Stepping Stones on the Road to Barbarism
Civilized people get up in the morning and make their beds. Mom was adamant and unyielding on this point. Even if you were barfing your guts up and had to stay home from school, it was looked upon favorably if you made the bed and spent your sick day on the couch with a blankie and a book.
After they make their bed, civilized people get dressed. Every day. Only barbarians stay in their jammies all day. Bras are not optional. Getting dressed includes brushing your hair. Hair was a particular challenge with her eldest child, who had fine hair wont to tangle, and who didn't seem to care how it looked. That older girl got her butt smacked with the hairbrush more than once as her mother tried to civilize her, and her hair.
My mother likened raising children to herding cats, or housebreaking barbarians, or any of a number of likewise impossible tasks. My father didn't help much with the civilizing process. Although our parents presented a consistently united front, sometimes Mom insinuated that Dad was barely housebroken himself.
No misogynist, my Father loved his children, and the fact that they were both girls didn't affect the things he included them in. His girls grew up doing guy things with him. Preferably out in the woods; hunting and shooting and cutting firewood. Sometimes responsible home owner things; landscaping and pouring concrete and building cabinets. We three invariably came back filthy and hungry (and tangled) from our adventures. It wasn't unheard of for Mom to peel us down to our skivvies in the back yard and turn the hose on us before she let us in to her clean house. As soon as we were scrubbed, though, she'd sit us down to one of her fabulous homemade meals, beaming with pride. She'd love on us and play games with us in the evening and help us with our homework. When Dad started to nod off in his easy chair, she would tuck us into bed with kisses and hugs and bedtime stories. It seems, unaccountably, she loved herding cats.
She especially had her work cut out for her to get us into ironed dresses and curly hair to go visit Grandma or the odd sojourn to church. Civilized people have religion, too, even if it is only a little bit.
As I age, I realize how thin is my Mother's hard-won veneer of civilization. I inherited my Father's collapsing spine and as it has increasingly manifested itself in my life in recent years, I find myself on a slippery slope. Barbarism beckons. I feel my mother stir in her grave on days when as dressed as I can manage is a fresh pair of jammies after a shower. I am unjustifiably proud of myself when I succeed in getting the bed made by noon. There are days now if I get dressed and get the bed made and get a load of laundry done, I get the same sense of accomplishment I used to get from doing all of that on top of a long workday followed by a strenuous hike. I take undue satisfaction now from the pathetic accomplishment of preparing myself a meal. Civilized people get up and do the dishes after they finish eating, too, but that's not happening around here anymore either.
Horizons draw near and expectations fall lower, aging in this crippled body. Becoming disabled has been a gradual, incremental process punctuated with radical and sudden change. Blunders off the edge of cliffs I didn't know were there. I've gotten back to sleeping eight hours a night now, after a recent plummet, but it takes fourteen to sixteen hours to do it. This leaves less functional time yet for civilized enterprises. Some days, racked with guilt about not having a fever or barfing my guts up, I'm on the couch all day with a book just because it hurts too much to move. Bathing every day and popcorn for dinner is nothing to be proud of.
To confess, there were days I cheated, even before. I closed the curtains so she couldn't see — because Mom was psychic even before she was an angel — and stayed in my jammies on the couch all day with a good book, exhausted from my 80-hour work week. But those transgressions were rare and, to the point, voluntary. I'm trapped now.
I am gradually adapting to my barbarity. I miss the good old days, though, when dragging the trash barrel up to the street didn't require days of planning and preparation and sometimes, in the event, painkilling drugs. It used to be such a simple, mindless thing to do.
There are notable bright spots in this downhill slide though. I've always known with spiritual and intuitive certainty that there was an afterlife, an Other Side, to this human existence. Now I know it with the certainty of experience. I hear my Mother's voice from the Other Side almost every day. That Mom voice they acquire when they give birth, the voice of absolute authority. The one that still strikes fear into my heart. “Terrylann. Pick. Those. Clothes. Up. Off. The. Bedroom. Floor. And. Do. Not. Make. Me. Tell. You. Again.” You know she means business when she smooshes your first two names together. And at this time of year, when the golden light of autumn slants in my windows just so in the afternoon, illuminating the webs of the thousands of spiders who are moving in with me for the winter, I think I can hear her in the closet, rummaging for the vacuum cleaner with a sigh of resignation, as her eldest relapses into innately barbaric ways.
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Some images are through Creative Commons License and we would thank all of those creators if we could find their names.
To the Life in Pieces writing circle for reading an early draft of this.
Terryl is grateful to her mother for this piece; for teaching her to make her bed and for her steadfast efforts to apply a civilized veneer to her barbaric eldest daughter.
Terryl and Al are both very grateful to the people who read our work. You are what make it worthwhile.
Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.
Terryl is the author of:The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 : 978-0-9894698-5-2
AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.
A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.
Together, we are MoonLit Press where words and images matter.