Shame

Despite the best efforts of a few¹ commentors, and my mother, I feel very little shame over any sexual misconduct in which I am alleged to have indulged. Wait, let me check!

Right, still very little shame.

Somehow this has not carried over into other facets of my life where the guilt — oh how very deep does the guilt run. This is nowhere so evident than in the absolute misery I’ve put myself through these past several years over the state of my lawn.

My little family lives in a neighborhood that could only be described as working class. We are surrounded by cubicle-jockeys, teachers, assembly-linespeople, truck drivers and a healthy contingent of grannies. No one, and I mean no one, cares a whit about maintaining golfcourse-like grass. But we do, for the most part, keep things neat. We mow weekly, and when late July rolls around (and in defiance of all logic) we set out the sprinklers to keep things green. Before I bore or otherwise acquired  children I did the same; additionally, I surrounded the entire house and bordered every inch of fence with gardens, which I filled with all manner of flora from the ornamental to the edible. Vividly do I remember being so pregnant I could barely see my toes and digging up one last patch of grass. I need to get this done before the baby arrives, I remember thinking. If I get it planted now, maintaining it after she’s here won’t be so difficult.

For the most part I was right; with one child and no other employment I had time enough to weed and fertilize, and every day during the growing season — every day! — I walked through my tiny domain and scuffed out with the toe of my shoe any weed brazen enough to show its spiny head. I even had time to take pictures of my handiwork, pictures which I painstakingly edited and which, if you’ve been here with me from the start, you might recall seeing regularly long ago. But then life (in the shape of two babies in quick succession and the end of a marriage) intervened, and by the time my husband left the family home and I was expected to earn enough money to satisfy three ravenous children, weeding the garden fell lower and lower on my list until it fell right off.

Then the guilt began: Each intervening year saw the yard grow more disheveled and the gardens less beautiful. Grass overtook the borders of fist-sized granite chunks I’d so carefully placed and choked out my lovely flowers. A local teenager with a lawnmower and a need for gas money managed the regular lawn care but as time went on scuffing out weeds with the toe of my shoe became less and less possible until at some point a couple years ago I pretty much gave up and let the shame grow as rampant as the weeds, weeds that hid even my carefully painted giraffe.²

Clearly this commercial played beneath my playtime too many times during my formative years. I believed it:

I can rub and scrub this old house til it’s shinin’ like a dime.
Feed the baby, grease the car and powder my face at the same time.
Get all dressed up, go out and swing til 4 a.m.
And then lay down at 5, jump up at 6, and start all over again.

So irrational are my thoughts on this topic that while we are outside playing I fret that we’re not inside cleaning. While we’re inside cleaning I worry that I’m not giving them enough culture. If we enjoy something cultural I’m convinced that my work is falling by the wayside. As I work I think of the ten-thousand things I need from the store. Shopping, I beat myself up over the fact that I’m not pulling weeds. And so it goes, a never-ending litany of guilt that I can’t get done everything that needs to be done and no matter how hard I try, all that’s happened is that my eldest is two-thirds of the way to being raised and I’ve not had nearly enough time with her. There is never enough time. I will never have enough time.

So in the minivan I play this. Loudly. Repeatedly. I sing along³ — for myself as much as for them. I hope the chorus bores into their little developing brains ’til they know that perfection is neither attainable nor necessary and that their self-worth is tied not to the number of weeds in their flower beds but is instead a function of how well they treat other people. I hope they will know this. I hope they will know this better than do I.

There is but one solution to my weed problem: I have purchased a huge quantity of mulch and bottles of the strongest weed killer I could find. I have begun a schedule of weed-killin’ that I resolve to carry out throughout the warm months ’til even the stubbornest specimens succumb. I have hired a teenager whose back is certainly stronger than my own⁴ to place the mulch in each flowerbed and around any plants that are not killed outright. The combination of a thick layer of wood chips and ongoing herbicidal blitz will surely knock things back to the point that I will no longer die a tiny death at the number of dandelions in the grass or foot-tall foxtails amongst the lilies. And then maybe next year I can get back to more toe-scuffing and less soul-crushing shame.

Maybe.

1. A merciful few, all things considered [↩]
2. This has not always been a bad thing. Right now the overgrown backyard is housing two pair of cardinals, a hideaway for the kids behind a seldom trimmed bush, and, next to the door, a mother duck warming a clutch of a dozen eggs. [↩]
3. Nervous messed up marionette, flying alone on a prison ship. [I know those lyrics are misquoted but that is how I hear them. I think they're better this way.] [↩]
4. Because he has not unloaded and spread out one-hundred bags of mulch a half-dozen times over the years [↩]