On the art of the mundane
On the art of the mundane
this could even be the secret to a successful marriage
You have to yield to the desires of your partner once in a while, too. You have to listen and see them. You have to acknowledge what it is that truly makes them happy.
It’s Saturday morning and my spouse Janyce and I are sitting in the front yard in our pajamas. We’re drinking coffee and the sun is rippling through the small open spaces in the bank of trees at the edge of our yard. Janyce has her laptop out and she is reading to me from her excel spreadsheet.
“I can’t believe we spent that much money on one rescue dog,” I say.
“Well, we did,” she says. “But I think it was mostly start-up costs. I can read you from the categories, if you want?”
I look over to her sitting next to me on her Adirondack chair. I’m only a little interested in this financial conversation first thing in the morning, but I know how much she loves to talk numbers with me.
“Sure, I’d love to hear,” I say.
Most mornings at 6 am, I wake to find her drinking coffee at our kitchen table working on her spreadsheet. She is trying to get a sense of how much we are spending and where it’s going, organizing our life. While she is tracking our money, I’m usually busy doing laps around the house trying to locate my glasses or my car keys or where I left my sweatshirt.
“Who are you texting furiously?” she says.
“I’ve got a few chats going this morning. Hold on. I will listen,” I say.
One of my friends just sent me her latest collage. I love the way she plays with scale in her work and her use of 1960s-style old advertisements of women, and the juxtaposing of past and future. In this one, I see the exasperated look of this fashionable housewife talking on the phone—bored, and caught between two worlds. My women friends and I text each other daily creative encouragement and insights from our lives. We live far apart now, but we try to hold onto this digital lifeline to each other. Community and connection are too important to us, as is making weekly art of some kind, no matter who sees it, or if it ever really gets out in the world.
I’m reminded of Suleika Jaouad’s 100-day project, where women members of her project group recently spent 100 days thinking and doing a creative endeavor. “It’s been astonishing to see community members totally enthralled by a new pursuit, and others comforted by a return to a practice they had given up years ago,” she said.
I’ve always believed that creativity has to be a daily presence in a life, but maybe sometimes you have to embrace the more banal routines of bookkeeping and housework if you want to be truly happy. You have to yield to the desires of your partner once in a while, too. You have to listen and see them. You have to acknowledge what it is that truly makes them happy.
Janyce and I decided recently that we’re going stop using our house cleaner and get back to the satisfying task of cleaning the house by ourselves. Satisfying to Janyce mostly, that is. I think I was the one who convinced her to let this drudgery go several years ago and to reclaim more of our weekend time for other things. But I’ve been having a change of heart lately. In addition to taking an interest in her spreadsheets, I’ve also taken the time to really listen to her talk to me about cleaning zones, and the proper way to dust a house from the top down before you vacuum. We set the timer the other day and we both spent an hour together on the living room tag-teaming it, we even switched out curtains in record time, high-fiving each other at the end.
Janyce excels in planning and the art of home economics. But I typically excel in the spur-of-the-moment business of living a creative life. Where she delights in structure and systems, I delight in the novel and social. It’s part of why it works between us. But even these divisions of labor get old and stale sometimes. The other day I scrubbed two tubs before a friend came over to visit. It took me 20 minutes on each tub. But I was actually pretty happy with the final resulting gleam and even the repetitive process I so often rail against.
“You know, that wasn’t so bad,” I said. “If we just take it in small pieces like this every day, we really don’t need a house cleaner.”
“Like I always say, nobody does it better than we can,” she said.