Why does it seem that I don’t have the time or energy to do certain household chores? You know, the ones you dislike so you avoid them, and the longer you avoid them, the uglier they get? I will watch my ironing basket fill up and overflow over two or three weeks, dreading the task. In my mind I will build it up, so that the job will appear to be so time consuming and difficult that I just know I can’t get it done. That ironing will take HOURS and my back hurts too much to stand for that long so there’s no way I can do the ironing. Meanwhile Mt. Wrinkle continues to grow.
When I finally bite the bullet and set up the ironing board, I time the job and find that it takes 48 minutes. That’s three weeks of laundry – 48 minutes. That’s an average of 16 minutes per week. I can decide to spend the 16 minutes and iron each week. Or I can decide to do a few pieces at a time, each time I do laundry. Or, I can decide to save it up for a marathon ironing session and it’s still only 48 minutes of my time and energy. I can lower the ironing board and sit on the couch watching the news while I iron. Yet in my mind, it’s a 3-hour, backbreaking job that I’ll never have be able to accomplish. ‘
I’d like to get out of “martyr mode”. I am trying to “just do it anyway”, even when it is boring, hard work, messy or “shouldn’t have to do it anyway”. Not everything in life is glamourous, exciting, fun. Someone has to scrub the bathtub; in my house, that’s me. I can whine about it, put it off, let the soap scum build up until I need harsh chemicals and lots of muscle to get it clean. Or I can just do it anyway, spend 5 or 6 minutes getting it as clean as I can, knowing that I’ll do another short spurt of work in a couple of days.
It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. Perhaps it’s better to have cleaned and missed a spot than never to have cleaned at all…..
