Type Pink Personality

I’m accepting a lot of help lately, as you can all imagine. I don’t enjoy it. I am actually at the point where I CRAVE sweeping my floor and am YEARNING to dust. I am dreaming up wonderful concoctions to cook that I never before felt like making and I suddenly yearn to be more than just a little physically active – I want to run and not be weary. But I can’t. And so while I am driving my husband to an early grave, for truly he has done EVERYTHING lately, I am also letting many dear kind souls into my home to bring me meals, mop my floor, clean my potty training disgusting bathrooms, do my laundry and more. Everyone has been more than kind and I have more offers than I know what to do with… so please take the following with a grain of salt… it amuses me.

Today one dear lady from our ward, who had taken a load of laundry off my hands this morning, called and immediately said, “You’re a type A personality aren’t you?” My speech slurred as the many jumbled thoughts in my head collided in an attempt to think up something cohesive and at least half-intelligent to reply (not very type A thinking, I’m assuming). I wanted to ask why? What in my laundry would make her think such a thing? Was there a sock missing now and she was assuming it was her fault? Did one of my many lists make it through a load and she was now finding it? Or had I already written her a thank you note and it had arrived before she had even cleaned my laundry? I said something like, “I used to be, but bed rest can change your personality quite a bit – why do you ask?” Apparently one of my boys’ pants had a tear and she thought I would probably want to stitch it up myself so that the thread matched completely, etc. etc…. and she listed a bunch of annoying habits that I assumed she labled me as having. Then she went on to explain how she would go about fixing the pants – as a non-type A personality. I told her that her way sounded great, but that since I was stuck in a stuck position I could easily stitch up the pants (though I would most likely leave them to deteriorate to a state of nothingness and then proceed to discard them). I also added, almost as an afterthought, that I don’t sew at all and so my “fixing” job would be much worse than the one she had described. “You don’t sew?!” my dear friend exclaimed, and suddenly I think I became human to her, or maybe less than. Regardless it was the break she needed and she simply said, “Well I’ll just stitch them through on the sewing machine real quick and bring them by in the morning. Have a nice night!” Strange.

Then there was the adorable girl who came to sweep and mop my floor the other week. While doing so she exclaimed such things as, “You must have really high standards”, “I don’t even remember the last time I mopped my floor” and “You must have had a stay-at-home Mom to think that this floor is dirty”… I really wish I could remember them all, but basically I started to feel badly for wanting my house to be a bit cleaner than the sticky-icky crumbly mess that I had to walk across in these increasingly-disgusting stockings to get to the bathroom 30 times a day.

In contrast, the quite older lady who came and SCRUBBED my kitchen, stated that she would just have to come back another day with some stronger cleaner and a much better scrub brush to finish cleaning my oven. OVEN? You mean I’m supposed to clean that periodically… not just when I move?

So it’s been interesting. Apparently I’m out of experience too, because today I had my very first PINK load of laundry. Saturday I stuck my back door mat (which is VERY red) in the washing machine. This morning I remembered it and, without looking, poored in some detergent and started the “small” load. Apparently, and I shouldn’t be surprised because this happens all the time, other items, very light colored items, had been added to the washing machine in the last couple of days… including some now unsalvageable khaki church pants and ta da – PINK LAUNDRY! Mr. Man took great delight in my mistake (mostly I think because none of HIS clothing were in there) and showed all the kids the PINK turnout, claiming that Mommy had found the secret button on the washing machine to turn everything pink. Big J LOVES all her new pink socks and shorts (and is thrilled I’ve FINALLY found that secret button), Little E thinks his pink undies (they are called undies, or even panties – now that they’re pink!) are a little strange, but on the whole we all had a good laugh. Mom is losing it, and there may be more than one reason why others need to take over the cleaning for a while!!!

So type A I am no longer. I’m now a definite type pink.