Owly

I’m a little bit OCD . . . aka . . . organization queen.

Hobbit is a little bit ADD . . . aka . . . creative faun.

Most of the time, these opposing forces work to our advantage. Hobbit helps me to laugh, play, and go-with-the-flow. I help Hobbit keep a tidy enough space that we aren’t embarrassed when people pop on over without notice.

And sometimes, OCD and ADD clash.
(it’s almost always OCD’s fault)

I grew up in a household where I was trained and disciplined to do things a certain (ahem) perfectionistic way. For example, when it was my turn to do the dishes, my brother would toss dishes back into the sink if I hadn’t cleaned them to their squeaky standards. According to my mother, mops didn’t exist in our household because cleaning the kitchen or bathroom floors properly meant getting down on your hands and knees and scrubbing til everything not only looked clean, but felt clean. (Apparently, mops can’t feel.)

But then the OCD organizational queen that I am married the ADD creative genius that is Hobbit. He puts googly eyes on things. They watch you. They feel.

I wouldn’t say that when OCD and ADD clash in our Mirth House that things get ugly. But they get awkward. Very, very awkward.

One morning this week, I went to feed Tosha and discovered that she didn’t have any of her homemade muttloaf in the fridge. My inner OCD efficiency queen makes a habit of taking a loaf out of the freezer as soon as I use up the last of the thawed loaf, so that the next meal time there is plenty of unfrozen muttloaf to feed the mutt. But on this particular morning, Hobbit had been the last one to feed the Tosh. So at 6:15am on a Thursday, I find myself banging a ziplock bag of frozen muttloaf on the counter in hopes to dislodge a square.

I’ll admit, I was taking a bit of my frustration and anger at the inefficiency of the situation out on the frozen muttloaf.

“I can heeaaar you,” Hobbit says playfully from the basement. He was half naked and didn’t have any idea what I was thinking. He thought I was making pan noises for shits and giggles.

But OCD-me was not having any of Hobbit’s play-tics in that moment.

The situation devolved from there, and let’s just say the frozen muttloaf didn’t get the worst of it. . . Hobbit did.

Minutes later, OCD-me took over my mouth and got as bully-abusive as my big brother did when he kept tossing not-clean-enough forks back into the kitchen sink for me to re-wash. Next thing I knew, I had shame-dumped Hobbit with a whole pile of not-washed-well-enough task items I had evidently been stock-piling in the back closets of the OCD shelf in my brain, and they had cluttered enough to violate my 70% Rule.

It was not my finest hour.
Or day.

I watched as Hobbit’s energy shrank and his defensiveness rose, in exactly the way my own did when my brother bullied me about the dishes.

Hobbit did a damn good job of staying calm, talking to me gently, and holding his ground. But for the rest of the day, I was unable to return to play-tics mode, and we stayed in Awkwardville until well after bedtime….where I found myself staring at the ceiling cuddling the Tosh while Hobbit snored away (still fully dressed) on the couch downstairs.

Finally, just before midnight, I padded my bare feet down to the couch, sat down next to him, and initiated talking in the dark mode.

Two hours later, we emerged from Awkwardville and went to bed a triple spoon with the Tosh (who now has a sufficiently thawed 3-day stash of muttloaf in the fridge).

Hobbit

What happened the other day with Owly and me may have had something to do with organization and efficiency. I don’t know. Part of it—and parts are important to this story—may have had to do with the jigsaw puzzle (that Owly gave to me as a surprise) that sat on the dining room table—barely touched—for over a week.

We’ve been busy recently and haven’t been connecting as much. And when Owly’s OCD gets snarly, it’s usually because I’ve been following my ADD through distant orbits on the other side of the house.

But before going into that, it is worth noting—in contrast to Owly’s structured family experience—in my family we stored things on the steps going downstairs. I have mentioned this on more than one occasion in the presence of Owly’s family, and they quickly change the subject while they ignore the antennae pushing out of my head.

I could tell you more about the basket on the chair by my family’s front door—that was supposed to be for mail—that was indefinitely occupied by a certain power sander and a pile of overdue library books for most of my teenage years, but I will save that for another time if I remember.

The point is . . . Owly and I haven’t been spending as much time together . . . and one day she surprised me with a 1,000 piece puzzle we talked about doing together. It is a rare thing for hard-working OCD organization Queen Owly to ask to play ;)

The image of the puzzle was beautiful . . . it featured a living room that any self-respecting hobbit would love to call home: a loungey space with the requisite worn leather chair, a stone fireplace, shelves of books and glowing trinkets, complete with a collection of flowers and larger-than-normal mushrooms . . .

. . . And I didn’t see it at the time . . . but the most astounding thing about the room in the puzzle was its exquisitely subtle ambient light . . . the kind of light you swear you have experienced in the tenderest and most mysterious of dreams . . .

. . . where orange and peach and rose mingle like smoke . . . like a late summer evening at dusk where the last rays of light stubbornly refuse to leave the sky . . .

When Owly and I opened the puzzle box, she spilled the pieces over the dining room table . . . . a rare indulgence for a disciplined Owly . . . and before long we found ourselves drinking wine and listening to Hooded Fang . . . and losing ourselves in the honest conversation you share with the person you get naked with . . .

And while sorting out the edges of the puzzle-world-room . . . what I wish I would have noticed and been more thoughtful about then . . . and would have remembered throughout the week . . . is that the source of light above us, a pool table light fixture with stained glass that Owly found used online . . . and then trusted me to install . . . emits the same kind of light as the room in the puzzle.

I don’t know how else to say this but to just speak very plainly as a post-it note to my future self—when the creature from a dream world you live with presents you with a magically illuminated box, and asks you on a Tuesday evening to play—do accept the invitation as COSMIC PERMISSION from the HIGHEST AUTHORITY to press pause on whatever you are doing—in whatever world you are in—and also remember—that the veil between worlds is a puzzle and a mere flick of the dining room light switch away.