Second date 3, The study from Hell

I never really believed D was going to try to tackle our study. Oh, she said that was part of the plan, and I nodded politely. But there was no way to clean the study until you could get to it, and that meant finding your way through all the junk. I figured that we would talk nicely about how maybe something should be done in the study one day, and then we'd go clean stuff that was truly clean-able. And after that we could sit around and visit ... or maybe it would get late and Wife would go to bed and I would take D back to her motel to fuck. Or something practical like that.

For years our study had been the storage place of last resort. Once upon a time, back before we had kids, Wife had fantasies of using it as a sewing room: so it still had a couple of sewing machines in it, and a wall of shelves full of thread, and crafting books, and notions, and patterns, and just slightly fewer than a million buttons. A lot of this was stuff Wife inherited from her mother, who was a very active seamstress. Wife learned to sew at her mother's knee, and has always felt that sewing was an important part of her self-definition. Whatever else you might say about her, she could always tell herself that, by God, she was her mother's daughter and she could sew her own clothes if she wanted to -- and make them look better than anything store-bought, thank you very much. It might be years between one garment and the next, it might even be years since she had pulled anything out of the mending basket ... but she could do it. She knew how. Her mother had trained her to be better at it than the next girl. And when her mother died, she had inherited all these supplies which she was going to use (some day) to make something really great. Wearable art. Not right now, but maybe next week ... just you wait and see. After all, that was her inheritance ... her destiny, even. Her identity. (Admittedly, this identity has always sat alongside several other, possibly incompatible, identities to which she has clung just as fiercely. But that's not relevant just now.)

Once the boys were born we needed a bedroom for them; so we moved the desk and computer out of the room where they had once sat (thus creating a second bedroom) and we jammed them awkwardly into the sewing room. And for the next ten or twelve years, whenever we had some project get stalled about halfway through, we would park it in a corner of the floor "for later". Did I mention that I'm not very good about throwing away papers (bank statements, paid utility bills, or any of Wife's voluminous medical papers, for example) ... and that I frequently didn't find time to file them either? But hey, that's no big deal ... there was room on the floor between the desk and the first sewing machine for two or three stacks of paper. Besides, as long as the paper is bracketed that way by furniture, you can stack it pretty high without any fear it might fall over.

You get the idea.

So, bright and early the second morning, D walked into the study and said, "Sit down Hosea. I need you to tell me how you work."

Huh?

"How do you work? We have to make this study a place that four people can work. You pay bills for the household; Wife manages a discussion list online; Son 1 and Son 2 each have homework from school. And everyone has a different style. So tell me how you work."

I don't even remember what I said, but Wife interjected, "Wait a minute. That's only part of what this room is for. I also have to be able to sew in here."

And for the first time in this lunatic project, D brushed her off with abrupt impatience: "No you don't. I've talked with you on the phone every day for six months; you spend hours telling me what you do each day. Not once have you mentioned sewing. Maybe you used to sew in the past but you haven't done any sewing in a long time, and this house is too small to leave a room set up for Some Day. We need a solution that will work for today, and you no longer sew today. Tthat means we need a study that four people can use as a study. If that changes later, the room can be rearranged then."

With that, she summarily asked the boys to bring in a large box of sturdy trash bags, and she started throwing stuff away.

I should have written this all down back then, I know I should have. Today, as I write these words, this all took place a fortnight ago, and there is no way I will remember it all. But the highlights? The overall gist? That's easy. Wife lost it.

You can't throw that away! That's a family treasure! I got that from my grandmother! Besides I use that every single day! How dare you?

This? Don't be crazy. There's fifteen years worth of dust on this, and besides that it's broken. You can't possibly tell me you use it every day ... in fact, you can't tell me you have used it even once.

But it is old! You can't throw away something that old!

Stop and focus. The job is to make this a study that four people can work in today. We can't do that if you insist on keeping every single solitary piece of broken trash. Get a clue.

But it's a family treasure! Have you no respect for my family treasures?

After about the twentieth shrieking repetition of this particular harangue, D finally lost her temper. "No," she said; and, pointing at the boys, she went on, "those are your treasures! And they have no place in this house that they can use for themselves because it is so clogged with leftover memories of the past. If you care about them half as much as you say you do, then help me clean out all of this Past from the house so they have room to live and work and grow in the Present! I know your mother and father are both dead -- but I lost my mother too, a lot younger than you did, and you can't keep people alive by hanging onto things!"

There was more. I can't even begin to remember how much more. Work on the study took two solid days, Tuesday and Wednesday, until well into the evening. D's return flight had been scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, but Tuesday night she gave me all her reservation information and said, "Change this. Extend my stay until Saturday. I can't leave the job half done, and there's no way I can be done before Saturday. I'm sorry but I can't deal with the airline on top of everything else right now -- just make it happen." The active papers were separated out; all the rest went in boxes -- unsorted, unfiled. So did the patterns. The duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate office supplies -- notepads and Post-It notes to last us "until Jesus comes again!" -- all went in the trash. So did most of the buttons, the notions, much of the thread. Wife started prowling through the trash bags, pilfering stuff out again that she absolutely had to save: bobbins, for example, to fit a sewing machine that is no longer in production, so that new bobbins are totally unavailable. It was awful.

To be fair, D also had us bring some new stuff into the study. My old desk from when I was in elementary school had been in the boys' room all this time, covered in junk. D made the boys clean their room ruthlessly. And the motivation she offered them was simple. Here are empty boxes: these ones are for things going to charity, and those ones are for things going to the trash. I will pay $20 for each box that you can fill all the way. Once my old desk was clear -- and once she had cleared out enough floorspace in the study to accommodate it -- she had us move it in there. She also had the boys bring in personal items -- trophies, photos, mementoes of one kind or another -- to decorate the desk and the shelves. She insisted that you can't expect someone to work effectively in a space that feels like it is not his own; so if the boys are going to do their homework in the study, they need to be able to see some of their own personal stuff surrounding them. When Son 2 saw his own personal memorabilia decorating the shelves over his desk, he danced an improvised jig out of excitement.

Wife, however, was not excited. Every step of the way, Wife asked, But what about me? Where is my personal space? You are giving Hosea and the boys space that is all theirs, and the only person giving up anything is me! Why is that fair? The first few times Wife asked this, D tried to answer patiently that up till now the entire room had been hers, and the current effort was just to make it equitable. After a while, she gave up and stopped answering the question.

In the end -- finally, somehow, we came to an end -- we had stacks of boxes filling the entire kitchen, and we had nearly 350 pounds of trash in bags strewn across our driveway. But the study was clean and usable. The desks were clear. The shelves held office supplies and memorabilia, but nothing else ... and they had a lot of empty space between one item and the next, so we could find stuff easily. We opened a bottle of wine, ate dinner, and fell apart. Wife was angry at D and me for throwing away so much stuff (for no better reason than that it was useless junk); D and I were mad at Wife for obstructing so much obvious progress. Everybody was snapping at everybody else, and even the bottle of wine -- plus the bottle of riesling that I opened for dessert -- didn't do enough to smooth that out.

But the study was clean and truly usable for the first time since we moved into the house almost 15 years ago. Anybody who doubts the possibility of miracles should stop by so I can show off the before-and-after photos.

Thursday we took all the boxes to our storage unit, and I took the trash (all 350 pounds of it) to the dump. And as Friday dawned, D was ready to clean the bathrooms.