Suburban Island: Travel Constraints

I don't know whether it is better to never go anywhere when you are a mom or go wherever you want and just let the chips fall where they may until you come back to create some vestige of order in the universe again.

A few weeks ago I went to Seattle for a conference. When I came home my son had no car (he had totalled it), the AC/Heating in our house had finally given up the ghost (nobody's fault), a retired Sid Dickens memory block had been knocked from the wall and glued back together (look, you can barely tell, my husband says to me with a straight face). And in the laundry room our dying dryer had been replaced with a "new" dryer that has to be about 20 years old. That's how he knocked the Sid Dickens block off the wall. Believe me when I tell you that this would not have happened on my watch (dryer or disaster).

While he was dragging in dryers and knocking artwork off the wall, he also managed to rearrange my whole office including undoing a cable for the wireless. It took me two days to find the problem after my return. I spent hours moving furniture, crawling around on the floor, and fighting dustballs in my little home office trying to figure out how to get it to work again. All the time the mysterious cable that turned out to be the key to creating harmony and efficiency in the daily lives of most of the inhabitants of our household was curled like a little black garden snake in a pile of nearby cords. That's what was wrong! My husband is very neat. Once the cable was out of the router he must have tidied up by adding it to the group where it might never have been discovered except for my persistence and the desperate prayers I shouted to the high Heaven's at strategic intervals for assistance in solving the lost wireless problem. Both tactics were necessary for as you can imagine, all the kids in the house are nearly weeping for want of the web while I tried to figure this one out. It did allow me to dust behind my desk and discover a foot massager had been deposited next to the wireless router while my husband was reorganizing things for me.

I don't know about you but I believe we all need a little space of our own. My office is my sanctuary. There is no room in it for my husband to store a foot massager and no call for anyone to rearrange my abundance of knick-knacks, papers, books, movies, and music. This is my landscape. My oasis. Hands off. How quickly the world will impinge on our sacred places if we give them an inch. He's going to find another place for that foot massager or it is going to find its way to the garage (his sacred space). I have a feeling I will be putting my stuff back the way that it was for months. I have just spotted a bobble head elephant stuffed behind a picture of my daughter and I at Dunn's River Falls in Ocho Rios. Now obviously the glass bag of goldfish that I bought from the Dollar store belongs next to that. If you are going to move things around at least use some common sense.

This isn't the first time that calamity has struck while I am away. Last time I took a trip my son stabbed himself in the leg with a pocket knife that opened up while he was sitting down.

Perhaps next time I should confiscate all car keys, potentially injurious possessions, and lock the office - the perfect center of life as we know it at our house - until I return.

But then, where would my sense of adventure be?

Comments

Ack - nothing like returning home to carefully-organized chaos thanks to your family, is there? My hubby had a bad habit of helping to "clean" things, including putting my mail away. Unimportant mail like unpaid bills, notices from the IRS, the PIN without which I can't do jack with my insurance, little things like that. I STILL haven't found the envelope with my PIN nor the one from the IRS (the latter of which I followed up by phone, just to be on the safe side.)

Posted by: Blue Opal | June 29, 2008 at 04:25 AM

My Mom used to say the same thing.... that she could NEVER *leave* the house because we would always do something crazy while she was gone. (there were 6 of us kids) She used to always get mad at my dad, too if he did anything without her permission such as the dryer thing. He eventually just stopped. (although some of his behavior was passive aggressive) My mom controlled the house, except for when she went away and then.....

Posted by: boxx | June 29, 2008 at 09:44 AM

I totally understand. Keep your hands off my domain and all things within said domain. I would have shoved his foot massager up his butt massager!

Posted by: Cosmic | June 29, 2008 at 10:24 AM

NOBODY touches my office area. (It's been to my benefit to have the reputation of being a high-strung and slightly dangerous individual.)

Posted by: Wyndspirit | June 29, 2008 at 11:07 AM

You poor thing! That is always my fear in leaving that everything will fall apart. My husband doesn't think the same way I do about keeping up on laundry or cleaning, etc... I hate coming home to chaos. I wish we could have seen each other while you were in Seattle. Of course, I might have been gone to WI at the time. I have lots of trouble with those canisters at the bank too--but I doubt that I would run over one!

Posted by: Margaret | June 30, 2008 at 01:39 PM

Oh boy can I relate to this? Last year, my husband got mad because the TV upstairs (mine) went out so he brought his up and installed it for me and bought himself a brand new tv which cost waaaaaaay too much..... Irritated the heck out of me because I hated the TV he gave me. However, that tv's audio went out about 5 months later and I had to get a new TV which I also hate.....but they don't make 'em like they used to. I would be locking up your office space when you are gone. Get the kids a cheap computer to use and kept your own personal space for yourself.....

Posted by: terri t. | July 03, 2008 at 02:20 PM