I Am Not Enough of a Reason to Fight - 1-31-09

Remember this summer when I was so good about cleaning my beautiful new condo? All I wanted to do was vacuum my pearl gray carpet. The toilets gleamed. My soft, downy, white bed was always pristine, and the pleasure I got from opening all the curtains in my house in the morning and pulling them shut at night warmed me. I was doing it for my future, the future I still believed in and could focus on better now that the condo was squared away and officially mine.

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Not so, now. My ironing piles up. I vacuum only when there are visible things on my carpet that aren’t supposed to be there. I do my laundry and put it away promptly, but my bed remains unmade and I resignedly let stuff pile up on my bench and dining room table.

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I figured it was the depression from my job, over time sapping me of motivation for anything. I was right but not entirely. It is because before I had a reason. There was a point. I believe deep down that it is not what it once would have been – merely the novelty of a new home wearing off. I started taking better care of my housekeeping skills, picking them up from where they had always sat, collecting dust, before I moved into my condo, when the novelty of my first apartment had long since worn off. I changed my habits, no longer content to leave my clean laundry in the basket for three weeks or my dishes piled up to the faucet. It was because I had realized for the first time that what I truly wanted was to have a family and care of them. And here I find myself, in my still-beautiful home, but it is a little more dusty, a tad more cluttered, and wonder why.

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Long before I realized it today, encapsulated the undercurrent in words, I had slowly become blind, no longer with the vision that had peopled my bright new condo with a family and a purpose and I have come to no longer believe in the future I had perceived so keenly. Yes, my job leached motivation to care for my home. But it is truly that I have no purpose in it. What is the point? I have always needed to know the point, the purpose of the things I do. That is one of the tearing things about this job now for me. There is no point in pouring my efforts into these sieves sitting in the desks of my classroom, no point in education as it is now. And I find I have no heart to invest myself in other things that have no point after eight hours a day wasting myself. Things like caring meticulously for a home that was meant for more than me. I no longer believe my home will house anyone but myself. I need to have more reason to do as I used to. I was meant to care for others, for my husband and children, for more than myself. I am not a good enough reason.