Death By a Thousand Cuts

[footfootfoot]

As I am working my way around my house I find it has suffered "death from a thousand cuts"; the majority of what is broken/damaged in the house is in the sub-ten dollar repair range, but the number of sub-ten problems is enormous. The aerator in the sink is missing, the rocker switch on the lights for the range hood is broken, the lights are out in the range hood, two of the refrigerator door shelves are missing, the knobs on the range are broken, multiple small (smaller than fist, bigger than finger) holes in the walls, noxious weeds over-taking all the established beds, broken window pane in the potting shed, broken mullion strip, (How the fuck do you break a mullion strip?) pull cord on the mower broken… and on and on. Then there are the more expensive repairs...
There’s cute clumsy and pathological klutziness. She is in the latter camp. None of her destruction is deliberate or consciously perpetrated, it's a part of her mental illness, same as her mother, to be surrounded by broken things, and to fuck up anything that is nice and new.

But it’s a new regime and the kids are being taught to keep things up front and touching. Taking a page from Milton Erickson’s book, I wait until they are all very comfy doing something they really like and then I summon them to the infraction in question with a loving smile and plenty of good cheer and remind them that they need to put the towel on the hook or their clothes in their hamper or the milk back in the fridge. We’ll see if they eventually learn to do things preemptively in order not to be drawn from their favorite activities.

I’ll let you know how this works out.
Anything chaos inducing, destructive, or grime creating was embraced by the old regime, not so much with the new regime.