someday I might devote entire Sundays to reading or spending recreational time with my children and be somewhat appalled to think I ever used to buy socks on Sunday afternoons. But for now, this works.