One final post to close this LONG day! I am preparing to entertain tomorrow morning. A good friend of mine introduced me to the all-in-one visiting teaching brunch. It's a great way to have fun, food, and check off your visiting teaching! It does require a bit of work, so we do this quarterly perhaps, but the sisters love it. It gives them a chance to meet each other and we all have a great time. We will be meeting together tomorrow morning to have one last hurrah before my faithful and long-time companion (Hey, one and a half years in this ward is almost life!) moves on to greener pastures.
Anyway...In preparation for this event, I decided it would be advantageous to all involved if I cleaned my bathrooms. Since I couldn't bring myself to jump this enormous hurdle at 11 o'clock (I do have three baths now) I settled on at least cleaning the one bathroom they will likely use... the half bath off the kitchen. Lest you all cheer needlessly let me first confess that this half bath generally takes only 15 minutes to clean. At any rate, I did it!
As I was waiting for the toilet bowl cleaner to eat off the algae growing in a beautiful ring around the bowl and allowing my disinfectant to penetrate to the pipes of my sink, I began to clean the mirror. At just this moment, Louis comes in to see what I am doing. As I looked at him and glanced at my LOVELY reflection in the mirror, I was overcome with emotion. I guess the best way to describe this would be sweet irony? I began singing one of my favorite love ballads, "So This is Love." This comes from my favorite fairy tale, Cinderella.
Despite the fact that I don't exactly have "Cinderella feet" or even her sweet demeanor, growing up I often thought Cindy and I had many similarities: we both wore rags, we were both forced to cook and clean for our mothers, our fathers adored us, etc.
I always marvelled at how the fairy tale ends... Happily Ever After. What a beautiful way to allow our imaginations to concoct all sorts of wonderful endings of true love, eternal bliss and such in our own shallow ways. For a while now the reality of Happily Ever After has been taking shape and tonight I added some more insight:
I still often wear rags; so my children can get some cute new outfits.
Mothers are not so mean and cruel as they once seemed, and moms know quite a lot more than I ever realized.
I still cook and clean, but it's a choice. And really, it's not that bad.
That's what Happily Ever After really is about, I guess. Doing the things you may not love, for the people you do love. Even though it may not be the glitz and glam I always was sure it would be, I have a feeling this is probably a lot more substantial.
Now each time I'm faced with the daunting task of cleaning the swampy bathrooms, I will burst into song, "So this is love, Hmmhmm, So this is LOVE! So THIS is what makes life fine. I'm all aglow (with sweat), hmm hmm, and now I know, the key to all Heaven is mine!........So this is the miracle that I've been dreaming of... So this is love!"
8 comments:
Camille, you are so cute. I can totally hear it. I think you are exactly right. I read on someone's blog (sorry I don't remember who's) that we shouldn't take for granted the little things because when we look back we will realize they were the big things. You've now inspired me to get off my computer and do something for the ones I love. :)
That is a beautiful post! I realized something similar when I had my daughter. I noticed that I enjoyed changing stinky diapers because I knew it made my daughter happy to be clean again. You inspired me too!
Camille, you had better watch out! Because that was beautiful and Time Out for Women might be after you soon. What a great analogy and your writing was very descriptive--I could see the whole scene happening. The only way to make it better would be to sing in your OZ voice!!!
Amme- OZ would be good, but I one-upped it! I used my opera voice. Yeah, baby! Time Out for Women?! What is this? Maybe if they needed a comedy routine!!!
Ok, so I have to confess... I hesitated to post this because I was afraid people would think I was horrid. I think that is the beauty of the English language, and the boon, you never really know what people mean, you see, I was steeped in sarcasm for a lot of what I wrote, but then I did have a pretty good, "aha" moment at the end. So really, all of you being inspired is what has inspired me back! hee hee
Oh so sweet!!! That is romance at its finest:)
What a wonderful perspective. Thanks for this post.
That was awesome!!
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