No Matter What

Layers and Layers

The next morning, I got out of bed and had a bagel with peanut butter. Typically the texture of smooth peanut butter bothered me, but now I was craving it. Pregnancy was really weird. It made me feel like I was a completely different person.

After that, it was time to tackle the house head-on. I put on my favorite docuseries about Galileo as background noise while Dad and I tried to fathom the mess of floor-to-ceiling shelves in the living room. These shelves were packed to the gills with stuff falling everywhere. Layers and layers of it, for the years and years we'd lived here. There was even stuff there from before I was born, when Annie lived here with my mom, and her own dad before he passed.

I guess we never thought about cleaning it because everyone was so busy. My dad always had stuff to work on at his office. My mom always had work, then appointments to bring me to. We had to use the weekends to do basic stuff, like cleaning the kitchen or yard work in the summer. All the shelves, the closets, and the basement fell to the wayside.

Bins and boxes were stuffed with my mom's unfinished paint sets, some of them unopened. There were piles and piles of different colored yarn, because the "was going to learn to knit someday." There was a pirate-ship-in-a-bottle model kit, vases and decorative sand for "sand art," and a bunch of unopened kid craft sets for me, except the one that was the solar system model set.

I went over to the rug to figure out which pile it was going in. There was a "keep" pile, a "garage sale" pile, and a big trash pile, where all our old board games and puzzles with missing pieces would finally be laid to rest.

"Aw man, this one is a blast from the past!" Dad said, holding up a rectangular box with a game in it.

"I didn't know we had an old Harry Potter game," I said.

"This was Annie's absolute favorite. It blows air and you have to try and get the ball to float through the little obstacles. You wanna see if it still works?"

I shrugged. "Sure."

An hour later with zero productivity, we put the game away, had lunch, and then got back to it. Even though it was old and some pieces were broken, the game still worked and was way too sentimental to my dad to throw away, so back on the shelf it went.

We made a lot more progress, and then my attention went over to that garage sale pile. It was the one filled with my mom's unopened, untouched crafts and yarn. It got my head spinning with all these thoughts about her. All these thoughts about what she never did with her time. She was busy working, taking care of me, and would always be sitting in front of the TV in her spare time because she was so tired.

It never made sense to me why she worked so hard. With Dad being the greatest dentist in Oak Falls, we were well off. But after finding out her old friend Iris was murdered, she changed careers and put her whole heart into working at Shady Shores, the local domestic violence center. It took a lot out of her, but she refused to quit. She told me all the time, "I'm tired, but I'll never stop saving lives."

I looked down at the space model kit, then at the little bump that was my stomach.

"What if..." I said to myself.

What if that was me, but worse? I'd have two babies. I'd be twice as tired. What if I didn't find the time to finish getting my degree? Or get to attend astronaut training? Or to even go on any space missions at all?

"Want to take a break for now? I have to go run some errands," Dad said. I nodded. "Okay. I'm gonna go throw my shoes on and head out. I'll be back in an hour. Just relax."

"I will," I said.

Once he was out the door, I left the whole living room undone, boxes and clutter everywhere, and made my way into the kitchen. I opened the blinds behind the table to let in some light. I opened the solar system model kit, found the crinkled instructions, and got to work. This hadn't been touched since my tenth birthday, when I got it as a gift from my mom.

The paint was mostly all dried out, so I added some water to it and it helped a little. I carefully painted each tiny planet in the correct colors, and tried to match up the paint jobs from years ago on the ones I left half-finished. I placed Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto on their little pegs. That's how old this thing really was—it still counted Pluto as a planet.

I turned the dial on the bottom, which rotated the nine planets around the sun in the middle. There was some paint under my fingernails, but I was done. I'd finished the only craft set to ever enter this house.

"I'm back! And I picked up a frozen pizza for dinner!" Dad said as he walked in the door, proudly holding up the grocery bags. He eyes the model kit on the table. "Hey, I thought I told you to relax!"

"I found this very relaxing," I said. "It's all done."

"Looks good! You should put that on display somewhere."

"Yeah. I think I have a spot in my room for it," I said, picking it up off the table.

I walked upstairs and placed it proudly on top of my dresser. There was no open space on that old thing, so I gave it a home on top of the jewelry box I never used, then sent a picture to Connor.

Looks great, babe! How's the cleaning going? He replied.

I learned that it wouldn't always be this easy to find time for the things I wanted to do, but with a lot of effort, it could be done. If I could finish that model kit after all these years, who knows what else I'm capable of? I was going into space, whether my twins would live to see my rocket launch or not. But for now, I still had to focus on the massive piles of stuff that were still all over the living room floor. They weren't going to clean themselves.