My Laundry Room Scares Me.

It's the last day of summer vacation. I was hoping to finally spend a whole day with my child, enjoying some relaxing time just absorbing who she is, riding a bike somewhere, making gluten-free zucchini bread (now THAT sounds appetizing, right?), feeling my heart thud when her lovely face shines with laughter, frantically trying to cram in all the reading and workbooks that she was supposed to do over the summer in order to seem really really smart tomorrow...and yet...we're busy today. She's at Mimi's, of course; that escape for her to the land of Whatever I Want, the place I'm so ambivalent about. I love that she has such a close relationship with my parents, I do. I appreciate that I get a night off every week. I'm glad that she has a soft place to fall when her mother gets overbearing and demanding. But. I had such plans today...

And, of course, with school starting tomorrow I have exactly ZERO excuses to not get stuff done around here. Now I'll have seven whole hours every day to myself. I have ambitious plans; I'm going to finish painting the house. I'm going to weed the roses. I'm going to fix it so that the front porch doesn't look like the Clampetts live here. I'm going to finish that little book I started four years ago. I'm going to see if I can shed this inner-tube from around my hips. And I'm going to clean out the laundry room. The scary, overflowing laundry room. That will involve ironing. It will also involve getting rid of crap, which right now is the biggest obstacle on my path to serenity. So. Much. Crap. Where did it all come from? Why, from my flibbertygibbet sprees involving buying stuff because it's on sale. From not putting stuff away. From my mom and my mother-in-law being convinced that they don't need to take anything to D.I.; maybe Vanessa will want it.
I've managed to avoid dealing with all this because we've been so busy the last 12 weeks. Now it looks like I have to swallow my fear and that choking, overwhelmed feeling that I don't know where to start, that I'll do it wrong, that I'll get rid of something that I'll then discover we really need, that there's something else I really should be doing instead but am not sure what that is so I'll just get on facebook.

But not today.
I'm going to go get my child.