Bourgeois dilemma #10: we just have too much stuff.

This weekend, I have the gift of 40 hours unfettered by responsibility for anyone other than the dog. My sweet husband is taking the girls to a backyard family camp out upstate. i am staying home, ostensibly because the puppy is too young to roam around the wilderness with other dogs and hoards of small children. that is not entirely untrue.

but the real motivation on my part lies in a different place. not self actualization or a yoga retreat or anything deep like that. I need to clean. not the type of cleaning to compensate for carmen's well meaning inadequacy, though I will haul out the windex to take the smudges and streaks off the family room windows. A deep seismic de-cluttering clean.

we all inhabit the same world, where the creep of stuff at times overwhelms. some people have the luxury of garages, attics or country houses to deal with this flow. others, like my friend dianne, are so vigilant about every piece of extraneous material that enters their life that even on a completely impromptu visit, their house appears ready for a magazine shoot. dianne, by the way, may seem extreme but she is in the high pantheon of friends who's own self described neuroses in no way impact their ability to be normal. and even she has traded up for more space.

my apartment is not like that. on a surprise visit, an old friend once exclaimed with the type of up tone at the end of the phrase that indicates hope or even desperation "are you moving?" At that moment, in fact, I was just reorganizing the living room. just last week i met with our minnesota based investment advisor in his annual visit to marvel at the robust performance of our heirloom portfolio overwhelmed with reasonably large positions of low cost basis third generation stocks that might be only slightly more useful than the paper they are printed on. he's never had occasion to meet us at home before, and upon entering, said "your apartment is great, so kid friendly." that would be code for "your apartment is smaller than I thought it would be given how much it cost. and boy, what a mess!". Little did he know that I had engaged in an express clean up just moments before his arrival in which I run through the house with a wheelie duffel bag and sweep the surfaces clean. and it's not just our generation. my in-laws just moved in about four blocks from us - in the past ten years they went from a big house to a huge apartment, in another city and now to an enviable three bedroom, three bath with views of riverside park. their stuff is a far cry from toys and remnants from birthday party goodie bags. more like antiques and battersea boxes and art. but as their movers left with the last load in, my sister-in-law and i welcomed new movers to take about a room full or furniture off to storage. between my husband's family and mine, we've got storage bins all up and down the east coast from dc to boston filled with family china, silver and furniture we may never use, won't want to sell for sentimental reasons. at some point, it's just going to have to get much much worse before it gets better. but not this weekend.

since i have known for the past week that this time was coming, I have let things slide more than they usually do. if all goes well, this should have the effect of a shower after a camping trip: the cleanest clean feeling of all. our house looks at this moment like the house of the one family i knew growing up in which both parents worked. I am not sure if I even knew it then, but when playing there and happening upon the parents' room with its unmade bed and clothes scattered about i would wonder what on earth was going on there. many a time i have thought of that room and that family as i step over a pile of clothes to get into bed at the end of the day. though I have only once in the last 15 years left the house without making the beds. and it was hard.

this won't be the first time that I have done a deep clean. years ago, about 6 months after we moved in to this apartment, i got an email from a mother at school who is an on camera reporter for a ny news program. she was looking for someone who would be willing to share the challenge of getting toddlers to part with their old and broken toys. at that time, since we had just moved and had only annie, our apartment was pretty darn tidy. but even then, i was engaged in the often daily struggle to weed out broken, un-used or unsuitable tacky toys. most poignantly, i had "donated" a too small walmart Cinderella outfit purchased on a snowed in long weekend with dear friends in northwestern MA. annie, then 2, had the time of her life in a pink sequined number that looked more like i dream of jeannie than cindarella. even the most focused child pageant participant would have recoiled at the inappropriateness of the ensemble. naturally, annie has a dress up box stuffed with beautiful outfits, tutus with flowers embedded between the layers, gowns that look like they belong in the wardrobe of les mis, miniature replica nasa space suits and the like. but one day, she asked quite specifically for the pink one and made a gesture to her chest where the little rosebuds alternated with sequins. i offered another pink number. "NO, THIS ONE" and the gesture. there was no way around the one she wanted, and it was long gone. I explained that mommy had shared that with some children who weren't lucky enough to have toys. (a regular practice of mine, as there are many amazing charities who collect used toys, books and even stuffed animals, but in this instance, a white lie as that outfit had been stuffed into a bag and toted to the trash by the loyal members of 32-BJ). the freak out that occurred when this came clear was beyond anything I had seen to date, and I felt awful. thank god, our loyal friends were able to procure a replacement (the last one on the shelf) at the very same walmart. and all was good. from that moment, i attempted to help annie part ways with things like broken plastic dress up shoes and duplicate candy land sets. most of the time without success.

thinking that this would be a good story for the reporter, and buoyed by confidence that our home did not look too bad, I volunteered and recapped the story in an email. they liked it, and a date was set for the camera crew to come to our apartment.

naturally, on that day, i hadn't even showered and ran home from work to meet the crew. our nanny had tried without success to put annie in a pretty dress, but she insisted on wearing the aforementioned orange nasa jumpsuit, which looked pretty cute. they crew arrived with a very earnest child psychologist in tow who, in addition to the remnants of childhood acne, seemed to be recovering from a bout with bels palsy. while the film crew roved freely, the psychologist interviewed me about the cindarella story and the reporter sat with annie, lovelier mike clipped to the collar of the nasa suit, at the tiny table in her sliver sized playroom. "why do you keep even the broken plastic shoes?" annie leans in, and whispers dramatically "I like to remember."

they finished, thanked me and left, indicating that the segment might or might not air on the 7am news the with next few days. we are not morning tv watchers but for the saturday morning dazed children in front of tv parents with coffee routine, so to be honest I more or less forgot about it.

until a few mornings later my email inbox was flooded with messages, some from people i hadn't seen in years asking if that was ME on the morning news. oh, yeah, 7am news would be one of the higher rated day parts on tv. yup. that was me in the greasy ponytail with no makeup being interviewed by a frozen faced shrink in the house depicted by the film crew with a repeating pan over the one disorganized pile of toys in the corner of annie's room with the kid who cannot relinquish even a broken single plastic shoe. note to self: do not respond to emails from on camera reporters.

we've come a long way since then and annie regularly participates in my purges and freely lets go of plenty of stuff. her little sister has been trained from an early age that things just disappear. but it still piles up and once every four or five years, requires a massive purge. so I feel the the luckiest woman in america just about now: AC cranked, large glass of iced coffee, trash bags in hand and ready to go.

wish me luck.

Bourgeois dilemma #37: will it be different when Paul Krugman is looking in my window?

rumor has it that the people renovating the apartment across the way are “the krugmans”. as in nobel laureate economist paul krugman and his wife Anita, economist and yoga teacher. it’s more or less confirmed here:

http://www.observer.com/2009/real-estate/paul-krugman-gets-new-place-hang-his-hat-and-nobel#

I listen to and watch their renovation from my $30 ikea home office desk and from my bedroom window can even see the super slick toto toilet they’ve added when the contractors leave the door open. they’ve even added a window in a room that used to be a bathroom. Impressive.

for the past 18 months or more, the apartment across the way has been vacant. this is not a rear window situation. In spite of generations of grand east side apartments, my sweet husband and I have made different choices and don’t live in a classic seven overlooking a park. we live in an apartment we love and are lucky to have, but what we look out on are other people’s windows.

At first, we would close the shades or pull drapes after dark. but over the seven years we've been lucky enough to live here, as with anything, we got used to the idea that we could always see into other people’s houses and sort of filtered out the view or lack thereof. during one phase we purposely watched the staff in one of the front apartment like TV (well, in fairness to my sweet husband he had nothing to do with that, it was the girls and me). The floor below my girls' room is occupied by a kitchen that belongs to my gym friend Herb. I had yet to connect him to the apartment in question during the hours we spent watching a cook in those windows as if it was a new cable show. I had the amiable gym chat with this nice older man every time I saw him – he had an original approach to tv while exercising and watched movies on tnt while on the elliptical (what better than casablanca to keep you moving?). Then, one night, POW, the nice man from the gym walked in to the kitchen. All of the sudden I felt like a voyeur. I confessed the next time I saw him in the gym and he laughed. We’ve been friends ever since. Just the other day, Herb made change for me so that I could pay a cab who’s credit card machine was on the fritz and left the $3 he “owed” me as a result of this in an envelope for me with the doorman. Now, that’s a neighbor.

Just now, I turned on the TV to find something stupid to watch while relaxing with a beer after a long week. Pandora was still playing “Justin bieber radio” off of the receiver and I danced with my Milo, our dog before settling in to a wife swap between a goth family and hockey freaks. Once I know that Paul and Anita are over there, thinking their brilliant thoughts in their Danish modern apartment in the shell of our prewar building, and at least for the first few months after they move in, possibly looking over at me, will I do that?

We’ll see.

Bourgeois Dilemma #12: the teachers' holiday gift is coming due.

in 2002 we were lucky enough to gain admission for annie at an unbelievable school. I've never been particularly studied about life choices (if we had, in fact, had a plan we probably wouldn't have stayed in manhattan with our particular combination of a small income and desire for the good life - champagne taste on a beer budget as my first boss in advertising told me). but in this case, given the hype about school, I had dutifully gone to the parent's league on the upper east side to learn what to do. In their book was the name of a school we thought a friend had recommended even though it seemed odd that our upper west side jewish intelligentsia parenting guru neighbor would recommend a school named for two saints, we fell in love with the place. the head was brilliant, the facility was fabulous, and the people seemed normal. done.

she was 3, and the oldest in the class of 10 children.

round about december first, an email comes from the class mother regarding the collection of money for christmas gifts to the three teachers. yes, christmas. it's an episcopal school and we are ok with that. yes, three teachers to ten children (they are, after all only 2 and 3). my older sister and her partner are both educators, and bemoan the annual haul of scented candles and bath soaps, so i felt strongly that we should not go this route. utilizing the "reply all" I have since un-learned in these class mother dialogues I lobbed in that I thought it might be nice to use the collected money to give the teachers an amex gift card and have the children do some crafty thing as well. oh yes, nice idea replied another mom adding that she had some of those styrofoam balls and maybe the kids could make ornaments for the teachers.

I participate in this exchange from my bowling alley sized windowed office on the 40th floor at dag hammarskjold plaza facing south. I was, after all, an executive. just a little over a year before we had watched in horror as the first tower collapsed. now, I am swept up in the drama of styrofoam ornaments which, I am convinced, if decorated with the small motor skills available to the 20 hands of the toddler class at St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's, will look awful. my phone is ringing off of the hook and work emails are pinging in to the inbox with alarming frequency. it's the time of year when everything seems to go sideways in advance of the holidays and we are launching a new training program at the same time as drawing together lists of people who will be laid off just after the first of the year. the economy is fine, at this stage it's just the company that isn't, so we have the luxury of being nice and not "ruining people's holiday." Happy new year! Nice to see you! Sorry, this won't be an easy conversation for either of us.

but, at this moment, all of that is just in the background. I am swept away by a vision that these gifted children won't be gluing yarn and pushing glitter jewels into yucky scratchy styofoam, they will be artfully decorating gold and silver cardboard stars with cute stickers. And I am going to take care of it. with a spasm that equated to a tourette's syndrome meets martha stewart, I jump on to the email chain with a definitive statement:

I think ornaments is a great idea! My sister once gave us one she had made on a cardboard star that was so cute! Why don't I take care of picking up some supplies for the kids to use! I can drop off bags for everyone before the weekend!

I refrain from using exclamation points in 99.9% of correspondence. yet, in the email with the school mothers, they serve as some sort of indication of affiliation and positive spirit. so as to say "I am not taking over this project because i am a total control freak, I am taking it over because I am so nice, really!"

naturally, I extend this offer and then lost track of it until the tuesday before the friday the kids need to get their materials. after all, I wrote every paper at college the morning it was due much to the chagrin of my studious roommate who would often find me in bed under a comforter with a beer and a le carre novel the night before some whopper was due. "oh," she would exclaim in a hopeful tone, "you finished your paper?". people don't change. there's a hallmark store as well as staples within a few blocks of my office, so I am not worried at all. not worried enough is more like it. I set out on thursday at 11:30, telling my assistant marla I will be gone for a half hour. it's the day of the training program launch and morale building cocktails, so to say we are busy is an understatement. as the hr director, I also have meeting each 45 minutes to talk to department heads about their plans.

first stop, the hallmark store. plenty of noxious bayberry scented holiday gift baskets. no silver stars. no gold stars. staples. what was I thinking? they don't even have an art supply in sight. it is, after all, midtown. last attempt is a stationers that has plenty of folder covers but none metallic and certainly not stars. it's noon or later and I am in a cold sweat. what will the teachers do without their stars? what will the other mothers think? wracking my brain I remember lee's, the proper art shop near my dentist. not altogether convenient as it's west 57th street, but surely I can whip in there and get what I need. I phone marla who lets me know in her uniquely uplifting australian conservatory trained opera singer voice that everything is fine.

I ascertain that holiday gridlock calls for the subway so across and up I rush. Lee's beckons with holiday cocktail napkins, english style christmas crackers and the like that adorn the front of the shop, but it's materials I need so I head to the back. nothing near the craft section. I walk around to the man who cuts mats and ask him, convinced that someone in charge of rigid paper supplies will know about stars. he shrugs. I make another loop around. easily available, naturally, are the styrofoam balls. but I am not going there. they do have sheets of metallic poster board. I take one and return to the disaffected mat cutter. "don't you have anything that I might even be able to use to cut a star out of this? please?" it's 12:30 and I am beyond desperate.

with a subtle move, he opens a drawer and pulls out an oak tag star. "I guess there's this one. I was saving it for myself, but you can have it for $2." $2? doesn't he recognize the wild-eyed gaze of an overextended holiday season full time working mother? Done. I snatch up 5 sheets of silver, 5 sheets of gold and 5 sheets of bronze- why not? and run to the register. In the cab, I call marla. thankfully, I work in an ad agency with a studio and myself was a picture framer to support an italian shoe habit in college, so I know what I am doing. "marla, I've got what I need, sort of. would you go to the studio and get a board and a cutter?" perennially can-do and wonderful marla doesn't even ask. I spend the next 2 hours cutting stars. when someone comes in for a meeting, I announce "don't worry, I am paying the utmost attention to you, I will just be cutting these stars while we talk." No problem. the plan is to have each child make two stars, from which we will create a lovely assortment for each of the three teachers. So I need to cut 20 stars. And I have about two hours - one if I am lucky in the office and one when I get home.

The cutting is careful but not painstaking work and it seems to be going well. but I keep getting interrupted by co-workers with questions, the ringing phone and the like. and there's the looming presentation and event to manage at 4. I realize that there's no way I am going to finish, and, in what seems a stroke of genius, ask Marla if she would possibly mind cutting just a few remaining stars. If she's willing, I can carry the materials home and after annie is safely in bed, sort them into the brown paper lunch bags with the stickers and instructions that will be labelled with each child's name. Naturally, she's game.

I go out into the real world of my workplace. Make a presentation to about 75 people and then am mingling at the cocktail hour. In my compulsive and compartmentalized brain, the issue of the stars and the gifts and the children that will make them is fully separate from the eager young ad men and women we are aiming to form into more perfect members of contemporary business society. until I see marla coming around the corner to ask me about something to do with the caterer. she is lovely as ever, nearly six feet tall with a proper suit and scarf, blond hair and perfect lipstick. But she has a huge white gauze bandage on her hand. given that I am surrounded by colleagues, I cannot really do anything about the hand which has clearly been severed by the star cutting blade - all I can do is let her know with my eyes that I am horrified. she smiles and says "it's nothing." oh god. what have I done?

later that night, much later, as I am neatly labelling the 10 bags with their stars, stickers, pipe cleaners all apportioned for the little angels of the toddler room, I call marla and she confirms that she really is fine. the kids complete the ornaments with all of their inborn artistic ability (rest assured it's easy enough to tell which ones the kids made and which ones their parents made on their behalf). and the teachers are touched.

seven years later, I have learned. as the end of the year present of aprons with self portraits of each child is presented to each of mary's nursery teachers, I clap and smile. over in annie's third grade room, I am not even there when the gifts are presented.

all I do is write the check.

Bourgeois Dilemma #43: my cleaning lady is using my perfume.

This is the one that got it all started.

Not once, but twice I have encountered my well meaning but basically inept cleaning lady carmen on her way out the door reeking of my scented lotion and/or perfume.

I am not mistaken.

I have an absurdly accurate sense of smell and always have. In boarding school, if my roommate had eaten tuna at lunch, I would return to our room several hours later after crew practice and be able to identify the scent as I entered. Just a few weeks ago, I tracked down an unused veggie burger we had brought along to a fundraiser bbq in the event that my 9.5 year old vegetarian daughter needed a dinner option. They offered veggie burgers, we never used it so it fermented in a backpack in my husband Tim's closet for about 5 days while I steamed about his obsessive running and it's resultant smelly shoes. OK, so maybe these aren't the best examples of my olfactory prowess, but take it as truth, I can smell things.

Here's the rub with carmen. without her, our apartment would devolve into abject squalor. with her, it's a sort of clean and often disorganized place that on monday and thursday afternoons looks half decent. The trick is that on tuesday mornings and friday mornings we inhabit a world of some sort of sick clothing musical chairs. tim cannot find his running shorts, mary's underwear is in annie's drawers (mary is 5 and weighs in at 40 pounds, annie it 9 and having started life at 10+ pounds, tops the percentile charts). Annie's light blue "girls rock" t shirt is in tim's drawer and I could swear that my lace hanky panky thong ended up with mary's carters one time. And it's not really that clean. The toaster oven always has crumbs under it and the fridge handles are still sticky and the dust is appalling. and I could go on and on. but she makes a big point of chatting on the phone whenever I am at home working to her son or daughter or someone who needs money and has some sort of crisis, and when my friend up the block fired her, she sobbed. I just cannot bring myself to do it.

I put this dilemma on facebook and got something close to 35 pieces of advice about what to do. off of facebook, people have sent emails with similar stories - the "it could be worse" scenario of someone who's bed smelled like their nanny's perfume at the end of the day. ugh. give her the same perfume for christmas with a note saying "I noticed you like mine". purchase stunt perfumes from the pharmacy and put them on the dresser on the days she comes. or, just say something. this last option, of course, is not possible in my world. last monday, I was leaving (late, naturally) for a meeting downtown and carmen came in to take out the approximately 70 pounds of laundry that had appeared over the weekend as I was putting cover up under my eyes. A stronger person might have said "carmen, which one is your favorite?" and made a sweeping gesture over the silver tray with the perfume bottles on my bureau. Not me. I just went on about my business.

I think I will just make sure I am not home when she's on her way out.