Cleaning Up the Mess You've Made

I was talking to my sister Dawn on the phone a moment ago. She was telling me about her Thanksgiving and the various drunken brawls that took place. She broke our cousin Tanya's nose and now Tanya won't talk to her (she's as alcoholic as we and the rest of our mom's side; Tanya's dad, our uncle, is in prison for killing someone in a D.U.I). Makes me grateful for my Thanksgiving. We only talked about drugs and alcohol and abuse. No one actually engaged in any of those activities at the occasion. But I happened to be in the home of the one normal person in all our family on either side, and that's our aunt Kay, our dad's sister. Every one else is just fucking nuts.



At the end of the convo, Dawn complained about her floor. There are dirty footprints all over it, she says, even though she just mopped it. Now she has to mop again. It's a nightmare. She's gotta go.

"It's the perfect metaphor for life," I said. "We clean up the mess, and then there's another one. We clean that up, and then it's messy all over again. We just can't keep it clean, damn it."



Recovery from sex and love addiction begins with a 90-day "withdrawal" and "inventory" period. For 90 days, you lock yourself in, keep everyone else out, and mop up all the dirty footprints without letting any more accumulate. It's a painstaking, thankless, nasty job. But you gotta get that floor clean. It doesn't mean it's not going to get messed up again in the future. But there sure is a lot of shit there, man, and if you get any more shit piled on top of that shit, you'll never get it clean. Just git 'r done. Then spot-clean daily, as needed.

After 42 days, I had hardly made headway cleaning up the old crap when more mess got tracked in on top of it all. It drove me fucking crazy. I was at the leaver of these new footprints' house last night, and he asked me if we could masturbate while we made out.  I said "no". He walked me out to my car, and I told him I wouldn't be seeing him again. No more dirty soles.



Of course, I gotta check my shoes, too. My former husband used to always call 'em CFM boots. "Oh, you're wearing your CFM boots today, huh hon?" I thought it was the acronym for some elite and glamorous style. It's the acronym for a style, all right.

But it's not really the boots that say, "Come Fuck Me".

It's me.