Category: home economics

When all else fails, clean out your cupboards

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To make an omelette you must first break eggs. Chairman Mao once said in order to see something beautiful, you must first go through pain (or something along those lines). And I’m sure there’s something in the Dao of Pooh. But there is always a moment – when you have taken out the contents of all but one shelf, thrown out all that needs to be thrown out and realised that if only you had two more of those containers with green lids then all that is wronged would be righted – when you look at everything and wonder what made me think that cleaning out this cupboard was a good idea?

And why do I have eight different types of sugar in ten different packets?

I really don’t like buying things

You know those shops – the ones that have no soul of their own and leach the life from yours – that’s where I’ve been.

We bought one table and six chairs.

If you need me, I’ll be on the couch. Please try not to drop anything on the floor as you approach. I’m as close to the edge as you’d like me to be.

If you really loved me, you’d put the table together without asking for my help. And before you did that, you’d bring me a cup of tea. And an almond croissant. And the newspaper. No, not that one, I’ve read it. The other one. Yes, the rest of the day is going to be like this.

It’s the simple things

‘Goodness, ThirdCat,’ people have said of late, ‘you seem happier these days. The spring has returned to your step, the sparkle to your eye, the glow to your skin…what is the secret of such lightness of being?’

‘Oh,’ I say breezily because I have recently been to the dentist and am not afraid of haliotosis, ‘I’ve just made a few simple modifications to my home. Simple things, but they’ve made life much more comfortable.’

‘So you’ve fixed that top drawer, the one with the cutlery and other useful things so that the whole front panel of the drawer no longers comes off in your hand every third day or so forcing you to use language you’d rather your children hadn’t become quite so fluent in,’ they say.

‘Well,’ I reply because it would be rude to ignore them, ‘that would make a great difference to my general sense of well-being, but no, that drawer remains only temporarily repaired.’

‘Oh,’ they say because they are as interested in the intricacies of my life as I am in theirs, ‘so you’ve ripped out that floating floor because while the name floating floor sounds so ethereal, in actual fact, when things such as metal marbles are dropped on them, as they very often are in a house with two young boys, the sound is enough to snap synapses three houses away.’

‘Oh, no, nothing quite so life-changing as that,’ I say.

‘Ah,’ they say, ‘so you’ve ducked into the hardware shop, that one you walk past every second day, to buy another small roll of felt, and you’ve fixed the felt to the bottom of the kitchen chairs so that they no longer scrape against the floating floor in that way which has grown from irritating to something approaching the sound of fingernails down a blackboard.’

‘Well, no, in fact, yet another of the chair legs has just lost its felt.’

And by the time they get to there, the new chopping board – the one with enough space to fit all of the slices of the bread and the block of cheese while I make the sandwiches – doesn’t seem to have made that much difference to my life at all.

But luckily, most people are too polite to say goodness me, ThirdCat, you’re not looking quite as good as you were.

Back to school

‘You look tired,’ the mister said. ‘Very tired. And kind of sad.’

Like he could talk, having just returned from a few hours on the tennis court honestly believing that he could put some of Federer’s shots into his repetoire.

But I am very tired. And kind of sad. Not, you know, depths of your soul can’t get off the couch sad. More a slightly self-indulgent woe is me and well, better get over it there’s dishes to be done kind of sad.

It is post-holidays, back-to-school blues.

One thing about school is that I have to start getting up at half past seven again. I am not a morning person. Have I told you that? Nor am I a hot weather person. Such nots do leave only small windows of opportunity for greatness. As the mister asks ‘so what exactly are you – a mid-winter, mid-afternoon person?’ Whatever. Getting up at half past seven tires me out.

I did enjoy the school holidays. For all the usual reasons – the beach, the movies, the baker’s clay and while I do not like playing Connect 4 with an over-competitive 6 year old, mostly I do enjoy the company of my children. Plus, I discovered something I had not anticipated (this being my first school holidays as a parent). For people like me, who work from home the holidays are quite convenient, because during the holidays you are, very often, at home. So is everyone else of course, which does bring difficulties (I’m quite sure Virginia Woolf was not describing a wardrobe when she conceived of a room of one’s own, but I’m here to tell you it can, in fact, work quite well, particularly if the people who lived in the house before you had the foresight to convert a hall cupboard into a large-ish walk in wardrobe). But, if you are able to block out the noise and the mess – as I very often, but not always can – then it is an opportunity to do a tiny bit more work than at other times (yes, yes, putting aside that last undignified moment on Australia Day, the culmination of a full week of martyrdom, I’m sure I’ve apologised for it and anyway it wasn’t totally unjustified and we got a very ordered laundry cupboard out of it didn’t we).

With a return to school, time is much choppier. One of my children is at kindy (or preschool or whatever name you give to that which four year olds do for about three hours a day – can anyone explain to me what is so revolutionary about this thing The Rudder announced yesterday, because be buggered if I can see any difference between it and that which has been going on at least since I was four) and the other is at school. This means that I drop them off at 9, pick one of them up at 11.30, then pick the other up at sometime between 3 and 3.30 (I never have worked out when exactly school finishes).

So, while the kindy year is a golden one in many ways, I’m sure you can see that in terms of me getting any of my work done, this is a HOPELESS arrangement. As I said to the mister some days it makes my heart sing, and on others groan. That’s how life is.

Plus, I am about to turn 38, and I have not made any real plans for this year so I’m feeling a bit floundering and what’s the point and what am I doing with my time/life – but that is a post for another time. Right now, I have to go and catch the bus so I’m not late for kindy pick-up.

Ironed shirts and handkerchiefs

The laundry floor is cold, even through her socks, but she can’t put her shoes back on. Not now. She could get another pair of socks, or the slip-on flip-flops, but if she leaves, she won’t come back and she has already offered. A gift of five ironed shirts.

‘It’s a present,’ she has promised, ‘not a precedent’ and the joke gets better as she relives it in her mind.

The iron ticks itself warm and the collar is first. It makes her think of her mother and wonder why did she teach me to iron, but not to sew?

The part after the collar, what’s that called? She reaches for the word. Is that the yoke? If she had learnt to sew, she would know. Collar, yoke (if that’s what it is), cuffs, then sleeves.

You need to set the sleeves up carefully. It’s quite a trick, isn’t it, flattening down the seams and not doubling up the fold. No tramlines. They are her mother’s words. When the shirts are striped, as many of them are, the fold might still be crisp, but it never lines up right. It makes a satisfying job less so.

The heat of the shirt on her hand, the creak of the board, the kink of the cord, these are the things that have always been.

And the sigh of the iron when you rest it on its base.

Was that asbestos, that piece of grey at the end of her mother’s ironing board?

The shirt is back on its hanger, hooked over the laundry door. She begins again. Collar, yoke, cuffs then sleeves. It depends where you are in life, whether ironing is the cold of Monday morning or the warmth of Sunday night.

When she has finished the shirts, she does the handkerchiefs because they are there and because she likes the smell of cotton warmed by an iron. Handkerchiefs don’t take long.

She does the handkerchiefs in squares, because it’s squares for a man. Grandma taught her that. Squares for a man. And triangles for girls.

And when Grandma packed the bag at the end of the holidays, she put in the knickers, the bathers, the shorts, all clean, and the handkerchiefs. Ironed. Triangles for girls. Grandma said I wonder what your mother will think about that. Did she lift her eyebrow or sniff after she spoke? Triangles for girls. Because it was the same voice she would use to say it’s hard for mothers, mothers lose their sons.

And it depends where you are in life. Sometimes ironing is a gift to someone else. And sometimes a gift to yourself.