It Is About the Nail

Sometimes, It Is About The Nail

In just over a decade since its publication,  concepts from “Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus”  have embedded themselves deep in our social consciousness.  The stereotypical complaints of the sexes are so familiar that we can joke about them.  And we do.  (Quick recap:  Women complain that rather than listening and understanding, men try to fix everything.  Men complain that Women aren’t really interested in solving problems,  they just like talking about them.)

We get the Mars/Venus postulate.  We’re informed.  We know  that our differences are intrinsic and logical.  We’ve swallowed the prescriptive paradigm that helps us see and validate one another.  And yet, we’re still arguing.  Some of us still resent the opposite sex; some are still contemptuous.  Some of us (ladies, I address us) refuse to let it ever be about the nail, though sometimes (sometimes) it is.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I woke up with a Very Big Picture of the Day…no, of the Point of My Existence, in my head.

Projects, possibilities, dreams.  Life goals, bucket lists, heartfelt wishes.  At that waking moment, I believed that if I could follow every bright possibility that Life offered to its glorious end, the process (or the finishing, anyway) would somehow complete me.  Make me whole.  All on a bright Saturday.

And then the phone rang.  The dog whined.  I remembered the laundry room (awash with unwashed piles).  My studio (strewn with artsy debris).   The garden (a new weed crop).  Dishes in the sink, spots on the windows.  The kids had far flung plans; the world had its demands.  My panoramic view blurred; suddenly, I felt sad, weary.  Lost.  I knew I wouldn’t be dream-catching today.

Somehow my husband noticed my shift from hope to funk (did I growl? or moan? I didn’t think so).  He regarded me apprehensively.  He’d had his own hopes for Saturday; I knew this and tried to rally, but I just couldn’t…not, at least, until I’d talked it out.  Disentangled, with words, at least one or two possibilities that I could claim for the day.  I began talking, though there was too much to say.  I couldn’t quite articulate the breadth and depth of my angst and all its reasons (ah, wild dreams traded for the mundane!  Epic!  Biblical!  Not even Tolstoy could do it in less than 500 pages!).

Still, I attempted it.  I knew, since I was speaking to My Martian Man, that I needed to get to the point.  Quickly.  I wasn’t sure yet what that point was, but I rushed toward it anyway.  I briefly mentioned unrequited artistic longings and motherly hopes.  I skimmed over writing aspirations, past hunger for connection and an affinity for growth.  Somewhere in there,  having leapt over disappointment and grazed my shin on its ragged edge, I whimpered…“and besides, the carpet is gross!”  The carpet being a metaphor, of course, for all things gone wrong in my life.  Stained…traffic patterns visible in shades of clay.  Condemned by Last Year’s expert carpet cleaner as unsalvageable.  The wrong application; we should have gotten pile instead of loop.

Aha. Here was something Real, something Tangible! Dirty Carpet!

At the mention of carpet, Frank’s eyes lighted with determination and purpose.  He grasped my shoulders, gave me his “don’t worry, I have this” look (which is the same as his “don’t worry, Be Happy” look), and said, “OK!  That’s it! We’re cleaning the carpets today! We can have it done by noon if we work together!”  And he hurried off to buy shaving cream (yes, we clean carpets with shaving cream; it works) and rent a carpet cleaning machine.

For about ten minutes, I smoldered.

What about my angst?  What about dreams unrealized?  The carpet was NOT the point (how could the carpet be the point of all my existential sadness???).  And then, it occurred to me that

A) Frank had woken up with an entirely different agenda than cleaning the carpets, but had given his plans up cheerfully the instant he thought clean carpets might make me happy, and

B) clean carpets really weren’t the End of The World, even in my panoramic view of it.

So I let go, let him fix it.  Went with him on his nail extracting quest.

And you know what?  It was an awesome day.  We plunged into our work, together.   Frank sweated.  He has the forearms of a Popeye, I tell ya.  I heated and carried hot, hot water (a polite nod to a millenia of women before me) upstairs and down.   Nora (our one and only child without far flung plans that day) helped spread shaving cream all over the dirty carpet.  Even the stairs.  We cleaned and rinsed and rinsed and cleaned…and the carpet became beautiful again.  Spotless, good as new.  We did it!  Our carpets were no longer gross, no longer doomed.

And I found that in our hectic activity, my All-or-Nothing mountain dwindled to a molehill (at least, it tucked itself neatly away for another day).   And while the carpet really wasn’t the point, the sense of accomplishment in finishing just that one big chore actually did make me happy. Empowered, mistress of my fate, as far as carpets go.  And merrily exhausted (we didn’t finish til 6, and when the cleaning machine sprung a leak upstairs, water found its way into a downstairs fire alarm, which made for an hour of High Adventure and Random Drama).

Our Saturday was rescued by shaving cream and my husband’s brawny arms, and by my willingness to carry water instead of agonize over all the things I wasn’t getting done.  This time, letting it be about the nail led us to a happy place.  This time, it was ok to let Frank fix it, and to go along with him for a carpet ride.