The Tyranny of THEM

This morning, as I was vacuuming the bathtub, I had a sudden, vivid memory from thirty years ago.

Wen and I were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and yakking about something that must have been vitally important to me then (although I’ve completely forgotten what it was, so I doubt it was all that important) when Wen’s three-year-old daughter, Tina, came into the kitchen and tearfully announced she’d hurt her eye.

“Do you want me to look at it?” Wen asked.

Tina shook her head and held out a Band-Aid printed in rainbow colors.

“Oh. You want me to put a Band-Aid on it,” Wen deduced.

Even back then, despite the reduced cranial capacity that afflicts all children at that age, Tina thought outside the box, sometimes so far outside it was impossible to tell what problem her ingenious solutions were solving. After a moment’s consideration, she stuck out her right forefinger.

Wen wrapped the bandage around it and asked, “All better now?”

Tina held up her bandaged finger to be kissed, then thanked her mother and ran out into the backyard to continue playing.

I turned off the vacuum cleaner, sat back on my heels and looked at the few remaining dust bunnies cowering by the drain. My bathroom has a shower stall. I’ve never used the bathtub. Cleaning it made about as much sense as bandaging my finger after hurting my eye. What problem was I solving by cleaning the bathtub?

It took me a while, but I finally came to the conclusion I was solving the problem of THEM, those judgmental ghosts who tell me I’m a worthless, lazy slut if I don’t have a sparkly clean bathtub. While the worthless descriptive is an exaggeration, and the slut accusation is totally uncalled for, the lazy epithet is quite true. And it’s not like I can hide if from THEM. THEY live inside my head.

So who are THEY exactly? And why are THEY making me kill innocent dust bunnies?

We’ll begin with Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) who proposed the Theory of Forms. According to Plato, Socrates argued for the existence of ideal forms which are the true reality. The material world we experience is just a shadow of that reality. You may think you own a couch, but what you actually own is a shadow of the perfect COUCH that exists on a plane inaccessible to your senses. Socrates labeled these perfect objects archetypes, and if he was correct, THEY could be manifestations of archetypes, one of which is obviously a sparkly clean BATHTUB. The problem with this theory is that I can’t experience the BATHTUB, so there is no point in cleaning it’s unreal shadow.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) turned this around when he theorized that archetypes were manifestations of the collective unconscious. We don’t know a lot about the unconscious, for obvious reasons, and it seems perfectly feasible that along with the standard archetypes of HERO, MAIDEN, CRONE etc, the collective unconscious holds an archetype for INDUSTRIOUS HOUSEWIFE, symbolized by sparkly clean bathtubs, which I am channeling. But here’s the problem with Carl’s theory: whatever my unconscious wants, my conscious thinks INDUSTRIOUS HOUSEWIFE is an out-dated, pre-liberation ideal from a male-dominated society that I refuse to measure myself by.

Finally, there is Transactional Analysis proposed by Eric Berne (1910-1970). The foundation for Transactional Analysis is that we operate from one of three psychic states: Parent, Child, or Adult. Child and Adult we develop ourselves. Parent is mostly just a miniature copy of our developmental influences.  Obviously my Child is unconcerned with the state of my bathtub. As a rational Adult, I’m perfectly well aware there is no benefit to cleaning an unused bathtub. This leaves the Parent, which actually makes a certain amount of sense, since I was raised in an era when ring-around-the-bathtub carried a stigma equivalent to heroin addiction today. However times have changed and harboring dust bunnies is no longer a domestic crime.

So there is no reason, logical or psychological, to listen to THEM any longer. Today, I take my first, wobbly step in a one woman battle against imaginary people. It won't be easy. THEY are loud and insulting. But I will devote every molecule of my being, every last scrap of determination in my possession, to resisting the tryanny of THEM.

As God is my witness, I will never vacuum the bathtub again!

Of course, it’s perfectly possible real people might think I am lazy if they see my bathtub. I only know one person brave enough to tell me this to my face, and I’m so accustomed to taking abuse from Wen, I probably won't even notice. On the off chance a rude and opinionated stranger uses my bathroom one day, I’ll stick a sign in my bathtub:

Psychology experiment in progress. Do NOT remove dust bunnies from this tub.