Dispatch #23: Company is Coming!

You're reading Dispatches from East McJesus. Living in East Machias, Maine, can be a bit lonely, so I write to save my sanity. The mission may not succeed, but let’s try to enjoy it.

It’s Holiday Time! Unless you are opting out of the merrymaking, as we are this year, you have a lot of hoovering ahead of you. Christmas tree needles, glitter, tinsel, fake snow, pet hair, cookie crumbs, pieces of torn gift wrap, bits that fall off charcuterie boards. . .these things will soon be clogging up your vacuum cleaners and dustbusters faster than you can empty them.

My upbringing and Geof’s were similar in some disturbing ways. We both had mothers who were OCD neat freaks. My mother not only demanded that my room be perfectly in order at all times, but she would even inspect the inside of my desk drawers. Pencils, rulers, erasers, markers all had to be separated, lined up, and probably color-coded, but I have too much PTSD to remember that part. If every square inch of my bedroom did not pass inspection, whatever weekend plans I thought I had with friends were canceled. Apparently — according to my father — Mom was cleaning the baseboards in their condo with Q-tips during the pandemic lockdown. At age 82. That is my genetic legacy.

My husband has his own traumatic stories. He “fondly” recalls all the times he was still in bed past 8:00 on a weekend morning and his mother was blasting Frank Sinatra (or maybe it was Bing Crosby or Dean Martin) on the oldies station, going around the house with her dust buster, often right outside his door. He’d hear a loud ZZZZZ, and then another ZZZZZ somewhere else, on/off, on/off, with “I did it myyyy waaay” in the background. It was her way of saying, “GEOFFREY, GET UP!” which she also barked out verbally. She might or might not have assumed, correctly or incorrectly, that Geof was hungover.

Now, decades later, whenever I use the dustbuster or vacuum cleaner it is wildly triggering to Geof. He did not inherit his mother’s perfectionist genes the way I did. Then again, he’s not an eldest daughter, and everyone knows we are not o.k.

And now it’s confession time: I’ve written this entire Substack as a delivery mechanism for this video. You may have seen it before, but you definitely need to see it again. Watch it twice — the first time as-is, for an immersive experience, and the second time with closed captions turned on, because you do not want to miss a single word. Then, read the comments, so that you can laugh for another hour.

Geof heroically puts up with some of this behavior from me, but he knows that it is his behavior that gets me spinning in the first place. Charlotte can shed light on how much I ruined her childhood in this way. Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Joyous Solstice, and best wishes for any other December holidays I missed!