When Your Life Doesn’t Make for ‘Good Content’
Can life be beautiful even when no one recognizes its beauty?
I am holding the toilet brush as if it’s a weapon. My cut-offs are short. Sunglasses on. I’ve slipped angry metal music into my ears to clean these bathrooms. I get $50 to clean six bathrooms and a laundry room, and this extra money, twice a week, means the difference between survival and not. My kids are with their dad this weekend, and 50/50 custody is agony but I have this to keep me busy. I am so grateful for this job, so grateful for the little four-room cottage to rebuild my life and be with my kids, so thankful that even though it takes two full-time jobs and this part-time one, there is always the food bank on Tuesday.
I pull on plastic gloves and watch myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m angry, I can tell. But I am strong. I haven’t eaten all week but I still think I am beautiful, that my mind is beautiful, that my work is beautiful, that the way the sun comes over the marsh and shines, bleached white against the bathroom doors and concrete while I clean, is beautiful. But is it beautiful if no one recognizes it as beauty? Is it valuable if no one can see its value? I feel like I know the answer. So, I am angry.
I’m near the end of the bathrooms, wringing out the mop for the laundry room, when a truck of…
