Compulsion to Clean
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Just me on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 10:11 AM
As of today my pregnancy is officially in its third trimester.
The twenty-something weeks of pregnancy are pretty low-key for me: my nausea has settled down, I’ve regained some energy, my heartburn hasn’t escalated and I can still eat what I want, and the birth of the baby is far enough away that I’m not feeling pressured about his arrival.
However, the arrival of the third trimester has been accompanied by a symptom that I hadn’t yet experienced during this pregnancy.
It’s a tiny thought niggling at the back of my mind: “The downstairs office is messy. The downstairs office is messy. You’ve got to get it clean soon.”
The office is not that messy; we just need to buy another small filing cabinet and spend an afternoon organizing. So I’ve been trying to ignore the voice, but I know this symptom. I cannot hide from it. It has a name, and it’s what had me vacuuming under the bed (the only time I’ve done that during the entire four years we’ve lived in our house) a mere three days before I gave birth to Camilla.
Yes, that’s right: Nesting.
I’m not a particularly neat or organized person. For my sanity and my husband’s I get our house into the state I think of as “walk-through tidy” every night before we go to bed, because I can’t live in a jumble. But my fridge has scary leftovers in it, I have not one but several “junk” drawers, and if you show up for an unexpected visit I can’t promise you that the sheets on the guest-room bed will be clean.
Yet by the end of my pregnancy with Camilla I was, as I said, vacuuming under the bed. I did some hard-core organizing of the junk drawers, complete with little baggies full of items categorized by function. It was a good thing we’d been planning to replace the linoleum in the kitchen - and did, two weeks before the birth - because I could not have lived with that nasty old stuff for another month.
As I enter my third trimester, I’m both curious and apprehensive about the lengths to which this round of nesting might take me. I’d also love to know if you experienced nesting, and what form it took!
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