You can clean or you can stop cleaning. The mess looms large, regardless
Grandmothers, cleaning and WAGs
My paternal grandmother, Olive, was as salty as her name suggests. And as with her briny namesake, she was an acquired taste. Appreciation of the flavour of her company required specific ingredients to pull off. Plop her into the wrong mix and she would leave a bitter aftertaste. (She was also small and round like an olive, so the similarities begin to multiply in my mind.)
Olive and I were never pals. The main obstacle to forming a bond being her deep dislike of me from birth. I’m not sure why she viewed me as something alien to her, but by the time I was an adolescent the feeling had become mutual.
She’s been dead since the Noughties, but I think of her more now than I ever did when she was alive. Maybe it’s because she is dead, and it is infinitely easier to understand a dead relative than a living one. Living relatives are so damned alive, it’s hard to see their humanity.
As I’ve gotten older, I have begun to reimagine the minor key villains of my youth as human beings, adults dealing with the stresses and strains of marriage, children, work, and all while nurturing private desires and despairs that go ignored or mocked or some mix of both.
Where they fall short, I try and fill in the blanks. I hope someone will do that for me one day.
I may be giving her more credit than she gave me, but you can have it, Olive. So long as you haunt me with your vinaigrette recipe. I still haven’t cracked it.
Olive had an infuriatingly stock response to any complaints you brought to her for nurturing. That response: Get on your hands and knees and wash the floor. It was her belief that it’s better to clean the house than get stuck in your feelings.
It’s unhappy advice if you’re looking for consolation or acknowledgment but it’s the kind of response you might expect from a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and trying to survive it. Today, I can parse its wise necessity. To take an action that isn’t destructive when you want to blow things up is never a bad idea.
It’s a rich irony to me that I’ve called on that advice over the last decade of my life not just occasionally but as a form of survival, too, as I’ve cycled through some of my own adult challenges. I rely on it almost daily to get me out of my head and heart when they are places that need attention.
But I’m also conscious of its inherent stasis — the way in which coping strategies become pathologies of their own, never getting you anywhere but right back at the same spot. The nature of cleaning itself provides this proof point. You can spend three hours cleaning the kitchen and it will be entirely undone the moment someone comes in to make a sandwich.
Crumbs in the sink. Wet stinky knives. The milk-ringed bottoms of cups. The mess is always looming. The mess doesn’t even have the courtesy to wait until you leave the damn room. You did it and now it’s undone. How do you deal with that?
Lately, I’ve gotten better about leaving other people’s messes to themselves while I tend to mine in ways that give me joy or just better feelings. I’m trying to remember the things that get stuffed away in corners and neatly placed under folded laundry. The stuff you have to silence alongside the things that you want to forget. This Substack is something that has brought me that. I’m grateful to anyone who reads or subscribes to what is really a form of mind cleaning I enjoy, that I strive to get better at and make meaningful.
And now for some BITS AND BITES:
And here are some recommendations for the holy trinity of viewing, reading, eating. They are all things I enjoyed this week.
• Read this from the EIC of Jewish Currents and continue to think about it. Ditto this rich appreciation of dark humour as an approach to the way in which Palestinian life and death is viewed.
• This introduction to the ideas of Yeshayahu Leibowitz popped in my inbox and I read with interest.
• Read about the non-fiction work, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, via an interview Masha Gessen conducted with the author Nathan Thrall at Lit Hub and have put it on hold at the library. It tells the story of Israel-Palestine through the lens of a Palestinian father who lost his five-year-old son, Milad, in an accident made possible by the structural reality of the conflict. I really want to read.
• Watched Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story on Disney+ in desperation for something mindless and instead dug deep into psychoanalysis of WAGs. I’ve met a real-life WAG, i.e., a wife of an English footballer before and I don’t think they have easy lives. Or rather, I believe, the cost is something we don’t often see paid in public. This documentary hints at some of that and I would like to write about it for a publication that pays me, but we shall see. I may not get my wish.
And, as a last word, I’m advocating for the season of the Pomegranate. From now till January, I recommend throwing Pom seeds into salads, bowls with sliced banana and clementines, and everywhere else.