the tidy trap

in praise of black ice

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Writing a memoir (or any half decent story) entails a high tolerance for disorder, both the literal and figurative kind.

Let’s start with the latter.

Memory is fallible, perception is nebulous but time…? Well, time is something quite different. In theory we exist in the present moment. But we are also moving, hurtling toward the future with only the past as our guide. Most of us experience our lives as drivers on a crowded freeway, navigating a stream of surging traffic, one eye on the road, the other squinting into a fogged-out rear view mirror, by which I mean the past — or what we allow ourselves know of it.

Most of us are rushing forward while looking backward, but neither place is where we actually are, which is here. Now. In the present. Do you feel me? Look, I’m not a philosopher or a theoretically physicist, I’m just trying to lay out some basic guidelines for the way most of us encounter our lives. In general it’s not important to be aware of how human perception and memory works but when we endeavour to remember the past or write about it, it helps to understand how the experience of doing so might affect us.

So let’s agree we’re all hurtling along the freeway, peering into the rearview mirror. But writing a memoir requires a different mode of travel, one that seems terrifying at first but is, in point of fact, no less insanely risky. The memoirist must take her hands off the steering wheel and ease her pedal from the metal. She must allow herself to gaze more deeply into the murky, distorted looking glass of the past. Ideally, if she is brave, she must force herself to slip inside it, inhabit the past, feel, touch and smell it, if she dares, all the while continuing to travel inexorably forward in the frantic never-ending rush hour commute to oblivion commonly known as “real life.”

Have you ever been driving and hit black ice? The first thing you notice are the strange vibrations in your hands which signal the loss of control between the steering and the road. The tires are no longer finding purchase, instead the rubber is spinning, gliding, you’re flying forward but you could just as easily be going diagonal or side-to-side. It’s odd. Then terrifying. You instinctively know not to wrench the wheel; it will only exacerbate the chaos. But if it’s your first time you’ll likely panic and touch the brake and when this happens, you’re in for a wild ride. The shift is as stark as jumping off a cliff — that lung-quashing plunge before your feet stab the water’s surface. What happens in the car is you begin to loop. It’s strangely relaxing. You swing out hard and slow in counter-clockwise circles, head rest gripping the back of your skull like a mother’s palm, eyes wide, heart jack-hammering in your chest. Your thoughts come inexplicably, crisp and coherent. First you think about the cat and who will feed him. And then your primary school friend Amy Morton who died in her early thirties trying to overtake a combine harvester on a back country road driving home one night from an AA meeting. You think of her three orphaned kids who you never met. Of the rabbits her Dad bred in that raised backyard hutch. How you and Amy would play with the baby bunnies for hours, looking through a muddy stack of porno mags you’d found in the woods behind Coverdale Park. You swing out on the ice and let your mind drift because for once in your life you understand there’s no point in trying to control it. You let the car do a lazy loop-di-loop until it shudders, bumps into something — a guard rail, a lamp post, another person or car — then bounces and when it stops perhaps you are dead. Or more likely, you aren’t

But you know you will die. For one awful ecstatic second you are able to live with this unfathomable truth pulsing inside you.

It’s frightening, black ice. But really it’s no more dangerous than hurtling at high speed half-squinting into the rearview mirror, which is how most of us live most of the time. Whether we like to admit it or not.

Now let’s discuss the former kind of disorder: The literal mess.

A lot of people, perhaps the majority of people you might know, spend most of their life actively tidying up. Have you noticed this? I find it fascinating.

I’m not a slob — I make my bed (mostly) and do my taxes and go to the dentist and get my passport and insurance documents are updated. My kids are fed and clothed, educated, vaccinated and loved. But for many decent people this counts as a pathetic bare minimum. It’s failure. My “pretty damn good,” is their version of total abject chaos. Such people look at my life — the life of a professional writer bringing up a family — with unvarnished distain. I’m not assuming this, they make it abundantly clear. The problem isn’t that I don’t make enough money but that I don’t make enough money to justify not pretending to care if my kid is wearing mismatched socks to day camp. It doesn’t help that I’m a woman — mothers aren’t meant to not care about anything, including the stuff that doesn’t matter. Purporting to care deeply about stuff that doesn’t matter and panicking about it at regular intervals is, apparently, part of a “good mother”’s job. But I can’t be bothered with that. Nor can I be bothered with all the endless tidying up. My mind is elsewhere, looping out on black ice, plunged deep into the looking glass of the rearview mirror.

I’m not interested in everything being immaculate. I don’t imagine it will keep me or the people I love safe from harm or death. I don’t consider it a virtue. I’m not chaotic, really I’m not. I’m just not fussed.

But a lot of people are. They care deeply about being exceptionally organised and tidy. They care intensely, almost religiously. If they’re not sleeping or eating or being entertained by a story on a screen, they are sweeping, scrubbing, refinishing, itemising, filing, planning, ticking off items on a list or a spreadsheet, lining up their pencils, planning, polishing their apples, getting their rubber ducks in a row. If tidying is your jam, the world has a place for you, because everything is always invariably a total mess or about to become one. If you’re a cleaner there is always something useful to do, something practical and forward-thinking — so long as it’s not too forward thinking. Because a lot of tidying is just that: A distraction from the unfathomable inevitable. But you can’t organise your way out of death.

If you’re writing a memoir (or writing anything really) even if you’re just a person who just reads a lot and thinks a lot and cares about stories and art, you probably do less tidying than you think you should. Perhaps you feel guilty for not power-washing the deck or doing weekly meal plans or syncing your calendar or cleaning out your spam. Perhaps you are near and dear to people (good people! decent people!) who have systematically dedicated their waking hours to the pursuit of such endeavours, to whom it would never occur to anything else. Perhaps you look at these people and wonder why you can’t be more like them. Why can’t you care more passionately about whether the car is vacuumed or the meter is read or the dry cleaning has been dropped or picked up?

It’s hard to argue with tidying. The world is a mess. One tricky thing is that often the people engaged in it are both your helpmeets and judges. They undoubtedly enjoy what they do but they might also make it clear they feel superior to you because you you don’t seem to share their interest in what truly matters, like whether the cupboard glassware is stacked down or up. If you are unlucky they might even scoff at what you love — messy impractical things like books and ideas and art.

Perhaps they find it unfathomable that you are writing a memoir. Or are writing anything at all.

Ignore them.

Do your taxes.

Brush your teeth.

Care for your loved ones.

The bed is optional.

That’s all.