Failings

Our "doggie apartment" has become a doggie multiplex. I called Ashley this morning about a lost pomeranian someone had found and she said that she was just about to call me. It seems that her brain-damaged dog, Jessie, had reached tolerance with Nicki and it was becoming clear that Nicki had to leave. Of course I said we would take her back. So Nicki has moved back into the lower apartment and while I had intended to move Tater and Tot to the playpen, now that Nicki is here and I will be leaving the back door open again, and the temps are in the 40s, I decided the puppies needed to stay on a heating pad for awhile longer.

As for the pomeranian, Ashley checked him for a microchip and there was none and the woman who found him decided to keep him, hoping that someone would put up a lost dog poster. Ashley thought she had seen him at adoption with another group and thought he had been newly adopted. I didn't follow most of the conversation, because Tater and Tot decided to choose that moment to be starving (check the video of the day to see what Tot is like when she's hungry!), Lizzie and Sheila only wanted to jump at the pomeranian, who was being held by the woman, and since it wasn't going to concern my hosting the pomeranian, I just put Sheila on a leash to keep her from jumping, heated up a bottle and settled in to feed the puppies.

This does seem somewhat like Doggie Central today.

I thought about this house a lot when the pomeranian lady was here, how my inability to get and keep a neat and tidy home has changed my whole view of what life was going to be like after I was married.

We moved here from Berkeley in 1973 with 50 other families who all worked in the same office, which was being moved to Davis. Those people formed a social circle on the other side of town. They did things together, they had dinner parties, etc. We never did any of that. I was always embarrassed to invite anyone here to dinner...and Walt was, I'm sure, embarrassed to have co-workers see our house.

When I was growing up, Karen and I could never have friends come to visit because of my father and so we always had to go to other people's houses to hang out. Our house was going to be different, I promised myself before we had kids. I wanted to be the house where our kids and their friends hung out. But the only group who ever hung out here were the foreign students from the high school who were friends with our Brasilian student. This became kind of a meeting place for them after school every day for a year, but our own kids were off at other people's homes, homes that were neater, that had better "stuff" to play with (or a pool).

Occasionally I have invited friends to dinner, but it means going through a mid-year Mom's Christmas Crisis to do it and I'm always aware of the stuff that is piled in corners and the dust bunnies I've missed. So over the years I just stopped inviting friends to dinner, and consequently we rarely get invited to dinner, so the "let's drop around for coffee" groups I had hoped to find when we had our own home in a small town, never came to be.

I meet people at the door and stand there talking to them, trying to hold Lizzie and Sheila back from jumping at them, rather than invite them in because I'm mentally doing an assessment of just how bad the house may be at the moment. I finally threw up my hands and gave Ashley a key to the house because it was just easier for both of us. She hasn't run screaming into the night yet...and she gets to go upstairs too!

It seems like my whole life, and probably my relationship with our kids (it's no surprise that Tom always comes to town and stays with friends instead of here and my mother stays with my cousin when she comes to the area) has all been shaped by the one huge failing in my life -- I never learned how to organize, clean, or keep a house orderly. The older I get the more difficult it gets to even start because the greater the accumulation of the years becomes.

Of course, when it comes to people like Pomeranian Lady, the up side is that I don't care any more. I figure I gave her some nice horror story to go home and tell her kids.

And the dogs don't care what kind of housekeeper I am. As long as I feed them and love them, they seem to be perfectly happy. That is something, at least.