Writing versus cleaning: My eternal struggle

It’s another one of those weeks when the housework has gone largely undone.

And I try not to let that bother me. I remind myself that housework goes undone when I have interesting writing projects under way. When nothing much is on the docket workwise, I have plenty of time for vacuuming and dusting. An unswept kitchen floor shouldn’t signify lack of sanitation to me; it should signify creative endeavors taking place.

But I have trouble being that sanguine about it. It preoccupies me, knowing that I’ve let my usual weekly housekeeping tasks slide.

But slide they have, because this week I have four different writing projects at four different stages of completion, each one as engaging as the next, and I just can’t seem to step away from my computer long enough to pick up a broom.

I know that this shouldn’t get under my skin the way it does. I remind myself that in the grand scheme of things – what the corporate folks I worked with years ago called the fifty thousand foot view – I won’t want to be remembered for the cleanliness of my kitchen floors but rather for the fine writing I produced.

But really, I want people to associate me with both. A clean house and a creative mind. And I don’t think the two need to be mutually exclusive.

Except that this week they are, because I’m just too busy to scrub. Yesterday I managed to clean some of the bathrooms, but not all of the bathrooms. That’s a small improvement, but since I didn’t get to all of them, I can’t cross “Clean the bathrooms” off my To Do list, so it feels as worthless as not cleaning any of them.

Perspective, I try to tell myself. No one would walk into this house and say “Ugh, dust on the bookshelf.” And even if they did, isn’t it more important to have books on the bookshelf than dust not on the bookshelf? Better still, books that I wrote?

Yes, true, all true. And I should mention that the reason all of these conversations happen inside my head is that no one else in my family cares a whit whether and when I clean. To them, the only outcome of my having cleaned the bathrooms is that they have to search in drawers for all the toiletries that were previously littering the countertop and therefore effortlessly accessible.

Soon, these four current projects will all be at press, I reassure myself. And then I can go on a cleaning blitz. A siege. A binge of cleaning.

Or I can hope for more projects. Because ultimately, I really would rather be a good writer than a good housekeeper. Although being both is still my ideal.

The up-side to housework (and laundry, and cooking, and errands....)

Whenever Rick or I complains about work, the other one says “Yeah, that’s the down side of having a job. The work.”

I was thinking about that this past weekend as I tried not to feel overwhelmed with household tasks. I’d had an especially busy work week – normally I’m at home mornings and on site with a client in the afternoons, but for the past week I’d been working on a project that had me leaving the house first thing in the morning and gone for eight or ten hours every day – and had that busy-mom feeling of the house falling down around me.

But then I reminded myself: No, the house is not falling down around you. It could use some vacuuming. It could use some dusting. Emptying the wastebaskets wouldn’t be a bad idea, and everyone would benefit from a load or two of clean laundry. But the house isn’t falling down.

And that brought me back to thinking about what Rick and I say about work. The down side of having a house is the housework, but conversely, the up side of housework is that it means you have a house. I thought about various people we know in Colorado, none of whom have lost their own homes but several of whom have seen their neighbors lose theirs, and some of the people we know can’t access their homes reliably even if their houses are still standing, so they have to temporarily move out. If your house washed away in a flood, I reminded myself, you wouldn’t have housework. Better to have the house….and the housework.

And then the same message seemed so easy to extrapolate to other things. Yes, there’s cooking to do… because we have access to healthy appealing ingredients with which we can make all kinds of things. And yes, I have a long list of errands….but I wouldn’t have any errands if I had no money to spend on things we needed.

This wasn’t just trite Pollyanna-isms. Thinking about the Colorado flood victims reminded me of what it’s like every winter when at some point we lose power for a day or two, or more: how all I want to do once the electricity has been off for a couple of days is wash dishes, even though washing dishes is never a high priority when the house is running smoothly.

Just as Rick and I say with work, the down side of having a materially comfortable life is having to take care of all those material goods. It’s reassuring to have a home, and food, and cars, and clothes. Taking decent care of them doesn’t seem like such a chore when I hold on to the perspective that these material blessings require a certain amount of maintenance. Pollyanna-ish or not, in that light, a Saturday filled with housekeeping, cooking and errands feels more like a blessing than a hassle.

Metaphorical broken windows

I was unloading the dishwasher, but I was thinking about broken windows.

More specifically, I was thinking about the “broken windows theory,” having just read a short essay about this by Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin. The original broken windows theory posits that a city block populated by buildings with broken windows is more likely to attract other kinds of litter and eventually more significant problems such as street crime and arson as well. Conversely, if city officials make it a priority to fix broken windows, the likelihood of greater graft and criminal activity on the same block will be diminished.

Gretchen Rubin extrapolates this theory to maintaining a household, and I was thinking about that as I cleaned up the kitchen this morning. Her point is that if you can identify your own small acts of household negligence, you might be taking a step toward forestalling larger ones. Since I started the day with a sense of mild despair about the state of the household, washing the dishes seemed like a good way to test her theory.

I generally have a fair amount of ambivalence toward housework, especially on work days. If I don’t keep the house neat and clean, I start to feel a slightly suffocating sense of overall disorganization and frustration. But if I spend time doing housework, I remind myself that I get paid to write, not vacuum, and no one in my family except for me either notices or cares if the rugs have been vacuumed or the shelves dusted. And I also remind myself that I often use housework as a deliberate diversion when I don’t want to write. I’m definitely not the only writer I know whose furniture is never so well-polished as when she’s on deadline with a complicated story.

But this morning, I decided to test the broken windows theory when it came to my own home. I decided instead of vacillating between the priority of cleaning and the priority of earning a paycheck, I would spend the first hour of my workday cleaning up. Rather than toggling constantly between household tasks and deskwork, the way I often spend my work hours, I decided I would just focus on getting all the cleaning done in one hour that I could.

So I unloaded the dishwasher, reloaded it with breakfast dishes, cleaned all the bathrooms, dusted, and started a load of laundry.

And just as I’d hoped, after an hour, I did not feel an hour behind on deadlines and writing commitments. I felt renewed. I felt happy to be working in an orderly house. I felt more motivated than usual to think about what I’d make for dinner, since I knew I’d be cooking in a clean kitchen rather than trying to prep one meal and pick up from an earlier one at the same time.

True, there are days when I just don’t have the luxury of indulging in an hour of housework before I get to my real job. Sometimes deadlines are tight enough, or projects have accumulated enough, that I just have to forget about the clutter and grime and sit down at my desk instead.

But today, it worked for me. I cleaned, and then started my workday with a clear, dare I say clean, conscience.

I’d taken care of my broken windows, and I knew the rest of the day would have a more orderly feel as a result. Sometimes, fixing broken windows – literally or metaphorically – really is the best approach.

The woods are calling

It was a productive Sunday afternoon. I’d just finished dusting and was about to sort two baskets of laundry when I glanced out the window. With so many leaves off the trees now, the view from the kitchen to the state park hiking trail that runs behind our back yard was unobstructed. Words floated into my head: “I cannot bear the fact that I am not walking in the woods right now.”

I thought for a moment about all the reasons someone might look out this window and say those words. Because they were too ill or injured to leave the house and reach the walking trail. Because they were taking care of someone else – someone ill, injured or simply too young to be left alone -- who needed their presence. Because there was an impending hurricane or tornado that would make woods-walking too dangerous. Because night had fallen and there was a risk of getting lost in the dark.

But none of those was the case. I was experiencing a physical yearning to be out walking in the woods, and instead I was…dusting and doing laundry. In short, nothing that really needed to be done.

And at that moment, the decision I’d made earlier in the day to focus on housework and my To Do list reversed itself. I put on boots and retrieved the dog’s leash. The dog herself needed no summoning; she was at my heels as soon as she saw the leash in my hand. We headed out.

I told myself it would be just a short walk, the easy twenty-minute loop from our yard down to the brook, across the esker and back. But once I was heading down the trail with the house behind me, dusting and laundry seemed a lot less important than they had ten minutes earlier. It was warm out, and despite last weekend’s time change, there was still plenty of light in the sky. An owl somewhere overhead hooted repeatedly. I’ve learned since moving to this house near the state park that I was wrong all my life in believing owls were solely nocturnal; we hear them throughout the day.

There was something so compelling about the urge to get out into the woods as I looked out the window to the trail. Maybe my sense of urgency had to do with the awareness that this option is temporary – we’re renters with less than a year left on our lease, and might not be able to walk through our back yard and into the state park much longer – and, of course, on the larger scale, any number of twists of fate could end my ability to go walking in the woods of Great Brook Farm State Park. Or maybe it was because I’ve been reading a lot of Thoreau lately and noticing, time and again, that Thoreau and I have in common a passion for walking equal to (in his case) or much greater than (in mine) our interest in nature itself. Thoreau had no family at home to take care of; he didn’t worry much about dusting and laundry. But he’s not here anymore to walk through the woods of New England, as far as I know (though I concede I could be wrong about that). I felt like I needed to do it for him as well as for myself.

Robert Frost said that the woods are lovely, dark and deep; my feeling yesterday was that the woods are also unconditionally welcoming. They didn’t make me feel guilty for not visiting them sooner, or for considering briefly that something else – housework – might be more important. They didn’t make demands or ask questions. They just welcomed me.

And after forty-five minutes, I was back home, free to dust and sort laundry for the rest of the afternoon, just as I’d wanted. Except I wasn’t even sure why I’d wanted that anymore, when the woods provided so much more solace than the housework.

 

Housework anxiety

Sometimes I wish the judges would just show up and resolve my anxieties once and for all.

My most trivial anxieties, that is: not the ones about my children’s future or our family’s carbon footprint, but the ones about my housekeeping abilities.

And perhaps it’s a sign of the current ethos, dominated as it is by American Idol and other judge-centric TV shows, that I feel like the best way to determine how I’m doing is to turn it over to a panel of critics.

I picture them showing up unannounced and walking through the house dispassionately but with purpose, brandishing clipboards and taking notes. I’d see my home anew through their eyes as they gauged the cleanliness of each nook and cranny. Stainless steel appliances polished? Check. Sills recently dusted? Of course. But what’s this sheen of stickiness on the stovetop? What’s up with the piles of homework strewn across the kitchen counter?

I can be confident that the beds are made….well, sort of. The covers are smooth, but please don’t check for hospital corners. That pile of mail on the hall table? It just arrived yesterday, I promise! Yes, I know there are too many boots by the back door, but it’s been a rainy, muddy week. And really, you wouldn’t believe how often I sweep the floors, but with the dog going in and out from the yard so often….

Given my housekeeping shortcomings, it probably seems strange that on some level I actually want these hypothetical judges to show up. But then at least I’d have some answers. Left to my own imagination – and working at home, surrounded by this particular environment throughout the duration of my work day – I vacillate constantly on whether our levels of tidiness, neatness and cleanliness register as mostly all right or mostly insufficient. Our house is a lot less cluttered than many homes I’ve seen. But we don’t have cleaning help, and I’m not someone who always remembers to look for cobwebs up by the skylights. And while it’s true that my kids’ possessions seem to flow one-way only – from their bedrooms into the family room and never the reverse – surely that’s what everyone’s kids are like, isn’t it?

Turning it over to a third party to make the determination is not the answer, I realize. I have to make my own peace with how I choose to keep the house, and I shouldn’t need to think about it from the perspective of an outside arbiter.

Sometimes it reminds me of something the labor-and-delivery nurse who taught our birthing classes before Tim was born said at the first meeting. “How many women do you know who have won awards for how successfully they went through the birthing experience?” she asked. No one responded. “Exactly!” she said. “There isn’t an award for it! You do your best, you do what works for you, and you hope for the best results, without worrying about whether you did it ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’”

The circumstances with housekeeping are a little different, but I still find her words useful. Unlike writing an article or driving a car, nothing depends on whether someone else thinks you’re doing it well or poorly. You just have to do it based on your own priorities.

My priorities? Clutter-free surfaces and sanitary kitchen conditions, and no clothes on the floor. As for the cobwebs by the skylights? Well, those spiders have to live somewhere. And if they’re up there, I can take it as proof that they aren’t on the kitchen counters.

Clean-up time

Holly is invited to a sleepover that starts at dinnertime tonight, and I’ll celebrate her absence the best way I know how: by cleaning up her room.

I realize how many principles of good parenting this comes into direct conflict with. Holly should clean up her own room. In fact, cleaning up her room should be a prerequisite for going to a sleepover. In fact, her room shouldn’t even need clean-up; tidying should be part of her everyday routine.

In the best of all worlds, yes. In my world, not hardly.

Holly’s room is a mess. Holly’s room is always a mess, with the rare exceptions of the times that I absolutely insist we spend some quality time together cleaning it up – which is less fun than a dentist appointment followed by a trip to the transfer station – or the times like tonight when I wait until she’s out of the house and then do a kamikaze cleaning job on it.

And it’s not good for any of us. The stress of seeing so much stuff all over the floor and furniture gives me a headache. Both Rick and I have stepped painfully on small, hard, occasionally sharp objects in the dark while up in her room saying goodnight. Things she needs get lost in the strata of materials. Small containers of colored water left over from painting projects have splashed on the rug. Beads have become embedded in the carpet strands. Library books have gone missing.

But she seems unable to improve in this area. She loves her mess, and as I wrote about last month, our trip to an Open Studios event didn’t help at all: Holly considers herself a practicing studio artist, and when she discovered that almost all of the professional artists whose workspaces we visited that day also favored a colorful but chaotic mess of art supplies and works-in-progress, it only served to fortify her argument that this is how artists need to work. “I like to see what I have, Mommy,” she says by way of explaining the necessity of keeping cloth swatches, sets of scissors, containers of beads, paint sets, books, paper, markers and more piled all over the floor in her room. “It helps me figure out what I want to do.”

Perhaps this is true and perhaps she’s just being devious, because the fact is that the way to put something over on me is to pledge creativity. Holly must know on some level that claiming her mess inspires her is the best way to ensure that I’ll never really truly insist that she keep neater. As a writer, I’m all about the creative process, and not a bit willing to stifle it in someone else.

Still, on that rare opportunity when Holly is out of the house while I’m home and it’s not what I consider work hours, I make my move. Tonight, I’ll pick up, and until she gets back home, I’ll enjoy the absolute sense of serenity that comes from a tidy, well-ordered room. She won’t be happy with my efforts. She will immediately start asking for items that she’ll insist she needs but that we won’t be able to find: the stub of a blue-green Crayola, a tiny booklet that she made for a tiny doll, three beads strung on a segment of floss. Inevitably, I’ll end up going through the same garbage bag I just filled in search of some obscure project.

But at least I’ll have until Saturday morning to know her room is neat. I’ll sleep soundly, happy with the order I’ve imposed on her chaos. And if once she’s home she starts creating that chaos once again, I’ll suppress my frustration. It’s all part of the creative process, I suppose. And who knows, maybe someday that same process with inspire her to create a new way to keep her things in order.

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.

Clean sweep

I should finish an article or return a handful of emails, but all I really feel like doing right now is sweeping.

Not sleeping. Sweeping. About this time every day, I get the urge to sweep the downstairs floors.

I think almost everyone could name some chore that they find satisfying for its level of mundane-ness: the kind of task that lets your mind wander to more cerebral issues while your body completes a utilitarian function. I’ve heard other people say this about ironing, or grooming a pet. For me, though, it’s sweeping.

There’s such a satisfying sense that if I do it every day, or at least every day that we’re using the house and not out of town, I can keep up. Unlike so many other pursuits I try to stick with, sweeping seems manageable. As long as I devote twenty minutes every day to it, I really can reach my goals in this area: to keep the floors reasonably clean.

Sweeping is highly measurable, too. How much you accomplish each time is literally visible in the dustpan. In fact, sometimes I purposely make all my piles before throwing any of them away and then pick them all up at once just for the satisfaction of seeing all the dust, dirt, crumbs and lint in one impressive pile. “All that! It was all on my floor, and I managed to gather it all up to throw away!” I think, aware even as I do so of how absurd it is to find this satisfying and yet pleased with myself all the same.

Sometimes I can’t help but think of the mopping scene in the film “Mystic Pizza,” where Julia Roberts’ character, angry with her sister for failing to show up as promised to take her waitressing shift, hands her the mop and snaps, “Wipe your conscience.” Is my enthusiasm for sweeping compensatory? I wonder. Am I sweeping something under the rug? Am I trying to make a clean sweep?

No. I’m just savoring one of my few daily responsibilities that feels finite. Unlike raising children or writing, every day’s sweeping session has a beginning and an end. True, I never get every last grain of dirt or sesame seed. (Sweeping my house would take half the time if my children chose white toast for breakfast once in a while instead of sesame bagels every day.) And I never do it twice within the same day: once the broom has been put away, no matter how many new crumbs I spy, I’m done, and that sense of finality appeals to me as well.

It’s easy, that’s all. And it’s a task for which I always feel that doing my best is good enough. Our floors sparkle only once a month, and that’s after our house cleaner’s monthly visit. She mops and uses floor polish. I do not. And since we live on a farm, plenty gets tracked in every day. (My kids have rightfully pointed out that no matter what the time of year, I claim it’s the worst season for keeping floors clean: in summer, sand from our trips to the beach; in the fall, hay from my morning cow-feeding sessions; in the winter, grit and melting snow; in the spring, mud.)

But I do what I can every day. And unlike many of the other areas of my life in which I do what I can every day, with sweeping, it always feels to me like I’ve earned a passing grade for execution and an A for effort.

Stuck in the kitchen

I can’t seem to get out of the kitchen this summer.

Yes, I realize how stereotypical that sounds: Mom’s stuck in the kitchen. Not only have I always resisted the cliché of being the predominant meal producer in the family; I don’t even like the domestic cliché of “kitchen as the heart of the home.” Although our kitchen is very much designed in the current trend of kitchen-as-gathering-place, I often insist when friends come over that we sit somewhere else for drinks and appetizers, because standing behind the counter while friends eat and drink always makes me feel like Sam the Bartender.

So it’s frustrating that I seem unable to leave the boundaries of that particular room these days. With the kids home full-time for summer vacation – their choice that they did not want to do camp or regular classes, and our out-of-town trip doesn’t come for several more weeks – I feel like I’m in the kitchen hour after hour.

It starts in the morning as soon as I return from my run. The kids drift down to the kitchen one at a time; both want something different for breakfast. The dog needs to be fed too. I give the dog her scoop of kibble and put bagels or toast in the toaster for the kids; then I slice a peach for myself and try to make it across the room to the coffee grinder without getting distracted by other tasks, reminding myself frequently of the oxygen-mask rule of parenting: secure your own airflow before you help other passengers. Meaning, in this case, I can’t help everyone else if I’m ravenous myself.

And then as soon as I’ve provided sustenance for pet, children and self, it’s out to the barnyard to let the sheep out to pasture; they’re hungry too after twelve hours in their enclosure, safe from coyotes but far from fresh grazing.

Feed, then clean up, then up to my writing desk for three hours – which in the summer is the extent of my work day -- and then it’s time to make lunch. Again, both kids have different requests. Again, I farm out to them what I can – fetch this from the fridge; put that in the sink; someone please let the dog out; someone please let the dog in – but it’s still me orchestrating the whole thing. With a minor pang of despair I watch the kids take their last bites of lunch just as I begin making my own, knowing sitting down to eat a sandwich and read the paper is once again a bit of a pipe dream now that they’re done eating and will be eager to start our afternoon activities, which usually begin with leaving the house to go swimming.

Some evenings dinner is traditional sit-down; four out of seven, though, Tim and Rick are at evening baseball games, Tim as player and Rick as coach. That means Tim needs a hearty snack before he leaves for the game, and then once they’re gone I start thinking about what I can make that Holly and I can enjoy at a regular dinner hour but that Rick and Tim can reheat when they get home.

On the weekends, I all but insist we go out at least once. “I need just one meal a week when it’s not my responsibility to figure out what anyone else should eat,” I implore my family. So we go out, and I make them decide where to go; I don’t even want to think about menus on the night we go out. I just want someone else to take care of it.

I’m learning this summer to take a Zen attitude, to see the beauty in the ceaseless cycle of cooking and serving and cleaning. I revel in the sound of the disposal and the dishwasher, knowing that the appliances are working on my behalf. I sweep the kitchen floor lovingly, telling myself it’s good to see the crumbs collecting together in the dustpan and knowing the broom leaves cleanliness in its wake. I admit, I’ve even been feeling secretly enthusiastic about the new microfiber dishcloths I bought last week, because they leave our countertops so much shinier than the old, grease-saturated dishcloths did.

Feeding, serving, cleaning up the mess: the rituals of a smoothly functioning kitchen become a metaphor for a smoothly functioning family. And as I stick one last plate into the dishwasher and press “start” yet again, I remind myself to appreciate these rituals. Keeping the family fed is no small feat, and I’m happy to be able to do it.

But I should also be trying to teach the kids to do more kitchen chores. It’s important for them to learn these jobs, and it’s important for me to get a break. Maybe they’ll learn to see the Zen aspects of sweeping as well. It’s never too early to appreciate a shining floor.

Home Alone - Six Hours of Solitude

When Rick and I mapped out our plans for last Saturday, it all sounded fine to me: he and Tim had a baseball game, so Holly and I would spend the afternoon with Rick’s family at his sister and brother-in-law’s house, where they would all be celebrating our niece’s fifth birthday.

But when I saw the e-mail from Tim’s coach saying the game had been postponed, my heart leaped with joy. “Now you can take the kids to the party and I can stay home!” I crowed. And that’s how I ended up having a Home Alone afternoon on Saturday, nearly six blissful hours of solitude.

I wasn’t exactly pursuing what I would consider a self-indulgent agenda. Although thoughts of movies, naps, long bike rides, manicures or Starbucks with my laptop flitted briefly through my head, I put myself to work from the moment they left. I cleaned the kitchen, swept the floors, picked up the kids’ rooms and our room, put away everyone’s clean laundry, weeded the flowerbeds and then loaded up the truck with trash and recycling and took a trip to the transfer station. (Thanks to the fact that our monthly visit from our house cleaner is next week, I didn’t feel compelled to start scrubbing bathrooms, which was a lucky break.)

And yet the hours of household labor made the solitude no less blissful. At other times of year, I might not see an afternoon of cleaning and tidying and yard work as such a pleasure, but this summer has been so kid-intensive that just having the silence of an empty house was all the novelty I really needed.

At this stage in my life, I don’t generally suffer from a deficit of time to myself. During the school year, the kids are out of the house six hours a day, and I’m at my desk writing, with plenty of peace and quiet even on the frequent days that Rick works at home. But this summer, time alone has been unusually hard to come by. Both sets of grandparents have been wonderful, as they always are, about taking the kids for visits, excursions or overnights, and both kids get frequent invitations from friends, but generally when one is out, the other is home. One afternoon when my mother took both kids to a movie, I found myself tied up with unplanned work-related phone calls for almost the full three hours. Being with the kids is mostly a pleasure these days, not a chore. But the fact remains that I’ve been getting very little solitude.

So when the door closed behind them, I was as eager and excited to roll up my sleeves and start some intensive housework as I normally am to leave on a vacation or try out a new restaurant. I was just so happy to be by myself. When the kids were preschoolers, I used to sometimes say to them, “I just need two minutes alone with my brain.” Meaning, I just need a little bit of time with no noise clutter, no demands on my attention: just a moment to focus on one thing that isn’t you. Saturday afternoon I felt the same way. Even though what I needed to think about was where to store Tim’s extra baseball pants and how to organize Holly’s many art supplies, that was all I wanted, a little time alone with my brain.

They came home cheerful and tired from the party. No one commented on the work I’d done – not the weed-free flower beds, not the empty recycling bins in the garage, not the fact that the carpet in Holly’s room was visible once again for the first time in weeks – but I didn’t care. I knew the house and grounds had been restored to a state of tidiness, and I’d had five precious hours free of all clamor.

We’re just about halfway through summer vacation; it was a little like the All-Star Break in Major League Baseball, the baseball-free day that every player has just prior to the All-Star Game. Like a baseball player, I ended it feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to play my best game for the second half of the summer.

I love being with my kids, but I love being with my brain too, and sometimes it feels like I can have only one or the other. Gratitude prevailed on Saturday as I basked in the serenity of a kid-free house. It was only a half-day, but I think it’s enough to tide me over until September.