Talents

Talents are a funny thing.

I was watching a talented man sing yesterday.  He had a beautiful voice, and wondered what it would be like to have a voice that resonated like that.  I longed to get up from the couch (I’d been watching him on TV) and burst out into beautiful song.  The only problem?  My voice is croaky at best.  It hasn’t been the same since I had Lacy, and to tell the truth, it wasn’t much before then.  Some music major I am…

It didn’t take me long to come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t sing.  I’d come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t sing so many time before that I had become rather used to it.  It goes something like this:

I wish I could sing like that.

Wouldn’t life be great if I could sing like that?

I can’t sing like that.

No amount of voice lessons will correct the croak in my voice.

My life is great despite not being able to sing beautifully.

I wonder if we have all th stuff to make brownies?

And that’s it.  Having the talent to sing would be great -amazing -awesome.  But it’s OPTIONAL.  If I can’t sing, it won’t drive me crazy.  I’ll just go through life without auditioning for American Idol, a show I’ve never watched anyhow.

But what about cleaning house?  I admitted to myself for the first time yesterday that I don’t have a talent for keeping my house clean.  I keep telling myself that I can’t keep it clean because of this and that, but the bottom line is this: I’m not good at organizing.  If my house my organized, I could keep it clean.  If everything had a place, I’d be better off.  MUCH better off.  As it is, I spend much of my life cleaning.  This gets me down.  I want to have a clean house!  So what do I do?  Work harder, not smarter.

I read a woman’s online profile yesterday.  Do you know what it said?  I love cleaning my house and watching TV.  I had to read it through a few times.  She LOVES cleaning her house?  I’m bafffled.  I get satisfaction out of cleaning my house, but it all goes to pot when all the work I’ve done gets rapidly undone. I lose motivation, think ‘why bother?’ and go back to doing something that will STAY done, like making aprons (Incidentally, this is also why I sometimes go through phases where my legs remain unshaven for grossly long periods of time).  Much to my despair, a singing talent is 100% optional but a cleaning talent is HIGHLY recommended for a woman in my position.

Yesterday, I decided to get the house as close to clean as I could before my husband came home from work.  I must interject here that my house isn’t DIRTY.  It’s cluttered.  I put the iron away.  I put the starch away.  I picked up toys, and then SMACK in the middle of cleaning, I got an idea for an apron and straightway got the starch and iron back out.  My husband walked through the door, I apologized profusely, he laughed at me, and I went on to relate to him my latest goal:

Make enough money selling aprons to hire someone to organize my house.

Ta.  Da.

(PS: a few hours before my husband came home from work yesterday, I sent him a text asking if he wouldn’t mind taking the kids out of the house for a few hours so I could clean.  A reply text came back almost instantly: “Are you okay?”  He was seriously concerned about me.)