14 Months Secret Separation: talking mediation

[adinva]

Regarding making the bed. I grew up in a house run like the Navy, with a finger run over the doorway and along the floorboards to make sure I dusted enough. Quarters have been bounced off my bed. I got yelled at once because all my glass animal collection hadn't been adequately dusted, so I tried to erase my entire personality from my room by putting away every single decorative or personal item. That would show them. No response. Gradually my stuff came back out where I could enjoy it.

Cleaning, like good grades, was not for me, it was for my parents. There was no other reason to do it, it was just done to stop the yelling. That's how I remember it anyway.

So in my own house I've struggled against laziness about cleaning. My favorite thing is to have a system that helps keep things where they should be - I set up a mail station with its own wastebasket, and that stopped the individual piles of daily mail that got dropped in random places all over the first floor of the house.

So I never made my bed other than when changing the sheets. My housecleaners do it when they change the sheets and it's nice. But I never saw the point when I'm just going to get back in it at night.

Sometime in the past year I noticed a friend of mine always makes her bed and I was genuinely surprised. I asked her why she does it and she said she just likes to get into a freshly made bed at night. For the first time in my life (really!) I thought, huh, I like that too. So I've been thinking about starting to make the bed, but I haven't gotten around to it just yet.

I noticed recently that my H was making the bed when I was out of town, and I asked him about it. But his answer was that he's sleeping on top of it now because it's hot out, so he was just straightening it to make it more comfortable and left it that way. I had thought if he expressed a preference for it made, we might start making the effort.

It's funny the mundane details that become meaningful in the breakup of a marriage.