Tolerably Habitable

In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)

Long talks with my brother, some live gigs in which deep dub gave way to live drum + bass, and at least one night out that took me to the edge of the hell-mouth that is the heart’s-home of silly, introspective drunks, gave me the shake-up that I needed to get my thinking straight. I came home, got some professional help with the house and garden, planted annuals, welcomed my darling hellion and started an internet diary. In short, I took up a way of life that continued, with modifications, even after I began keeping company with the señor fewer than four years later. Its poles of house, garden and work have largely been the standard by which I measure myself even eight years after its establishment.

In one of those mini-epiphanies that inevitably takes place in suburban locations – in this case, the local supermarket carpark – I yesterday realised this early-century standard is in part the source of some of my worries now. The past year should have, more than any other, reminded me of the changes time hath wrought. Time and money have not only been colonised by different responsibilities, but also space. The scale of humanity and caninity that occupies this small house is so much greater than when I finally wrangled my life the way I wanted it, eight years ago, when it was one woman, one part-time job, one dog. This, more than the lack of domestic will I assumed was the source, is the reason the garden is now largely lawn and overgrowing shrubs, and the kitchen, poor, cramped kitchen, the site of daily struggle with a king tide of dirty dishes and food waste (our good fortune in having a dishwasher is offset by the fact it is housed behind the laundry door). When Millie came to us at nine weeks she destroyed in less than a month the level lawn, the plants in pots, the old foam couches on which I had till then lived comfortably. Add to that six live puppies since (the majority of whom still live here) and the folly of my aspirations of shining floors and level garden beds becomes clear.

I am living a life of which once I could only idly dream, but it demands I revise not only the standards to which formerly I held myself and my home but also cease to attempt to put multiple full-time responsibilities into what is only one fulltime life. Parent, employee, domestic slogger: it’s the last, in the case of both the señor and me, that suffers. This is no special insight outside of our own lives, but there is something to be gained, nonetheless, from realising the obvious from time to time. I realise too that I have not helped myself in the last few months by taking as my read-guidance domestic mapping by writers not also working fulltime. I forget, sometimes, when my job is like a second skin, that it is still a fulltime job (as is the señor’s) and thus eats easily the time that can otherwise be spent raising the home beyond the standard of tolerably habitable. We have the care of each other, the care of our daughter and our daughter-to-be, the daily needs of seven dogs; tolerably habitable must be good enough for what future we can foresee.

Tagged as: home, housework