The Domestic

Herself oversteps the mark

W“Because of decades of gaslighting, I wasn’t sure I had much of a right to be annoyed”

e have some pretty major boundary issues in my family. Day to day, for example, it’d be rare for me to have a shower without, on average, at least two of the three people I live with being present in the bathroom. Meanwhile, my mother asks me on a near-weekly basis if I have convinced Himself to get a vasectomy yet, even helpfully providing literature on the subject.

I suppose she thinks extensive research into the matter will help me build an informed and convincing argument that he will have to agree to. Unfortunately, it actually comes across as a conspiracy against him, a kind of castration by committee, and he is duly unnerved.

Recently, Herself proposed that we house-sit for her when she goes away this year. It’s a generous offer as we, of course, could potentially make a bit of cash airbnbing — yes that’s a verb now — our own house.

I hadn’t fully made my mind up about it — after all, moving two kids and two adults is an undertaking, not to mention the reining in of the state of chaos in which my home constantly dwells. It seemed like huge mental expenditure for relatively little fiscal gain.

The upshot was that I was undecided on the whole thing when we left for a week’s holiday in May, and my mother, not accepting my indecision, used her spare key to invade the house to tidy and photograph it for our proposed Airbnb ad. Not by any stretch the worst thing to do to a person, but even well-intentioned deeds can be a bit much when they are not wanted.

When I returned, the house was certainly tidy, but my careful, deeply idiosyncratic filing system of crap had been flung out of whack. Scraps of paper of untold importance to me had been categorised as trash by the cleaning interlopers. My racing bike, which is something of a diva and only leads a cosseted indoor life, had been left in the garden. And someone had fecked with the fridge, so the whole freezer had defrosted. Rage. This was a new level of overstep, a departure from the run-of-the-mill controlling and micro-managing that she usually engages in. I was annoyed, but also because of three decades of no boundaries and gaslighting, I wasn’t sure I had much of a right to be annoyed.

I began to feel somewhat vindicated when I told others of the intrusion, and they corroborated that I did indeed have a leg to stand on in this argument. And this was before I even told them about the text message about me (it was mildly mocking in tone) Herself had accidentally sent to me in the wake of the row. That’s right, now I really had the upper hand. I was admirably magnanimous about the trampling of the boundaries and instead took the high (rocky) road.