My daughter came home from a play date naked. The mom she was with got out of her car, and quickly gave me the disclaimer, "I don't usually bring kids home from play dates naked, but you've got to see them". I laughed, said it was okay (was it?) and hussled to the car. Not only were the two kids naked, strapped tightly in their car seats, but they were covered in feathers.
"They glued them on to see if they could fly", the disclaimer continued.
They weren't smiling, they were both sitting there as stoic as someone could be that just realized that feathers don't necessarily make your aerodynamic. I always imagine corrupt politicians tar and feathered, and it was quite a contrast to these innocent wide eyes and little bodies with haphazard color stuck in random places. I could picture them flapping around, jumping, trying their darndest to take off. Luckily we live in a place where most of the houses are one-story (all except mine, which is 4). I don't think that they tried to jump out of a window or anything, and I remembered the story of the little boy that jumped to his death in New York with a Superman costume. That was when I was a kid, and my parents must have given me some lecture on it for me to remember it so clearly. Maybe I was just older than I think, and my parents gave me less credit than they should have.
As I unstrapped my daughter from the seat and grabbed her bag of clothes from the mom, thanking her, a moment of doubt came over me. This is quite silly, but I wondered why the kids didn't do something like this at my house. Did they not feel free enough to have this much fun (or at least conduct this experiment-fun or not)? Is my environment stifling?
We're in the process of selling our house. I'm afraid that I've become a little OCD with "a place for everything and everything in it's place".
When I first met my husband I fell in love with him because his socks never matched, he was eccentric. He had 2 feet of garbage filling a two car garage... all the way across. There were mice living in old suitcases, the dogs had eaten a hole in the wall, there were 3 month old poroge's sitting in the oven. When his pots and pans had ripened in the sink for enough time, he wouldn't wash them, he would throw them off of his balcony into the woods below.
I guess I am the kind of person that goes for hard projects. I looked around the other day, his office was clean, his shirt didn't look like he had pulled it out of a pile of old laundry, and
his socks matched. What had I done?
More importantly, why was I doing it? When you're selling your house you're trying to sell someone on the dream that if they just lived there, then life would be easier, cleaner, more-inspiring. I know because I've fallen for it myself. Our house in on the market because we've found another that promises all these things.
We have magazines that pound us with images of whitewashed hallway tables donning a single flower in a crystal vase with keys hanging neatly on a hook. Only woman buy these rags. You wouldn't find the most metrosexual male standing in line at whole foods with a copy of Real Simple.
All of the ads for cleaning products still display women using them. I recently did an ad for Van de Kamp's fish, they instructed my to write "Moms!" on there, then list the reasons it was a good choice. I almost refused, but really I need the cash to buy more magazine's and cleaning products.
The truth of the matter is though, if you have children, the whitewashed table has probably been written on, and the keys lost. The wonderful part is that the flower is probably a "weed" from the yard stuck in a glass. There are probably feathers stuck to the side of the tub. There's probably a tired little girl, tucked into her bed, not caring about cleaning fluids, or if she left her crayons out. She's just happy to be "Home" after trying to fly.
Tomorrow her mommy won't care if Martha Stewart herself is coming over to view the house. Let them see it how it is, for what it is - a home.
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