sweeping things under the rug.

When I was married, my husband and I had a lot of problems. They were mostly run-of-the-mill problems, the kind most married people face. But we were ignorant, and as things go, ignorance means not being aware of what you don’t know. We weren’t naive; we knew people were flawed. So we put our heads down and muscled through the issues. Some we tackled head on with therapy, our parents, and our friends. Most we fumbled through on our own, accepting that every married couple had their issues and trusting that we would continue to work through them, together. Somewhere along the way, though, money problems or the challenge of parenting or job stress or frankly, just denial, made us start sweeping those issues under the rug. We kept making decisions to move our life together forward (home ownership, a children, then a second child) even as we kept tripping over the rug, which grew lumpier and more difficult to walk steadily across as time passed. And then, as it too often does in this modern society, the day came when one of us got tired of tripping: me. Always the one with my feet firmly planted on the ground, I began finding it impossible to skip over the moguls. When I pointed this out to my husband, he stared blankly at me, then at the clouds. He had no idea what I was talking about, but instead of being curious enough to find out, he told me I was being ridiculous. That I was crazy. That everything was as it should be. For someone who lived with his head in the clouds, this was probably true. The moguls I tripped on, he skipped over, reaching higher and higher the bigger they grew.

The higher he aimed, the lower I felt. Suddenly it became clear that we had been battling, then ignoring, our incompatibility for most of our relationship. As the best man at our wedding famously said, our marriage was a terrible idea. As my mother said just months before the wedding, it wasn’t too late to call it off. For a long time, we found ways in which our differences were a strength in our relationship. We complemented each other, filled in gaps for each other. Our different strengths and weaknesses meant we were a superhero duo when we worked together. But we were finding it more and more difficult to work together, and when we were not on the same page, life became a hot mess that I could smell rising up from under that rug.

I vainly tried–for several years–to get us help for our marriage, to get him help for his ADHD, to get myself help for communicating with him, to find a way for us to effectively compromise. My efforts finally failed when we sat in the fifth or six-hundredth therapist’s office and he shook his head defiantly and said none of the solutions and compromises that we’d discussed would make him happy. He’d met someone else, and he seemed to think he’d have to work less hard to make that relationship work. I didn’t blame him–and if I’m honest, I was more than a little relieved that I wouldn’t have to try any longer either. He moved out a few months later, we were divorced 60 days after that, and I wasted no time in rolling up my sleeves to begin cleaning up the mess left behind.

Living with a self-proclaimed artist, MacGyver,  mechanic, handyman, jack-of-all-trades had its ups and downs. On the positive side: he could fix almost anything and usually without a trip to Home Depot. One of the negatives was the mess of a garage, basement, assorted kitchen drawers and any other unclaimed space that became cluttered with hoarded tools, magazine collections, and myriad randomly discarded and reclaimed pieces of wood, scrap metal, and doodads. As I’ve been working to clear the clutter, though, my attempts to upkeep the house have felt, more or less, like putting lipstick on a pig.

To be fair, he’s not the only one to have put some “sweat equity” into this house. The previous owners had built all the cabinetry and decorative touches in the house, wired the house for an alarm system, “finished” the attic and basement to make them (questionably?) livable. Last month, I hired a contractor to remove the faux fireplace mantel that the previous owners had built, update some moldings around the room, and install new wood paneling to close the hole in the wall the mantel had left. As my partner and I looked around the room, imagining white-washed panel, dreaming about a new dining room table and chairs, and wondering about new light fixtures, our gaze kept landing on the DIY pipe shelves my ex-husband had built and installed in the corner of the room.