Am I crazy? I spent Christmas cleaning my house. I'm not a lonely heart sitting pining for a holiday invitation: in fact I declined to join two separate Christmas celebrations. My best gift this year was four whole days alone!
I feel guilty even typing that. My marriage is not troubled; my family are easy-going and undemanding, there are no hidden conflicts brewing, ready to pop to the surface like stress-induced pimples. It's just that my husband and I both work from home, and while my work regularly takes me out - at least one day a week and often a night, as well - his is almost entirely web and phone based. So he never. Leaves. The house. Oh, he's not agoraphobic; he goes to the bank (three blocks away) grocery store (across the street!) But an hour alone in the house is a real rarity for me.
What's funny is, I'm not using my time alone to do anything that I couldn't do with my husband here. Nothing scandalous or secret. Just stuff that feels weird when he is. Like this:
- With a Hannaford gift I got for Christmas, I went hog wild in the produce aisle. I will spend the entire four days eating salads, fruit smoothies, whole wheat toast with avocados, and the like. Call it the solitude cleanse. (Unlike that creepy weird cleanse my friends do during which you drink lemon juice and cayenne pepper and wait for the "black snake" to appear. Ew, and also, bullshit.) I could do this when hubby is around, but it feels weird to spend our somewhat limited grocery budget on things I know he won't eat. Also, he's going to be popping frozen pizzas into the oven, the smell of which is hard to resist.
- I am doing a deep-clean of the house. I do this every time hubby is away. When I lived alone, I was really very neat, but coupledom requires compromise, so our home is sort of a compromise between shelter-mag clean and the state of his bachelor apartment: comparable to the interior of a dumpster. I'm not the sort to scrub while looking daggers at my relaxing spouse; I'm the type to plop down and watch Smallville beside him. So we end up doing mostly down-the-middle surface cleaning: the vacuuming, the litterboxes, the dishes, the laundry. When he goes away I drag out the furniture and shampoo the rugs, because if he isn't there not-cleaning, it's a very different experience than if he is there, not-cleaning. My cleaning jag is made more enjoyable by:
- Pandora! I've created several stations; here's my house-cleaning station. Now, hubby and I dance often, but, as I suggested before, cleaning while he is idling (or even working: I have more important things to do, too!) makes me cranky and not feel much like dancing.
Or maybe that was the point, after all.
