Address Or Die Trying

I am at an absolute loss.  No one else living in this house cares if we live in squalor, and that's not hyperbole.  I'm on day four of a migraine and even when I feel mostly good, the house is various stages of trashed, regardless of whether or not it's pear/zucchini season.  This house never has a clean season.  Now I am embarrassed if we have to open the door for anyone, including the mail carrier.  I start to panic just having to walk through the place because it doesn't matter where you look, there is stuff everywhere, on every single surface.  We're like a hoarder's starting pack.  There is time to turn back before a film crew shows up, but as I am literally the only person who hates this, I am going to have to be the one who makes drastic and uncomfortable change now.  Or lose my fucking mind trying, then they can be on hoarders without me.

To boot, we are supposed to be looking for a new house in town.  I have even started packing boxes and going through cabinets, weeding out what can be stored, trashed, or donated!  But for my efforts, I have gotten days on end of migraine and a house of squalor.  Certainly it doesn't help that the girls are still getting a lot of migraines and we are all stressed as hell about the school we're not getting done, but why am I the only grown up (of 3) in the house who knows how to discipline the girls and make them clean up after themselves?  Raising adults is hard ass work, it takes a village, and we have no village.  And what small encampment we made goes unseen under the garbage strewn about.

And steven is like a grudging and slow teenager, who has to be told to do every little detail of every little thing except walk the dogs.  Even that was a hard earned victory, that stupid, dirty, lying, careless bastard.  Still, every day I have to wake him up and give him specific jobs to do, many of which he will do slowly and crappily if at all.  For fuck's sake, I process pears faster than he does While cooking cabbage With a migraine and you can't make shit like that up.  It wouldn't be so bad if he weren't a professional cook, who worked at the goddamed Pentagon for four years.  I hope you're as not shocked as I am that the squalor rant involves a food-specific steven rant.  MY GOD this song is repetitive! 

So, part of the uncomfortable change was to put all the girls' toys into storage and only let them have homeschool stuff.  But being that I am truly alone I think we are going to have to quit homeschool too, our charter home school anyway.  I can't do food management and house management and migraines and insurance and meetings and caretaking by myself.  Forget packing.  And it's heartbreaking for so many reasons.  But you can only work with what you're given.  I can't make anyone else care about cleaning up.  I can't make steven care about doing a good job helping around here.  And I certainly can't make us stop getting migraines and having food allergies, though I spend a great deal of time trying.

We will be reduced to managing misery, and learning how to keep a house while miserable.  I'm fine with that.  Discipled misery is far better than undisciplined misery.  And for the girls, it is likely a lesson more important than history right now.  We're in a crisis, and it's probably past time to be in crisis mode.

You know all I wanted for my birthday was a clean house.  Family kept asking and I kept answering.  I didn't demand a spotless house for all eternity, I just wanted a clean house that day.  Two guesses if that happened but you'll only need one.  It was just a symptom of some greater problems, that it's time we addressed.  Address or die trying.