Poo Happens

I’ve discovered a cure (or perhaps simply a treatment) for the anxiety that’s been following me around about this upcoming move: Compulsive cleaning.

“I have a job now,” my husband said to me yesterday. “Why are you still anxious?”

I just stared at him.

There are two main reasons I’m still anxious, 1) it’s my nature and my default response, and 2) in less than two weeks, we’re putting our house on the market and fixing to move 2400 miles away to a place I’ve never seen before.

While my poor husband expected my anxiety to simply dissolve, he’s doing his best to adjust to the permanent nature of my high-strungedness. After 16 years together, he’s still finding new things to learn about me.

Even though the anxiety is natural to me, I am still doing my best to alleviate it. And that’s where the compulsive cleaning comes in.

We’ve been decluttering, with the focus of avoiding shipping unnecessary items cross-country and clearing surfaces in anticipation of showing the house. I ramped this up over the past couple of days, challenging myself to keep the floors clean, surfaces clear, and the dishes done up constantly. I’m even wiping the oven out every time I use it (after it’s cool). I know I can’t keep up this level of order for too long, but for now, it seems to be giving me a release for my nervous energy.

At the same time all of this is going on, my toddler is making new strides in the gradual transition to independent pottying. He’s still not great at recognizing he has to go when he’s wearing trousers (much less being able to recognize it in time to pull down his trousers before going), so he runs about nekky quite a lot. He met our realtor at the door in his birthday suit this morning. Luckily she’s a mom of four and isn’t easily shocked by a toddler running about au naturale. I’m not sure how our fellow residents at the extended-stay hotel are going to feel about it, though. Perhaps we’ll institute a “pants mandatory” policy during the move.

Today, he made a valiant effort to take himself to the potty when he had to go poo. (Yes, I’m blogging about poo.) He didn’t even tell me when he had to go, just went into the bathroom and did his best to manage the situation on his own. The first I heard about all of this was my son coming into the kitchen where I was doing dishes and saying in a very tragic voice, “Poo!”

I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say there were some complications.

And that with the help of my children, I won’t be short of things to clean any time soon.