I spuddle.

So I was thinking about this today while I was working in the garden. It was a nice afternoon, sunny and quiet. Quiet because the kids were out with Clayton and sunny because, well, the sun was out. Obviously. I am the master of a descriptive setting. Why I haven’t yet won a Nobel prize for that, I have no idea.

Anyway, I was meant to have been taking some “me time” (a phrase that makes me want to poke the fatty part of my leg repeatedly with a sharpened — and perhaps burning — stick) but was unable to wallow in this so-called “me time” because my front garden is overrun with weeds. Seriously overrun. On a street of lovely houses, my house — from the front — looks like it might be the one house that is, in fact, occupied by squatters. (The back yard is lovely though, I swear.)

To tell this story properly, I have to backtrack, thus making me one of those annoying people who starts out telling one story, backs up to give the history of the story and never, ever gets to the final and exciting conclusion that they promised in the beginning. Not to worry. This post will not have an exciting conclusion, I promise.

So here’s the background to the background: Not too long ago, when we were renting a house from some very unpleasant mean people, these unpleasant mean people accused me of being a “pig”. A pig! Me! I know! If they said much else, I didn’t hear it because all I could hear was the word “pig” echoing around in my head, pinging off every possible surface until it was etched into my recall for all time, replacing much more germane information such as all the lyrics to Joan Jett songs from 1982 and the French translation of “Stop that thief! He has stolen my umbrella!” (formerly my only fluent French phrase).

I am a pig. (Does that put me at increased risk of contracting the Swine Flu I wonder? Remind me to look it up and obsess about it later, even though I was kidding when I said it, perhaps I have all the symptoms without my knowledge and in an ironic twist will contract the Swine Flu thus lending extra credence to the whole pig accusation.) Me who cannot sit on the couch and watch The Bachelor until every damn toy is picked up off the floor, the kitchen is clean, the dishwasher loaded, the bed made even though I’m about to get into it, and the kids washed, folded and put away. You’re probably thinking, “What the hell were they thinking?” Which is what I was thinking, too, except I have a tendency to believe what people say about me so I was also thinking, “How did I become a pig?”. As it turned out, what I’d done was this: I’d shaken a baby bottle and it had sprayed a tiny, nearly invisible spray of milk onto the surface of the kitchen cupboard and I had not noticed. Can you imagine? I didn’t notice! That same day, the unpleasant mean people dropped in to ostensibly “measure” something but in reality to assess my housekeeping skills as they knew we were moving out and were apparently gathering evidence to launch an attack. Later that day, they sent me an e-mail advising me I’d have to have the kitchen cupboard surface refinished due to the obvious damage. They thoughtfully provided the address and phone number of their preferred refinisher. (For the record, I “refinished” it by wiping it off with a damp cloth.)

The whole thing was almost funny, but it wasn’t funny, because it stuck with me. And when I say it stuck with me, I can tell you that this happened now over two years ago and I still think of it at least once a day when I’m deciding whether or not I have the energy to scrape the spilled yogurt off the floor or really how important it is to clean the bottom of the windows where all that strange black gunk accumulates. It’s like I imagine that these unpleasant mean people are going to come over, look around, and nod sagely, saying, “See? She’s a pig.” Which is ridiculous. Why would they come over? I am not in the habit of having unpleasant mean people to tea. I cannot imagine what would come over me to so much as invite them in. I saw them in the grocery store once and it was all I could do not to drive into them with my cart. OK, I may have nudged them a little. OK, I ran over their feet.

But you have to understand, these same people accused me of HARD LIVING which is even funnier because I did not leave the house once for the entire year that I lived there, having just had a baby and having no social life to speak of and the hardest living I ever did was sometimes staying up too late watching reality TV shows when I ought to have been catching up on sleep. They wanted to get extra money from us because they wanted to reno the house we were moving out of and to move into it themselves. It was very apparent that all the things that were wrong when we moved in, that they laughed off at the time, were things they were planning on billing us for later, but we were gullible and they seemed nice, so we didn’t keep a record of anything and in the end were screwed out of a bunch of money. The money doesn’t bother me. But the pig comment got to me. Even though it was ludicrous.

It still gets to me.

So now I work myself into a frenzy to erase any sign of pigdom in my house, with varying levels of success, because it’s hard when you have toddlers and every time you wash the floor, they pad along behind you on their dirty feet leaving a trail of dripping juice box and sand (because they always have sand tucked into the cuffs of their pants or their ears or somewhere, I don’t know where they keep it, but it’s there) in their wake. Such is my sticky, sandy life.

I never extended my Fear of Being a Pig to the front yard until just the other day when the sudden realization that I AM ACTUALLY A PIG hit me at the same time as 4,869 dandelions bloomed simultaneously throughout the yard and flower beds and something happened inside me that many may call a panic attack but I’d describe more as the feeling that my delicate flower of an ego was made from tinfoil and it had been crumpled up really really hard into a fist-sized ball and stepped on and then farted out the bum of an elephant. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then you are obviously not as crazy as I am and shouldn’t read this blog because little will make sense to you here. When it suddenly became clear to me that the neighbours probably thought this was a crack den or the home of an elderly person who perhaps had died in bed six months ago and no one had yet noticed, I could hardly breathe. I literally could not WAIT to get out there and start weeding.

Which is why, instead of spending my “me time” flipping through magazines and sipping martinis in the sunshine while hired hands fanned me with palm fronds, I was hunched over in the side yard thinking about how it’s time to let go of that whole “pig” thing, all the while yanking up dandelions by the roots in spite of the excrutiating disc pain it was causing because God-in-heaven forbid that anyone passing by might fleetingly think, “Goodness, look at that house. Those people are pigs.” In other words, I don’t care what people think, except when it’s something not flattering. I wanted — no needed — those passers-by to think, “Goodness, look at that house! What an amazing garden, those people are angels sent from heaven to beautify the world with their miraculous horticultural delights!”

So there’s that.

I weeded the side yard and then became debilitated by back pain so instead of actually weeding the front, I bought a weed-puller thing and thought about why I’m so ridiculous that this thing that these unpleasant mean people said about me two years ago has the power to prevent me from spending my off-hours being massaged by leprechauns under a sparkling rainbow while unicorns dance on the ribbons of sunlight and fairies swim in the puddles made by the gently falling rain.

I’m thinking of letting it go. Soon. Right after I tidy up the living room for the first of 800 times that I will tidy it today because right now, at this second, there are no kids in here actively messing it up.

Filed under: Me, Myself and I