Lessons (1)

When we bought this old heap house, the bathroom featured broken Fifties-vintage plastic tile. The previous homeowner, affectionately referred to around these parts as “that dirt bag,” had not reached the conclusion that showering was off limits. We immediately recognized that restriction unless we wanted to transform our walls into a mold colony. So we got Seamus to come by with her hard hat and crow bar and tear the whole thing down to lathe and plaster. Sweetie’s next-to-biggest brother crept through crawl spaces no other human has ever seen to install plumbing and wiring and her biggest brother rebuilt the walls with glossy white subway tiles.

Moments later, I birthed baby Small.

So we had a shiny, functional shower but perhaps not the greatest amount of attention to lavish on its upkeep.

Years later—two? Three? I am not the best at tracking the SAHM period of my life— I noticed that the subway tile—or more specifically, the grout—was no longer shiny. At the end of the stall where the shower head is the grout was yellowed and scuzzy looking. At the far end it was as clean and bright as the day it was laid.

That’s when the shame started dogging me. Unlike the rest of this dirty old place, I felt responsible for this tile. I could remember the day we bought it from the smart, sassy Irish saleslady in West Springfield and left the showroom asking each other if there weren’t more things to tile in the house—she was that good. I could remember the brother’s red reading glasses sliding down his broad nose and the way he held his beer bottle in one hand and tilted his head to survey the placement of the next tile. This shower stall represented one tiny corner of my home where a century of other people’s dirt did not precede my tenancy, and I had failed to keep it pristine.

While I felt ashamed and inadequate every day, I never felt compelled to change my cleaning routine.

Which was this: Every six months or so I would agonizingly choose between a green cleaner and a toxic cleaner. Every six weeks or so I would squirt the chosen cleaner onto the dirty tile. The grout would fail to immediately resume its original whiteness at which point my shame transmogrified into frustration, bitterness and anger.

“I don’t know how to clean this!” I would howl—sometimes to Sweetie, but more often to myself. I’d think of the clean, bright homes of my mother and sister and grandmother’s and sister-in-law, and how they would never have let this happen. Occasionally I would spend an afternoon standing in the shower with a toothbrush or a tiny bleach pen, obsessively cleaning the grout with the same lack of results.

The whole experience of failure was so exhausting and upsetting that I’d need at least a month to recover before I could try again.

I kept that up for a few more years.

Six months ago I had some kind of shower epiphany. I have noticed that these surges of self-efficacy have corresponded to Small’s developmental stages: The first time she slept through the night, we painted the dining room. Something about her first grade self determination restored the emotional wherewithal required to shift my shower stall gears.

I decided to act like a person who cleans her shower stall once a week. I expected it to keep looking awful, but I’d know it was cleaner and maybe that would make me feel better. Every Monday I squirted cleanser onto that tile; just the random toxic cleanser that happened to be on the closet shelf. I felt a frison of environmental guilt but determined to take this project on without agony: the next bottle of cleanser might be a gentler brand. I didn’t take hours with a toothbrush or waste evenings Googling “How to clean grout.” I just squirted the cleanser on the tile, wiped it off, and moved along. When it didn’t get newly, beautifully clean the first week, or the second or even the third, I forced myself to think positive. “Oh well, maybe next time.”

Gradually, the grout got clean. Now, you might not even notice a difference between the shower-head end and the dry end. It’s unremarkably, simply clean.

There’s no way to tell the story that exactly explains how this felt like a tiny little miracle in my soul. Every Monday I squirted something out of a bottle and a month later a burden of guilt I’d been carrying for six years lifted off my conscience.

Aha! I thought. There is a lesson here. I could even write about it: “Imperfect effort, applied consistently, will yield results.” I thought about how already knew this lesson from karate, how just showing up is more important than doing things perfectly.

I felt very smug, and serene, and wise from my Zen shower lesson.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and I noticed how discolored the grout was on the bathroom counter that was installed two years ago. My conscience started twisting and whining. “I don’t know how to clean this!” it howled.

For the love of God. I thought I could generalize the lesson to my whole life, and I couldn’t even generalize it to the whole bathroom.