The Gray Elephant: A Story of Deception……….

Some of us have the theoretical Elephant looming in the corners of our home. At our house we actually HAVE the darn thing taking up space and staring at us on a daily basis. Since Clay’s getting ready to deploy and we’re in the mode of cleaning up and clearing out, we decided to get on each side of the darn thing and wrestle it out of the house.

What the heck am I talking about?!………………Well, it started as one of those Smoke and Mirrors moments where I was trying to find the quickest and easiest way to clear off the counters and tidy up before someone came over. I had been working on paperwork and knew that I wanted everything together so that I could easily pull it back out and start again, after company left. Ah ha! The big, gray bin in the garage would be perfect! So, I hauled the bin into the house and swept everything I was working on into it (along with a few counter tops), closed the lid and wheeled it to my room (yup, it’s so large that it has wheels). This all worked out just fine for several months. I’d load up the Gray Elephant with everything that was unsightly and then pull it back out to work on it. Until………………..the first time I didn’t go back and unload it. Well, it just snowballed from there. It started being a regular resident of my room and finally, on one of those occasions that Clay cleaned out and tidied up our room, he said, “NO MORE GRAY ELEPHANT IN THE BEDROOM”. So, I found an empty wall to park it next to and all the while I kept “hiding” papers and junk in it. The kids started using it as a step-stool to reach my white board! After too many times of rewriting the “very important” things back on the white board, I wheeled it into the laundry room. Ugh! The laundry room isn’t very big and we have a TON of laundry, so maneuvering around the Gray Elephant became difficult. If we needed to get into a cupboard, it was I who had to push the beast out of the way. He was just too heavy for the kids to move. But, I kept ignoring the beast and enjoying my cleared counters. It started to nag at me that there had been projects that I had deemed important that were lying in the bottom of the beast but that I couldn’t remember what they were. I would quickly quiet the nagging voice with whatever task was at hand. But the day of reckoning came. It was inevitable. You can’t live with an elephant looming in your corners forever. So, Clay asked a friend from work if he and his girlfriend would come take the little kiddos and entertain them while we opened and disposed of the beast. Saturday was our day!

It took us 4 hours and we removed 5 bags of garbage (yes FIVE bags!). We’re not talking brown, paper, garbage bags, but the full-sized white, plastic garbage bags for lining the kitchen trash, size! Then we unloaded a whole TON of pictures. I kept saying,”where did these all come from?”. Then we unloaded a bag (just the brown, paper kind from the grocery store) of things that needed to be shredded. Finally we ended up with 1/2 a table-top of papers that need attending to. Whew!

The beast is dead!

So, while I believe in Smoke and Mirrors I also need to remember that a dog is the only animal we can comfortably keep in our home! But what to do with that big, gray bin? I think it’s going to be a perfect place to store sleeping bags.

So today, people, I challenge you to look around and find the elephant that may be looming in your house and lead it out, shut the door and never let it back in!

Good night~

This entry was posted on February 12, 2008 at 3:07 am and is filed under attitude, cleaning, encouragement, family life, mom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.