(slightly edited from my original blog)
After my previous post, I feel that I need to write a post in defense of Mom!
My frustration with the way I learned to ‘not’ clean the kitchen (by procrastinating) is just a part of my own struggle with procrastination. There certainly weren’t many times that I did it without being asked or told until I was much older – like when I came home from college and was happy to be in any kitchen at all (or when I felt guilty when Mom was sick or taking her finals)! Mom has told me a story several times that I treasure.
She was sitting in a chair with me on one knee and my brother on the other reading us a book when her Mom came to visit. Nannie J made a comment about it being nearly lunch time and the beds were all still unmade. Mom told her that her babies were growing every day, and that after they were grown there would be plenty of time to make the beds. I'm glad cleaning the kitchen wasn’t a top priority for her, but our life together changed when both my brother and I went to school and she went to work, then to college, and then began teaching.
I can remember many things from when I was very young and Mom was home with us - or we were home with her...
Some of them are my own memories, and some of them I remember from stories and pictures. It’s hard to explain the difference that happened when we went to school and she went to work,. It just seems it wasn’t so much a life centered around our home and land as it was when I was very young – and maybe my world just got bigger… When I was actually ‘learning’ to keep house by doing it (or not - by procrastinating as I was saying before) it’s was in a family that all went to school and work and came home. Our house was empty all day long. That doesn’t sound too odd for people nowadays, but the following story will show you how different if feels.
In the winter our home was heated completely by wood heat, so the fire would need to be fed all day long. Dad would bank the fire at night and get up very early before anyone else did and stir it up before he did his chores, so in the morning the house was already getting warm. The first place I would go every morning was to stand or sit on the hearth. During the winters after Mom began working and my brother and I were in school (after we were old enough to get off the bus at our house rather than the sitters) we would come home to a very cold house.
I would open the door expecting to feel the warmth of the fire and there was nothing, it was just cold. That was when I realized that our house had been empty all day. Our house now is hardly ever empty – there’s almost always some combination of us here. My kitchen has to function different than Mom's did. The way I learned to function in a kitchen hasn’t been working for me. It has taken me 10 slow years to figure that out! Now I'm trying to dredge up those early memories of when we were very little and all home - how did the kitchen function then when it wasn't me in charge of getting it clean?! Mom, if you read this sometime you can help me out!
