Way back in 2013, I found myself in Big Lots. It was just a few months after I left a career that defined my identity for more than a decade. And as I walked through the aisles of off-brand merchandise, dented cleaning supplies, As-Seen-on-TV products and almost-expired candy, the Eagles “New Kid In Town” played on the store sound system.
I was only there because I needed some plastic storage bins, but I felt like I stumbled upon the rock bottom of my life. Surrounded by towering shelves of outdated and overstocked product, I heard the Eagles warn me:
“They will never forget you ’til somebody new comes along”
The closeout merchandise was no longer an unbeatable deal, it was my doppelganger. How could I fool myself into thinking I was an in-demand career woman if I was shopping for low, low priced containers in the middle of a weekday? The most important conversation I had that morning was a debate about the relative merits of grilled and toasted cheese sandwiches with a four-year old.
My husband and I switched roles near the end of 2012. Before that, he spent five years as the primary parent of little kids, working ten hours a week. I was main wage-maker and worked full-time. Then, he started working fifty hours a week and I started my own consulting business, taking on the bulk of the homemaker duties. It was a gift that we could make the family float with the arrangement. We were immensely grateful to have that flexibility. But, I got whiplash from the lifestyle change.
Rather than hustling to meet a daily broadcast deadline like I’d done for twelve years, my main task for that day was the reason I had to go get the organizing bins: cleaning up the kids’ room. It’s a job that vexed my husband and me for years. It even drove us to make a music video about it.
Typically, we’d split the ‘room clean-up’ duty, which involved the kids but meant we did most of the heavy lifting. When my husband was the at-home dad, though, I didn’t have to help out quite as intensely. I was usually at work when the mess reached crisis proportions (the only time we go motivated enough to handle it).
This day, though, it was just me. I tried everything to get out of it. I put the cleaning off and rationalized I was teaching the kids a lesson. I bribed the kids to do it themselves. I yelled myself hoarse to get them to handle it without me. I knew they probably needed some supervision and guidance, but I just didn’t want to walk in and have to deal with the chaos.
I didn’t want to handle the clean-up because doing it meant that I wasn’t more important than the job. I had the time – and really, no excuse – to raise the sanitation grade of the place where my little ones slept. But, eight hours re-ordering a child’s universe meant twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred seconds of awareness that I was no longer spending all my days going to a mentally challenging job with intelligent adults and exciting stories to tell.
So, with begrudging assistance from the children, I tackled the mountains of action figures, Legos, baby doll clothes and teeny-tiny house furniture. I had no spoonful of sugar for sorting broken crayons from Hot Wheels.
I threw the Nanobots in a bin with the Transformers and launched into a long-winded diatribe about consumerism and over-consumption, lecturing about making-do and the need to embrace simplicity. When a teetering box of trains fell on my foot, I threatened to put all the toys into the trash can and leave the kids with only two wooden blocks and a sock puppet. And that’s when my eight year-old son said, “Well, then you’re just making more pollution.”
Kids can be so annoying when they make a good point.
So, when I walked into the Big Lots that day, I was despondent. Every moment was a crushing obligation. When I heard the Eagles singing I totally forgot why I decided to brave the despair of Big Lots for stackable boxes.
I didn’t go to Big Lots because I didn’t have any other choice, or because I was out of other options, or because I thought I wasn’t worth more than closeout. In fact, I had gone to Big Lots for the storage bins because it was a compromise between my desire to make it fun for the kids to play in their room again and my desire to be as earth-friendly as possible.
I knew I could have scavenged wood pallets and built a miniature barn for their all-organic toys, but instead I decided that I’d delay throwing away all their plastic crap by putting it neatly into other plastic crap that was only one step from the landfill anyway. I reasoned that by shopping closeout I wouldn’t be contributing to the demand for new stuff, I’d just be scavenging the almost-garbage… to hold other pieces of almost-garbage. And, I felt certain my new system would make it easier to clean, giving me more time to do the work I’d rather be doing.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but life isn’t about perfection.
When I got home with my containers of compromise, I stood in the messy room and felt awful about where I had arrived in my life. Cleaning up after my kids’ childhood wasn’t my childhood dream for myself. And then, this CCR song came on Pandora radio.
Suddenly, I thought of The Dude. His thrift-store sweater, his beleaguered car, and his trips to Ralph’s. Sure, he was between jobs, but it didn’t make him a loser. At least, not in his eyes.
If The Dude had time on his hands, he used it to help his friends, take in some of the local art scene, or work on his bowling. And he had no problem doing tai chi on a cheap rug, possibly from a closeout box store, so long as it wasn’t soiled.
If I learned anything from The Big Lebowski, it’s that money, status, what-have-you, they’re not reliable markers of a person’s true nature. You are who you are, not what you do for a living or what other people think of you. That’s how the Dude abides.
I looked around at the paper airplanes and candy wrappers and comic books and realized I wasn’t having an identity crisis. I just had a soundtrack crisis.
The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” suggests that life is, at best, a brief moment in the spotlight and then a bitter exile where you’re forced to watch the next lucky stiff get his ya-ya’s with your dream. Creedence, on the other hand, paints a picture in “Green River” of the joyful simplicity that is taking a break from the rat race and going home. It’s really a matter of how you choose to see the situation, good or bad.
I’ve now been out of that former career longer than I was in it. Even still, I know I may get that “Big Lots” despair again. But next time I know I just need to change my tune.