…that cup of ice coffee I enjoyed with dinner.

At some point during the weekend, I came to see everything around me as being at a level of filth that was just intolerable. The house had begun to look and smell like the inside of a car that has been on a cross country trip with four young children. I wondered what kind of mentally ill person was responsible around here, anyway? Who would let themselves live in this fashion? Dishes, piled up… flies were delighted but not me. I suddenly had this flash of shock as I thought about how it must seem to my kids, to live in such a messy place. I think it was getting on their nerves as much as mine, as they frolicked about and teased each other mercilessly.

I have a pretty low tolerance for when they are squabbling. I wouldn’t mind that much, but for the telling. Mom, Annie won’t give me back my half of the silly putty… Mom, Carla bumped me with her head! Mom! Maaaa-ommmm! It makes me say things like “well negotiate with her. Offer her something in exchange. Distract her. And if that doesn’t work, then GO TO YOUR ROOM BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT! Do you need a trip to the ER? No, so why are you trying to get me involved here??” (Mother of the year award coming right up! Sarcasm: just one more service I provide!)

But amid such mess as was our house, the squabbling just kind of fit right in. I found myself recalling information I’d gathered way back in my grad school days– learning about how the environment that a person is in can really shape their behavior. Of course they were going to be miserable in this house in the heat, the awful humidity… with me being busy playing scrabulous washing the dishes and preparing meals

rather than playing with them, and with every surface for play already cluttered with toys, and laundry and quite possibly guinea pig turds.

Something, something, had to pull me out of this squalid existence. It feels like today we suddenly started to really tip the scales and head in the right direction. In fact, it’s been a solid week of chipping away at the dishes, the laundry, and sweeping up, and so forth. D helped a great deal with this long weekend of ours. The weather had a way of helping as well, because today was off and on rainy rather than perfect pool weather, so I didn’t get up to the pool (or my garden).

In addition to doing a bunch of laundry, D came up with an innovative way for us to communicate the things we’d like each other to do over the course of a day. He suggested that we each make a list of three items for the other — it could be anything you want your partner to do for you from Give a Backrub to Mow the Lawn to Put the Kids to Bed to Apply for a New Job. Anything at all. The rules: Only put three things on the list. Expect that 2 out of 3 Ain’t Bad. 3 out of 3 is a pleasant surprise. And 1 out of 3 is Not So Good.

So, I looked around and realized that the huge laundry clutter in our bedroom was really getting me down, and yet I had no desire to sort and put it all away. I put that as one of his 3 things, and lo and behold! He did that task. This then inspired me to further clean up our bedroom, and I swept the room out and cleared out under the bed as well. I would certainly never have done that if the dresser were still cluttered. You see? The environment of my bedroom was paralyzing me from doing anything to improve it, because the dresser was a hurtle that seemed too awful to tackle. My bedroom closet is still a horrible mess and a monolith that I am not sure I can tackle. But with the dresser clear, I feel a little more easy about giving it a try.

D had been wishing I’d cook up a big yummy dinner, with lots of leftovers for him to take to work over the week, so he wrote that on his list. Getting this information early in the day gave me a chance to think ahead: sure, I can cook dinner, I thought. Dinner is important to me, too, and I like cooking. This in turn helped me get focused on grocery shopping, and planning some meals for the week. I ended up making a big pot of curried chicken, a pot of basmati rice, baked BBQ chicken legs, and a big container of salad. I also prepped some things for tomorrow’s dinner.

What tends to happen to Drob and I, is that our creativity kicks in when we have a problem to solve. The novelty of a creative way to handle expectations is very helpful to me. I can deal with small, concrete wishes, written on a piece of paper in a way that I cannot deal with a houseful of chaotic needs ricocheting off the walls.

I don’t know if this will be something we continue long term– it often happens that we have a good system going that Really Works until, that is, it stops working. Then … we try something else.

In my dream world, there are all these Very Clever Solutions to Life’s Problems… I find My Little Ways and teach the secrets to successful and happy living to my kids. I tell them all this Wise and Awesome stuff and they are able to help run the household like a well-oiled machine.

The truth be told, I really hope to someday be able to have some level of organization that I can pass along to my kids. How can I expect them to clean their rooms, or find their shoes, if all around them is a constant whirlwind of chaos? In short, I can’t expect that of them, in that circumstance.

There needs to be a system in place, and it needs to be consistent and simple. And when I forgot to do it, there needs to be a fail-safe way of getting back on target.

So far, though, I don’t have this magic bullet. I just have my creativity, my unreliable energy levels, and a husband who is a lot like me. And I have coffee. That counts for something, as surely I am going to need it in the morning.