All my best laid plans have come to naught. Was going to leap up with the dawn, cheerful and bright, and trip lightly to the kitchen and laundry, restoring the glad tidings of order out of chaos. Oh well, I guess I won’t worry about that now. Instead I will wander around in the usual circle of Saturday distraction.
Actually, this week was a remarkable one in that, for the first time in many months, I did have short periods of buzzing around with energy. For example, one day I walked into the kitchen, saw that the stupid kitchen carpet (for real, who installs carpet in a kitchen) was like the sand along the shore of the sea, breezily walked over to the vacuum, pushed it into the kitchen and literally, I kid you not, vacuumed the floor. I know right. Completely amazing (insert string of your favorite shocked emojis here). Other remarkable events like this occurred throughout the week–loading the dishwasher, scrubbing the shower, pulling weeds, washing a big pot–domestic tasks heretofore lost to me in the mists of thyroidal incompetence.
This new haze of cheerful industry brought home to me once again the tragic truth that unhappiness and depression are, for me anyway, usually always linked to the sense of loss of control. Or to say it in a more hideous way, I’m a control freak. When I’m in control, I’m happy. When I am unable to exert control over my environment I am unhappy.
I read a long time ago that this is the usual way of humanity. Some study was done on the general health of the employees in a massive office like situation–some big financial company or other. There was the CEO at the top, and the grunt boy at the bottom. They took everyone’s blood pressure and symptoms of ill health (look at the breezy way I am able to talk about science!) and discovered, alarmingly, that the people at the top of the structure were healthy, happy, and rich, and the people at the bottom were sick, unhappy, and poor.
I, of course, was shocked to read such a revolutionary study. And so I carefully examined my own life and discovered that, yes, those times when I have been at the top of the food chain have been the best for me personally. Whereas, that moment when I was the poor sucker wandering around a lumber mill at night wearing a hard hat, carrying a hose, and looking for a fire to put out was not quite so charming. Depressing, in fact. To be dependent and out of control is difficult, and horrible, and it’s easy for the whole self to turn towards the dark side of depression and bitterness.
The person who has the wherewithal to manage a household, without reference to other people’s demands and peculiarities, is actually quite high up in terms of riches and freedom. I don’t have a ‘boss’. No one yells at me for how badly I entered all those figures into that database and then went on to misfile a whole ream of financial documents (another low point in my working carrier). Housekeeping, for me, is essentially creative–the restoration of cosmic order against the imperiling darkness of chaos. I organize my own time. I get to be my own person.
But take that away with sickness, or perhaps in other cases by marrying a domineering and unkind husband, or perhaps by being ill equipped for the task, or by just hating it, or in any other way feeling the profound absence of freedom, and the SAHM is no better off than that grunt boy in a huge office structure.
And truly, this whole paradigm is why the church, though certainly hierarchical in many ways, should breathe out a powerful sense of freedom. A church is not a company. There should be no compulsion. There should be no Telling Other People What To Do. In the church we have to ask for help from each other. We can only plead and persuade the Other to come to something or to do any of the work. The compulsion can only be inward, from God himself, the Holy Spirit who constrains, convicts, and compels the believer towards holiness. Even then it is always an outworking of freedom, the true bright liberty that comes from holiness and self sacrifice. There should be none of the ill health and psychological problems associated with the corporate post industrial drudgery of the ordinary person’s working life. Of course, we’re all sinners and so even in the church we manage Not to live this out. But the dream should be real.
As for me, I must remember this moment and savor it for when, sometime mid winter, I believe the lie that keeping house is a drag and the best thing in the world would be to go back and be the checkout person at the Christmas Tree Shop.
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