sisyphus

When I heard the legend of Sisyphus, I was a teenager in high school. His punishment sounded cruel to me then, but never until I had a house, a family, children did I understand the mental and physical agony he must have felt.

I imagine him, condemned forever to roll a huge boulder to the top of a hill, where it would inevitably escape and roll to the bottom. I think of him standing at the top, sweating, swearing, and then stomping down the incline to start all over again. What must he have done in life to merit such treatment?

We moved into our home two years ago this week. This means there have been 104 Mondays, on which I wash the same clothes I’ve washed hundreds of times before. 104 Wednesdays to make the same eight loaves of bread. And 104 Thursdays, on which we have the opportunity to go to the library for storytime, health permitting. We’ve loaded and unloaded the dishwasher at least 730 times, and probably more like 1460 times. Been to the store in the neighborhood of 156 times. Church, 104. We’ve given 730 baths, served 2190 meals. Brushed our teeth a total of 7300 times.

We use our house hard. For many people, a home is a place to eat and sleep. In our home, we eat, sleep, play, work, go to school, go to work, and so on. So my personal boulder, I admit, may be larger than is strictly necessary. But knowing that doesn’t diminish its size.

As awful as the story of Sisyphus is, I begin to understand one thing. Nonfiction isn’t always pleasant. Was it a legend? Yes. Was it true? Definitely. Every morning, if we’ve been diligent in our labors the previous day, we have a relatively clean house. And the work begins. Distilled into one equation, our day is something like this. Six people creating disorder + one person creating order = entropy in its finest form.

For a while I thought it was just the number of people creating order that was out of balance. So I cut the purse of the family budget and hired housecleaning help. I felt very cosmopolitan, taking my children to the grocery store while “the help” cleaned the house. When I returned home, it’d be beautifully and completely clean. I would think, money well spent. But as soon as I opened the doors to Pandora’s SUV, the boulder would come crashing down again. I couldn’t get the groceries in the house before the children were pumping ketchup onto the newly sanitary kitchen floor, unrolling toilet paper all over the sparkling bathroom, crumbling crackers into the fluffy, spotless carpets. I let the cleaning help go.

There must be something larger to this story that I’m missing. There must be valuable lessons to learn in the hard slog that is every day. If you know them, send them my way. The only lesson I’ve learned is this. I’m not as much like Sisyphus as I originally thought. He at least made it to the top every time, without his boulder slipping away halfway up, or crashing off down the side of the hill to smash to smithereens at the bottom while he watched in resigned horror. There were no children hanging from his neck, his legs, his back, and when he got to the bottom every time at least he could find his rock. Ha. Sisyphus was on easy street.

But I wonder. His labor was obviously designed to give him an eternity to reflect on whatever heinous acts he’d committed that earned him that unenviable position. He must have done something terrible to warrant a lifetime of tedious, repetitive labor. But...what did I do?