Beech Tree News Network

The place is falling down around me.  You wouldn’t think four people could generate this much destruction.  I guess we’re just gifted.  I can tolerate a mess for a while then I begin to feel like I’m being pushed out of my own home.
    I see the problem.  The problem is I give everybody, including myself, permission to do these things.  These things being the freedom to work, play and relax in the manner to which we have grown accustomed, which, in our case, is chaos. 
    There are times, usually after I’ve visited other women’s houses—women who run tighter ships than I do—when I look at my own house with new resolve.  I will box, bag and order everything aright.  I will sanctimoniously proclaim to all those in my household who will listen—mostly Dougle the cat—that things are going to be different from here on out.
    “We’re not going to live like this anymore,” I tell my family.  They yawn with anticipation.
    I tell myself I need that tee shirt Charlie Sheen wears on “Two and a half Men.”  GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, it screams.  The problem is it’s not just my house.  They have no place else to go.  I have no place else to go.
 The most difficult concept I’ve ever had to come to terms with is the “It’s not personal” concept.  When I’m in the throes of an emotional rant about how my family is taking advantage of me by destroying everything I’ve cleaned up, picked up or put up, my husband, Garey, will calmly say, “Cheryl, it’ nothing personal.”  What he’s saying is this:  “We’re not doing this to make your life miserable.  We would be living this way whether you lived here or not.  We’re basically slobs.” 
I recognize that even I undermine my own handiwork.  I’ll see a new idea for glass bottles or a recipe for laundry soap or material for curtains, and before you know it, I have stuff soaking or boiling or draped everywhere.  I have always had a soft spot for personal creativity, in all its forms.
When my kids were little, they and their friends dressed up in costumes.  They built forts and tents and teepees.  Furniture was pushed back to make room for gymnastic mats.  There were chases through the house involving ping pong pistols and disc shooters.  There was egg dye and Play-Do on the kitchen table.  I would laugh at their antics then cry later over the mess.  I was your basic bipolar mom.
Currently, my granddaughter’s trampoline is in our living room along with three large boxes of her toys.  She drags cardboard boxes from my sunroom into the kitchen and makes a train which we ride to Walmart.  The living room floor becomes an ocean holding a cardboard boat that we row with fly swatter oars as we keep a look-out for Captain Hook.
There is an ideal place I like to picture during the really chaotic times in my life.  It’s a cottage in a small English township.  The cottage has a thatched roof.  There is a small flower garden to the side, and folks riding bicycles—the ones with baskets attached to the handlebars—wave at me in recognition as they go by.  My visits there are brief.  Someone in my house will spill something or break something or lose something and I’m jerked back into the reality that is my own.  I have a plaque hanging in my kitchen that reads: The Hughes Family…Keeping the Fun in Dysfunctional Since 1975.  Yeah, that pretty well defines us.