A Clean Sweep

Just need to let you know something that perhaps, just perhaps, you haven't figured out yet.

My kids are amazing.

I don't know where they have gotten their spidey sense from, but they seem to intuit when I really need a hand at something but don't feel comfortable asking.

Unfortunately, there won't be any before and after photos here because I would have never taken a before photo. STBX had a space in the basement that I always likened to his mind, completely haphazard, a mess, bordering on a clinical diagnosis, like a pauper in a shack.

It was where he kept his computer equipment, his papers of all kinds, oh, and his porn.

There were boxes and stacks and piles EVERYWHERE. Now, this might just sound like someone with organizational problems but there were also the food containers from YEARS ago. Our basement is leaky (of course) and a few months ago when I told him that a vast amount of the papers all over the floor were moldy and needed to be picked up (as I am allergic to mold and walking downstairs made my skin itch, my eyes water, and I would begin to cough). Of course I got the typical response, an exasperated sigh as he continued to play online (with his girlfriend, no doubt. I'll bet SHE never asks him to behave like an adult.)

Well, I started to do what I always did. I started to clean it myself. If I waited around for for him to do it, it would never happen. That is what 17 years taught me. It was then that he got all pissy that I forced the matter to a head and actually went downstairs to pick the wet paper off the floor.

Of course, everything else that wasn't wet got left behind.

Thus, after life hit the fan in December, this part of the basement has been his mocking testimonial, an artistic rendering of the awful, shitty mess that he left us.

It wasn't until last week that I was searching for something and actually started to poke around in that area. It took about five minutes before I sat down and just wanted to cry. There wasn't even a foot path through the mountains of crap. It was all so fucking overwhelming.

But then the kids stepped in. They were off school and didn't have to worry about getting up the next day. I went off to bed and they helped themselves to the heavy duty contractor bags that the handyman has been using.

I woke up to this.














and this















It was like being a shoemaker with elves.

There were banking slips from 1994, printed out emails from 2003, every single kind of ridiculous clutter and disgusting dirty Chinese food container that you could imagine.


Oh yeah, and there were about seven of these






It was therapy for all involved. I can now walk into my basement without visiting the "shrine to the seventeen years of your wasted life with a goddamn loser", and the kids got to do something that they have been wanting to do all along.

They got to throw the bastard out.