I’m trying to craft a post about meteor showers and late-night burger runs, but apparently today is not the day for it to come together, so instead I am writing about something much more immediate and [constantly] present in my life: the everlasting tension between keeping house and making art.
I have always been an artist in one way or another, and I don’t mean that in a pretentious “Look at me I’m a serious artist” kind of way. I mean I have always been a little mind-wander-y and I tend to keep little project-based messes the way other people keep gardens or stamp collections. I curate my messes, my little piles, my corkboard collections of images and words, except usually without the corkboard. I also grew up in a house where we didn’t really learn the basics of keeping things nice. Keeping a space neat and nice has always been a kind of mystery to me, and only recently have I realized more of what is really going on behind the scenes. For me, messiness and cleanliness tend to come and go in cycles. It goes something like this:
1. The space is clean. At some point, it does start out clean.
2. I get excited by how I can use the space. Is the big table cleaned off? Suddenly it is a marvelous landscape for sitting and writing into the evening. Is the living room clean? Obviously, it’s time for a pillow fort. Even a big empty space can be employed as a spot for napping, meditation, or gift wrapping.
3. I use the space, and keep it relatively clean, though not perfectly so. I begin congratulating myself. But just a little. Because I know what’s coming next.
4. Uncontrollable event occurs. This is the phase where I always lose it, my friends. This event could be something like oversleeping, child illness, running out of milk and having to run and get it instead of doing my evening cleaning routine, flat tire, emergency beautiful day and trip to the park, or, as is often the case, sudden onset of artistic inspiration. I sit typing, hammering out the insides of my brain, getting that perfect draft down (I’m doing it right now, kids. Right at this moment I am typing at a table cluttered with such bizarre and sundry items that it would put your grandmother’s attic to shame.). In other words, something happens which feels, or is, more important than cleaning. I go into a trance. I am under a spell. And I have to write my way out of it. So I do.
5. Deadline occurs immediately after uncontrollable event. I have several daily deadlines – picking up my son from school, making dinner, going to bed before midnight, etc. Then there are larger deadlines like grading deadlines, desperately-necessary grocery shopping, doctor’s appointments, family events, and so on.
6. I come back to consciousness. This is a difficult step. Oh, so terrible. This is when I post the thing, or finish revising, get back home from the store, or just have a moment to myself after a particularly busy stretch of hours. It is a depressing phase. Here, I realize that I have more to do than I can easily do in the time I have left for the day, so I have to pick. Do I want a clean kitchen or folded laundry? I need both, but I can only have one. How do people make decisions like that? Do they just never find themselves in situations in which they do?
6. Dogged determination wins out. After some undefined length of time spent dreading the task, I stay in the kitchen until 11pm cleaning it. I put off grading for a full day and clean entire rooms. Some big effort happens, and I get it all taken care of. Then, I proceed immediately back to step #1.
It’s not an efficient system, and I’m not defending it. I’m just saying that in one way or another, it’s what happens, and as long as I have little posts and articles and stories popping into my head and demanding to be written, or until I can hire Mary Poppins and pay her in crushed goldfish crackers from under the couch, I’m not sure I will ever be able to circumvent this wrecky system completely.
Part of the problem is that I spend so much time inside my own head. My hands do one thing, and my mind does something else. I always get inspiration for solving little plot problems while I am washing dishes. The problem comes in because my mind can handle this two-way split, but when it has to split three ways, it all breaks down. I can clean and plot a story at the same time, but I can’t clean and plot a story and keep my ears and eyes open to watch my kids and keep them safe and happy. So if I try to clean while my kids are home and awake, I have to turn off the writerly part of my brain so it doesn’t static-out all the other important things I have to keep track of. Making myself do this and then immediately take up a horrifying task like cleaning out the fridge or folding socks (kill me now, people) is a challenge to my willpower that I am seldom equal to.
So far, the best solution seems to be waking up early to write before anyone else is up, in order to at least partially satisfy the demands of my creative self, and then focusing on more mundane homemakerish things and analytical teaching work for part of the day before I fall back into my stumbling writerly reverie for an hour or two. Maybe as I expand my writing discipline (so far so good), the order will extend to other areas of my house (please, God, the sink. Please.) as well.
Only time will tell… stay tuned. 😉
Daily Daguerrotype 