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A
Home of My Own
by Elizabeth Bussey Sowdal |
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That’s
it! I am done, finished, kaput. It is over. I have put up with it for years and
years and years and I am not going to put up with it anymore. I am getting my
own apartment. My very own apartment. There will be one key. My key. There will
be absolutely nothing crusty and/or unidentifiable on any of the furniture in
my apartment. The dark wood will gleam richly. Delicate, precious objects d’art
will be placed tastefully and to their best advantage here and there with no fear
that they will meet violently with any unexpected flying object of any kind –
not a football, not a shoe, not a cat. Nothing will fly in my apartment but my
hopes and dreams.
All my dishes will match and none of them will be from
Taco Bell. They will be lovely, delicate bone china. Hand-painted. Antique. I
will never find them in the backyard. I won’t have a backyard, but if I did have
one, I would never find my dishes back there being used as a pill bug nursery.
I will have a brand new toothbrush which I will know with absolute certainty has
never been used for anything but my own teeth. Because sometimes I am not so sure
about my current toothbrush. Everybody always denies using it with wide-eyed innocense
and then just when I start to believe them and relax a little somebody will pipe
up with, "Wait a minute! I thought I was green! I was green last time! Then who
has the purple one?" I hate that conversation.
After I get my apartment
I am going to go shopping. I am going to buy a pair of nail clippers, tweezers,
scotch tape, pens. No! One really good pen. Some eyeshadow which will never, ever,
ever, be used as camouflage paint, NO MATTER WHAT! I am going to buy special apartment
clothes. They will never be worn by anybody else. These apartment clothes will
be mine and they will be laundered appropriately. The clothes I have now? Well,
just let me try to buy something "nice." The minute my back is turned someone
in this house is bound to root it out – ignoring the huge pile of dirty laundry
which is a permanent fixture in the floor in front of our washer – root it out,
I tell you, and throw it into the washer with a load of dishtowels and a quart
of bleach and then into the dryer set on "nuclear holocaust" for FOUR HOURS. And
then whoever has done all this most recently will get their feelings hurt if I
complain. "I was just trying to help!" No, you wretched torturer of fine fabrics,
you were trying to assure that you would be grounded from using the washing machine.
What a twisted joke! You know you have sunk to the very depths, the slimy, lightless
chasm of motherhood when you hear yourself saying, "That’s it, young lady/man!
No more laundry for you! Don’t even think of it!" Oh, they’re wily, they are!
I will glide through my apartment admiring it. Barefoot. Because there will never
have been a Leggo in that apartment, ever. Then I will take a very long hot bath.
It will be long because nobody will be there to bang on the door and yell, "What
are you doing in there? Do you know where my other GI Joe sock is? How come they
say it’s hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk because I tried it TWELVE TIMES
and nothing fried? Can Johnny come in and see your appendix scar? Do we have anything
good to eat?" It will be hot because I will be the first, last and only person
to use the hot water. When I am finished, who knows? The sky is the limit! I will
tweeze if I want to tweeze because my tweezers will be where I put them, where
they belong. And they will catch and pluck each tiny hair no matter how wispy
and fine with exquisite precision because they will never have been used as a
screwdriver, or a bug immobilizer or a brother pincher. They will only be what
they were meant to be. And they will be mine! And my tweezers and I will live
the whole of our secret lives together happily ever after.
Huh? Nothing
honey, just dozing. The tweezers? I don’t know. Did you look in your tackle box?
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