Spring Cleaning

At the beginning of each year, I launch an ambitious spring cleaning project. My goal is to empty every closet, drawer, cabinet, and box in the house, clean it out, wipe everything down, and then replace what we are keeping, but neatly and better organized. I started the process last year but fizzed out, so I am determined to do the entire house this year.

To stay on track, I created a checklist with every single item and area that I want to clean out and organize. This way, I can track my progress, and I can also choose what to clean out, based on how much time I have. For example, an entire closet will need several hours on a weekend or a day off, but if I just have a short window of opportunity, I can clean out and organize my box of nail polishes (yes, I have a bit of a nail polish problem, but I swear I use all of those colors!).

This past weekend, thanks to the polar weather, I mostly stayed inside and got started on the list. I cleaned out both bathroom vanities and medicine cabinets. All I can say is, I don’t need to buy any body lotions, body washes, or scented body scrubs for a looooooong time! But at least now they are all grouped together neatly, and I know I can sit out the next several Bath & Body Works sales.

This morning at work, I figured, why not keep the momentum going? I cleaned out my desk drawers and cabinets, then organized loose items like extra notepads into cute little containers in a drawer.

I just feel so much better when things are neat, orderly, organized. I can’t wait until the entire checklist is marked off, and the whole house has been de-cluttered and tidied.

Sometimes it’s funny to uncover something I forgot that we had. In the small table beside my seat of the couch, I had stashed some embroidery thread and small scissors. I couldn’t remember why I had those, since I don’t embroider. After wondering if I was simply going crazy, I finally remembered that I had used embroidery thread to decoratively stitch the edge of a blanket that I made for my husband a few years ago. How could I forget? I kept the thread and scissors in that little table because it took forever to go around the edges of that blanket. I cut the blanket extra long since my husband is so tall, and I would sit in the evenings, chatting or watching TV with him, working my way around that blanket one section at a time with the thread.

We’ll see what memories I uncover during this year’s round of spring cleaning!

First Dance

Deb and Napoleon’s first dance, Napoleon Dynamite

My husband was flipping through TV channels last night and randomly landed on a music channel playing 80s videos. As soon as I heard the song, I melted. I told my husband, “Oh, this song was my first dance, back in middle school.”

He stood up immediately, which I wasn’t expecting. He smiled, reaching his arms out to me. We slow-danced in the middle of the living room, singing along, laughing as we remembered those awkward gym dances so long ago. I rested my head on his chest, and he kissed the top of my head.

I can’t remember the last name of the boy I danced with almost 40 years ago in that middle school gym. But I remember his face, his nervousness, the song, where we were in the gym, the excited butterflies I felt.

What a beautiful, nostalgic experience to slow dance to that same song, decades later, with my husband, in the living room of our home. Wherever that middle school boy is now, I hope he also found love, happiness, and his own lifelong dance partner.

Obsessive Hate

I’ve made a lot of flippant jokes about my husband’s ex-wife, Psycho, being obsessed with me and stalking me. In all honesty, though, it’s more disturbing than amusing.

This summer, my husband and I will be celebrating 20 years together. TWENTY YEARS. Two decades. And her bad-mouthing, snooping, driving by, and online stalking have never slowed down.

The easy explanation is that she’s crazy, jealous, has no life. All those things are true, but there is obviously more than that going on. Obsessing and stalking for twenty years takes more than just a few loose screws.

I find her pathological obsession puzzling. If I like someone, I seek them out. If I don’t like someone, I don’t pay attention to them. Simple. Claiming to hate me, yet rabidly seeking me out, doesn’t add up.

Dr. Karla McLaren, a psychotherapist, wrote, “… we attach ourselves to our hate targets with an intensely obsessive passion.” It becomes a distorted form of infatuation, or as psychiatrist Willard Gaylin calls it, a “quasi-delusional mental disease”.

Dr. Gaylin emphasized that the obsessive hater externalizes internal frustrations, conflicts, and shortcomings onto a scapegoat, and that the choice of victim is guided by the unconscious needs of the hater, not by actions of the victim.

Ah. That makes sense.

By all accounts, Psycho did not intend to follow through on their divorce all those years ago. It was a narcissistic stunt to demand sympathy and money from her father, to feed her parasitic ego by expecting my husband to beg her to come back to him, and to bask in commiseration and attention from that town of inbred tongue-waggers. Instead, my husband realized that he missed the kids like hell, but not Psycho. Then…he met me.

If Psycho is honest with herself, that is ground zero for all of her feelings about me. I didn’t even know her, or my husband, until long after they separated. Her game playing, selfishness, stupidity, and untreated mental defects destroyed her marriage, but it’s so much easier to point at me and say, “I hate her.” For 20 years.

Dr. Gaylin writes about pathological haters shifting blame to others for their unhappiness, deprivations, and misery. It’s easier than accepting responsibility for their own actions. I don’t believe that Psycho is even aware that she has done this, has trapped herself in this delusion, for decades.

Hateful fixation, like Psycho’s with me, shares serotonin and dopamine profiles similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder. She has obsessed over me for so long that it is a compulsion now, intrusive, embedded in her neural circuitry.

I already knew it was a disturbance solely in her head, and I am just the one she conveniently blames for her failures as a person, as a wife, as a mother. These psychiatrists’ research and writings only affirmed what I already understood.

A co-worker of mine is now going through a contentious divorce. We talked for hours the other day. I thought about what I wish I knew nearly 20 years ago, and I told her that the best advice I could give, besides document everything, is to learn to tune out the bad-mouthing, the accusations, the insults, the provocations. I told her to let her ex drown in bitterness, anger, and a toxic stew of hateful emotions, but for herself and her child, choose better.

My husband and I made a conscious decision to focus on us and the kids, our future together, our happiness. Psycho made a decision to focus on her jealousy and her spite. Her venomous thoughts and behaviors fed on each other, until they blotted out all reason or potential for growth.

It’s sad. But avoidable. And all her own fault. Hell, we even tried to warn her, but she was swiftly past the point of logic, if she was ever there at all.

Twenty more years from now, Psycho will still be obsessed with me. She can’t help it. It’s become part of who she is. She has entwined her very being and identity with her fascination with me. The alternative is honestly evaluating her life and how she spawned its downward spiral, but she lacks the strength, honor, and integrity to ever do that.

So she will continue to stalk me online, to interrogate others about me, to drive by our house and anywhere else she can find me, to think about me more than she wants to admit. It’s not healthy, it’s not sane, and it’s sad and pathetic, but it simply is what it is.

She is beyond help, and has been for years. And, cold as it sounds, I don’t care. She has done this to herself, day by day, choice by choice.

Just as I decided nearly 20 years ago, I am going to focus on me, my marriage, my family, my happiness. I am proud and grateful that my choices have led to a life filled with love. Can I really blame Psycho for coveting what we have?

Treasure

This popped up as the verse of the day recently on an app I use. We had just spent most of the day visiting with two of the kids and one of our grandsons, so it was absolutely perfect timing.

The three-day weekend blasted past us and was over before I was ready. The main reason it went by so quickly, though, is because we had such a beautiful time. Nothing wild and crazy, no fancy trips, no huge plans…nope, even better. My husband and I enjoyed time together, date night, then also had fun visiting with the kids and holding, spoiling, and loving on our younger grandson.

My husband sat with one long leg stretched out so he could bounce our grandson on his knee. Our grandson loved it, looking up at him with a huge smile on his little face, laughing. My husband joked that I can’t bounce him as well because my feet don’t touch the floor, which is kind of true, but don’t tell him I admitted that.

I took a few pictures of them together. Our grandson’s face is slightly blurry, since he was bouncing at the time, but the happiness on his face is perfectly clear. Our daughter-in-law took a few pictures and sent them to us later: our grandson standing in between us, or sitting on my lap and curiously examining my necklace.

I have always loved watching my husband with the kids, but there’s something extra magical about watching him with our grandkids. Even if his back hurts, even if he worked hard all day, he forgets all of that to get on the floor, wrestle with the older grandson, lift the younger one high in the air, whatever it takes to put a smile on their face and make them laugh.

He is loving, giving, gentle, protective. Seeing him as a grandfather just gives me one more reason to love him even more than I thought was possible.

My treasure is him, the kids, our grandkids, our home, my brothers, my family. And that absolutely is where my heart lives, where I find my joy and my peace, and all of my love.

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