It Didn't Take

I am writing this to avoid doing my dishes.

Also my laundry. Also taking out the trash, which would require carrying it downstairs to the dumpster, which would take maybe ninety seconds, which feels like ninety seconds I cannot spare. The trash can is full. The bag next to the trash can is also full. There’s a wagon by the door with another bag that’s been meaning to go downstairs for — I want to say two days? It might be four.

Today is both National Pack Rat Day and National No Dirty Dishes Day. I am celebrating neither.

Here’s what the apartment looks like right now: I’m sitting at my desk, which has dishes on it. Half-empty cans of Coke that need to be dumped before they can go into the trash can that is, again, already full. There’s mail piled up. Candy wrappers scattered around where I sit. Behind me on the table is a smattering of leftover nonsense, including a package of Oreos I haven’t opened yet. And the thing is - it’s all out of the view of my camera, so that my telehealth clients can’t see just how much of a disaster I am. Correction. How big of a disaster the room is.

The reason I need to deal with all of this — the grown-up reason – is that I’m a fifty-year-old man who should be able to maintain a living space. But the more pressing reason is that Rhonda is coming tomorrow.

Rhonda is my cleaning lady. She’s been cleaning for me for over five years. She’s efficient, has a whole strategy, gets things done fast, and laughs at my jokes. She is the least judgmental person on earth.

I need to clean before she gets here.

I know. I know what you’re thinking, because it’s the same thing Rhonda thinks. But here’s what happens, every single time: I go downstairs to let her into the building. We walk to my door, I open it, and immediately say, “It’s a disaster, I’m sorry.” Every single time. And every single time, she tells me it’s not that bad, that this is why she’s here, and then she laughs at whatever quip I throw in after the apology. I try to vary those. The writer in me, I guess.

She always tells me to stop apologizing. She has never once made me feel bad about the state of things. That feeling is entirely homegrown.

If you want the complicated answer for why I clean before the cleaning lady comes, it’s that I need to make sure certain things are put away where I won’t lose them, and that enough is moved out of the way for her to do the deep clean I’m paying her for.

If you want the simple answer: it’s that I’m ashamed.

I’m a therapist. I know what shame is. I can diagram it on a whiteboard, explain the difference between shame and guilt, trace it back to its origins in about six minutes. This is not a mystery to me. And I know where this shame comes from.

My mother is a phenomenal homemaker. Her house is spotless. Always. She tried to teach me all of that. She tried really hard.

It didn’t take.

I know that keeping a clean house is a reasonable expectation of an adult human being. It’s not an unreasonable standard and the shame isn’t because my mom did anything wrong. The shame is because it’s just dishes. It’s laundry. It’s carrying a bag of trash for ninety seconds to a dumpster. None of this is hard. I know how to do all of it. I just — don’t. And then I don’t again. And then Rhonda texts to ask if I want to schedule something, because usually she’s the one reaching out, not me, unless I’ve hit the point where I look around and feel disgusted with myself.

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I’m not really a pack rat. I don’t have a sentimental attachment to the half-empty Coke cans. I’m not saving the junk mail for later. I don’t have boxes of memories I can’t part with. If anything, I’m pretty good at throwing things away — once I actually stop writing long enough to do so.

The problem has never been letting go. The problem is just the go.

After Rhonda leaves, the apartment smells so nice. I almost always take a nap in my freshly made bed. I lie there in clean sheets in a room that feels like it belongs to an actual adult, and I think, this time I’ll keep it like this. I do my best. I really do. But inevitably I get in a rush, and clothes land on the floor, and a dish ends up in the sink, and a Coke can sits half-empty on the desk for one day that becomes three, and the cycle continues.

Job security for Rhonda, I guess.

Besides, if I did get my act together, I’d miss our patter, that ritual where I apologize, she reassures me, and for a minute I feel okay being me.

Kirk Sheppard is a therapist, author, and theater journalist (and member of the American Theatre Critics/Journalists Association). He turned 50 in March, and he’s writing about it all year. Go to kirksheppard.com for more.