I get up again...

This week, I cleaned out our home office.

I say 'home office' in the hope you have an uber-efficient IKEA catalogue-looking image in your head as you read this. Neat, cuboid filing pods, full of colour-coded pages and wireless ultra-modern electronica. That you think of me, in my skinny jeans and crisp white shirt, hair scraped back into a sleek bun, invent-a-personality glasses perched jauntily on my efficient looking face.

Yeah. Not.

Let me paint a before picture. We're talking piles of paper haphazardly composting under the weight of their peers. Books stacked (thematically, at least) making the Leaning Tower of Piza look decidedly vertical. Cables throttling shoes and lassoing the office chair. Balls of dog hair so dense they were actually holding piles of letters up off the floor. I believe the dog hair balls may actually have been attempting to perambulate some of the crap towards the door.

It took an entire day, a rolling series of drinks (coffee, then water, then juice for energy, then more water followed by a nice red to celebrate), and the willpower of a catholic saint, but I did it.

By the end of the day, the filing cabinet was stuffed, the bills were all together (there's the small issue of paying them still to go), the work notes were clipped together and the books were shelved. The dog hair...? Well, most of it escaped under it's own steam into the far corners of the room. The remaining long threads wedged themselves onto my eyeballs, just to help me remember my awesome day.

I learned a lot from my cleaning adventures.

1. I really should clean more frequently.

2. I have a LOT of books about autism.
I really like reading autism books. There's always something to learn. Even if I don't agree with them, I keep on reading. They clarify my instincts, they challenge my perceptions, they jog my memory, they soothe my soul. Even though people have been telling me to stop reading since this trip to the autism theme park began, I cannot see the logic. I admit there's a measure of searching for a needle in a haystack, or maybe it's a 'if I stop reading today, tomorrow's book will be the one that provides the key'... no matter, I truly believe knowledge is power. And the autism books books keep me away from the gossip mags and the chick lit.

3. I have a lot of chick lit.

4. I download and print a LOT of articles, thinking, 'I must read that and then give it to... the paediatrician, the teacher, the crazy dude in the dog park (reflecting how much good it would actually do if I actually did give the article to anyone who actually should read it).

5. We have a beautiful child and we are lucky to have him. As evidenced by the notes he leaves, the pictures he draws, the photos he features in, the Thomas and wild African animal detritus he collects. There's nothing bad about Billy, in the classical sense of the word. He's a passionate, positive lover of life. The life he loves so deeply may not be the one the rest of us might choose, but it's his, he loves it and it is in physical evidence all over the home office. Actually, all over the home, but that's a whole other cleaning related story.

6. We may not be the tidiest parents in the world, but we're doing OK. We have a lot of evidence of this - both the untidiness and the OK-ness. There's a lot of thinking material (stuff about autism, stuff about holidays, stuff about family, stuff about dogs, stuff about doctors and hospitals and therapy, stuff about diets... ugh, I'll stop there...) There's a lot of doing material (art supplies, train drawings, stories written or dictated by Billy, videos of crashes and plastic animal attacks, the next level of motor challenge... damn you roller shoes... we'll get to you soon) and lot of animal material (see perambulating Scruffy hair bunnies above).

7. We should probably groom the dog more.

At the end of the day, as I groomed the dog, I thought... 'We'll be OK' and I exhaled.

For the first time in a month or so, I was able to find some level ground, and how did I find it? By surrounding myself, literally, with the physical evidence of our efforts as a family.

We live, we learn, we earn, we groom. We try, we get it wrong, we get it right, we fall down, we get up again. And some days, we tidy ourselves up a bit, and start over.

Maybe one day, I'll get tidy enough to own skinny jeans and a crisp white shirt.

Yeah. Probably not.


PS. I did this job as I watched helplessly, from 1000 kilometres away, as my hometown and most of my home state disappeared under epic floods. While my family and friends remained safe, many many families did not. Towns are destroyed, homes are gone, lives are lost. 


I couldn't help thinking about the kids with autism in all this chaos. How does a child who struggles to understand normal life, make any sense out of a flood? How do you explain precious objects being swept away, family members missing, electricity cut off? 


I may be feeling better about my own decisions, but I take my hat off to the parents who are shepherding their kids through the Queensland floods right now.