This weekend my Husband was working late again at his second job. I was alone with the kids doing overtime with no lunch break and the only thing I felt like doing was scrubbing my dirty kitchen floor.
Let me back up for a minute. When we moved into this house a little more than three years ago the previous owners had spruced up the place before moving out. We moved in having no kids helping us muck up the place so everything started fairly neat and clean. The kitchen floor appeared brand new. I assume the previous owners replaced it shortly before listing the home up for sale. It looked very nice and while it wasn't tile or anything fancy, I enjoyed the aesthetic of it.
Fast forward three years, two kids and no free time later to a kitchen floor that, while it hides dirt ridiculously well, I knew it was filthy. I remembered what it used to be. I remembered how it felt under my feet when it was fresh and new. I remember being so pleased with it that on our first night in our new house we ate our Subway sandwiches happily sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor.
The floor looked fine now to the untrained eye. I was rarely ever worried with how it looked or felt when a guest stopped by. But I remembered when it didn't cast a hue of yellow across its surface. I wanted that floor back.
I've tried to deep clean this floor before, don't get me wrong. But I'm not the kind of woman that wants to spend hours or days scrubbing to get results. I wanted efficiency. I got the tip to try baking soda and vinegar and since I use vinegar for #allthethings already, I skeptically gave it a go. It worked. It worked really well in fact. So, here's me spending my Saturday doing what I never thought I'd do sitting in a pool of apple cider vinegar in the middle of my kitchen floor scrubbing away.
Focusing on the task at hand gave me a lot of time to reflect and meditate on the things that have been weighing me down lately. This floor has been frustrating me for sometime now, but I could see the same frustration carrying over into other aspects of life. Enough hours passed that I finally began to see the giant metaphor in front of me. The floor is me.
When we moved into this house three years ago, I was still new to the "real world," fresh and clean. Two babies came along and constantly putting myself last has allowed quite a bit of dirt and debris to build up in those deep, hard to reach places in my heart. It's easy to overlook this with the typical ins and outs of daily life. I walk across my kitchen floor every morning and for the most part, I don't take notice of the hidden dirt because the surface is clean. Even my Husband didn't realize how filthy the floor has been. Like my kitchen floor, I'm tough. I don't show wear until a place has been rubbed completely raw. I am clever with hiding my "dirt" so to speak. But the nagging feeling of knowing the dirt is there, the fact that it's allowed to exist alongside any good thing is gross.
So here I sit scrubbing away at the dirt hidden in the crevices of my vinyl flooring and mentally scrubbing away at my heart.
