Last week I ventured into a place that I try to avoid on the same level that I try to avoid dark alleyways and Justin Bieber concerts – my daughter’s room. My grandmother takes great pleasure in pointing out that Conley’s slovenly ways are my righteous comeuppance for my fastidious tendencies that apparently stretch back to around infancy.
I texted my husband and told him that her room was in such disarray that it was making me tear up. So, I got to work. (And, please don’t come at me with how I should have made her clean her own room. My husband tried that already. It didn’t end well for him and I am deeply in love with that man. Yes, of course, in the parenting utopia that we all live in when we are not doing the actual parenting, I would have set out guidelines and expectations and made her follow through with them. But, I didn’t. I wanted the room clean and not in a half-assed 10 year old kind of way.)
I bagged up old clothes and hung up new ones. I stuffed keepsakes into a tote. I gathered up discarded stuffed animals and put them in their container. And, I was doing ok until I opened her trashcan. When the dry-heaving stopped, I heard Morgan Freeman’s voice. He said, Remember Sosha, Andy crawled to freedom through five-hundred yards of sh*t-smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just didn’t want to.
If Andy Dufrense could crawl through 500 yards of sewage, I could clean up the prison hooch starter pack that was fermenting in my kid’s trashcan.
The room was chaotic and disorganized when I entered it. It made me want to cry. It made my need for control come barrelling out of my fingertips. My daughter’s room was a physical manifestation of the emotional wreckage of the life that we have been dealing with the last couple of months.
After I got through threatening shipping her to a Siberian work camp if her room every got that way again, she sweetly thanked me. She said, “Mom, thank you so much for helping me. My room just got out of control and it overwhelmed me.”
I get it, kid. I totally get it.
I don’t have anything unique or profound to say about our new world. I’ve done the same things that many of us who are very privileged have done: drank too much, ordered too much, eaten too much, watched too much, scrolled too much, self-pitied too much, worried too much. Some days it just got out of control and overwhelmed me.
Fortunately, I have people who have taken a breath and come in, walked through the sh*t with me and then cleaned me up.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
