I didn’t leave the apartment yesterday until 2:30 when I went to pick up My Kid from school. My day is over before everyone at the office has even returned from lunch.
As is my wont, I told myself I was going to go to the gym, but first I would do a few things in the apartment… clean the bathroom… and the kitchen… (It’s not a real kitchen, it’s a galley kitchen, a row of appliances along one wall of the living room.) I filled 3 bags of dirty laundry, one of towels, one of darks and one of lights. I will take them to the laundromat and pay to have them done. That’s what I do in my city life without a washing machine of my own (which keeps me from multitasking: making dinner, keeping an eye on the kids and having a load of clothes in the washing machine all at the same time the way my mother did. In my city life these three tasks do not take place in the same location. The playground, the laundromat and the kitchen are not even on the same block. I pay to have towels and socks and jeans and playclothes done by the ladies who wash other peoples clothes at the laundromat. I wash anything special and brightly colored or that needs to be taken out of the dryer while still damp, like anything with spandex in it. It takes at least 2 consecutive hours at the laundromat (and that’s only if I can go in the middle of the day at an uncrowded time and fill several machines at once, plus packing and pushing the laundry cart there (down and up two flights of brownstone stairs) and putting the clothes away, or hanging them to finish drying over the shower rod or on the wooden laundry rack. It’s all so Victorian. The dress shirts my husband wears to work are also done professionally, even though I kind of enjoy the repetitive accomplishment of ironing shirts. When we first moved here with our toddling baby, setting up an ironing board in the middle of the traffic pattern of busy room was a terrible idea. But, there was no out-of-the-way place for it. It got put into the back of closet never to be seen again (I’m not the only one, when My Kid started pre-school, there was a wooden ironing board in the “housekeeping” section of the classroom and I heard three different 3-year-olds ask “What’s that”, mine included.) until it was taken out and put on the street. We still have an iron, but it’s so high up in the back of the closet that I only get in down for special projects. I might climb up and get it down this week to iron the Girl Scout patches onto My Kids Brownie sash.
There are so many little things that are complicated for me that were not a big deal at all for my mother. For example, I am thinking of taking a pair of my daughters pants to the tailor just because the waistband needs a little piece of elastic sewn into the back of the waistband that is too loose. I can do that. I should do that. They’re not even nice pants, practically sweats that I got on sale, but she can’t wear them at all if they feel like they are going to fall off. I do not have a sewing machine and even if I did it’s not a big enough job to get out the sewing machine and setting it up and putting it away after. My mothers sewing machine was always set up on it’s own table just outside the laundry room in the basement. Little fixes like that could be taken care of “in a jiffy”.
Before I knew it my day was over and was time to walk to the subway and get on the train to go pick up My Kid at her elementary school and stand and chat with the other mothers and babysitters for an hour while the kids jump and run in the playground. Then we stopped at Target on the way home which often happens when we take the 2/3 train to Fort Greene from Brooklyn Heights instead of the C train to Lafayette. I hadn’t exercised, or written, or anything from my “creative clowning career” to do list.
This morning there were e-mails in my box from friends who have performances in Manhattan next week, and an update from Anna Zastrow who is spending a couple of months clowning in Cambodia.
Sigh…
I do have a sweet husband and a beautiful child.