Over-and-Over

They say that Hell, you know the place with the fire that's run by the guy with horns... OK 'they' is a fairly loose term. Let me rephrase. In the accounts of Hell that I've come across in my many readings and too many hours of TV and movie watching, along with my amateur theologian studies, Hell always seems to boil down to repetition. Arsonists are burned alive Over-and-Over. Murderers are killed Over-and-Over. Rapists are raped Over-and-Over... you get the point.

Well, I have entered Housewife Hell. I clean a room. I leave that room to put the last howdidthisgetinhere thing away, and by the time I walk the 10 paces back to the clean room, it's a disaster again. Over-and-Over.

And I have to tell y'all, they're wearing me down and out. I have had shouting matches with God at least three times in the last week. My sink is constantly overflowing. My floors continually look like I don't own a vacuum. My bed looks completely un-made within hours of being made. I wipe up the kitchen table, sit down for one commercial and go back in the kitchen, and am afraid to put anything on the whatthebleepisthat on my kitchen table. Even I have begun to look like a disheveled mess because every time I go to take a shower, there's no hot water, no washcloths, and no towels. Over-and-Over.

I used to make a list of what I needed to get done. Now I make a list of what I have done so I don't sit there playing the 'am I loosing my mind or didn't I just do that' game. I don't even have the sanctuary of my computer room anymore. It's been invaded.

Hubby has two work carts blocking up more floorspace than the old bed did before we cleared it out. And my nice neat filing system is everywhere because the man can't control the directionality of the fan. And my notebooks have pages of handwritten stereo information in them. And I'm out of printer paper cause he can't NOT print everything he sees out for future reference and messability in other rooms of the house. And my desk is a nuclear dump site. And no one can get through on the phone, only now it's not because I'm on the computer; Hubby is on the computer. And when hubby is on the computer, munchkin wants to be in the computer room with his daddy so he can play with the power tools (the battery and bits have been removed from the drill!) while hubby is obliviously lost to reality because daddy's drooling at the Onkyo website and only kind of telling Boo not to play with whateverTHATis over his shoulder. It's stereo-computer-porn. It's every day... Over-and-Over.

I've started sleeping during the day. I'm so sick of my environment that I don't even want to see it in the harsh light of the new 105-degree-heat-index day. I've started staying up all night so I can vacuum at midnight and send the disaster-makers off to bed before they can track mud and crushed Cheerios across the newly cleaned floors. Then I turn off all the lights in the house save for the dim one in the living room, which I clean up and sit in quietly. I bask in the silence and pseudo-cleanliness for as long as I can keep my eyes open. Noon is now my version of 6am.

And the hubby doesn't understand why my fuse is getting shorter and shorter. Why a single spark will light off the entire keg of dynamite. Why I've turned into a shrieking, nagging harpy that can't even stand to be around herself. And yet, in between that joyousness, I've been having so much fun watching the munchkin develop and grow more incredible every day. And I've been savoring the talks with my daughter like they're the last piece of cheesecake on the planet. So there are definite upsides. Kind of like the tragedy that leaves you paralyzed from the waist down, so you start to appreciate that you're still breathing and have the use of your hands.

OK, alright, maybe it's not quite that bad... maybe.

It probably isn't at all that bad...my perspective is warped...

Because it's Over-and-Over.