Getting Primal (With Purell)- A Nonfic Essay

 Getting Primal (with Purell)

As a child I refused to eat chicken wings and ribs. It wasn’t because they were too spicy or because I didn’t like the flavor. That was actually far from true. I truly loved the flavor of each. Instead it was because I could not stand the feeling of having dirty, sticky, grimy hands. I would only eat these things if someone pulled it off the bone for me and I could eat it with a fork, which evidently made having either of these dishes a whole ordeal for everyone in my family. 

***

I can remember our family dinners every night at my dad’s house around our small wooden table where we had just enough spaces for the seven of us.

 My older brother Drew would come running down the stairs so fast he’d nearly fall when he’d hear someone yell “TIME TO EAT!!”. The rest of us would trickle into the kitchen one by one. I’d go to the powder room and wash my hands, snatching my younger brother, Ethan, up from his playroom. My sister would walk in slyly, still in her soccer uniform.  My siblings and I each took our places in our assigned seats ( meant so that we wouldn’t argue over “the good seat”). 

“Who wants milk?” Mema would shout from across the kitchen in her gentle, grandmotherly way of course. A chorus of “Me! I do!” would erupt from the dinner table in response from us four kids. We’d all sit down and I’d pass my plate down to an adult for them to cut my meat off the bone and the corn off the cob. My sister would scoot closer to my older brother and bite into her corn in just the right way so it would squirt corn juice on him. 

“EW! Alexis!” He’d shout. Our parents would scold them. My little brother would belly laugh and look at his own reflection in the window across from his seat.  I would eat my dinner with a fork and watch Drew quickly launch Broccoli onto Alexis’s plate when he thought nobody was looking. Ethan would make a mess and I would cringe. 

“Wallie!” he would call, waiting for the smallest of our four dogs to come clean up after him. To shift my mind, I’d look off into a painting in the living room. Although distant, I could still see the reflection of cartoons we had left playing on the television. 

***

These days, I don't have this specific problem much because I don’t eat meat anymore, and my veganism is a compulsion all of its own. However, this is just the beginning of my peculiar tendencies when it comes to cleanliness. 

As I grew up, the overwhelming need to feel clean only intensified. Although I wish I could define this feeling, or what clean is to me, I can’t. Even the people closest to me cannot begin to understand even after knowing me my whole life and hearing me explain it thousands of times. I think the main issue is that I don’t fully understand it. When you really dive into my behaviors, more and more small inconsistencies in my definition of clean make themselves known. I think one reason for this is that it has been something that developed over time, not something I was born with. It has always just been something I needed to do to make myself feel better, the extent to which varies in nearly every situation. 

Throughout high school it was not uncommon for me to sleep on my bedroom floor because I didn’t feel clean enough to get in my bed at night. I would lie on my carpeted floor with a pillow and one blanket to cover me, with my dog by my side and stay there until my 5:30am alarm blared. Although I didn’t mind this so much, my mother found it rather unnecessary and slightly unnerving. 

***

Fast asleep on my bedroom floor, a crack of light would enter the room and spread across my face. My mother had opened the door to let my dog out to go to the bathroom, she had just woken up. I look up at her in her pajamas and realize I’d slept on the floor. 

“Brooke, why are you on the floor?” She had asked me, disturbed. 

“I didn’t feel like showering,” I replied sleepily. I rolled over, still in my athletic clothes from track practice the evening before, and shut the laptop and school work splayed out on the ground in front of me. 

“You could have just washed your sheets in the morning,” she rebuked.

“It’s just the principle of it mom, I don’t expect you to understand.” 

“Get ready for school.” she replied,  leaving my room. 

After showering and making myself presentable, an intensely long process as I’m sure you can imagine, I had missed the bus. My mom, frustrated, drove me to school. 

***

When I got to college and was on my own, this way of life only worsened for me. I picked up the habit of showering at least two times daily, since I am not paying for water (my parents used to tell me that the water bill was getting too high and if my shower lasted longer than 10 minutes, they would shut the water off on me; they never did). I clean my sheets nearly twice a week most weeks, and most days I refuse to sit at any dining hall table (or any other public table for that matter) without wiping it down. I find myself unable to sit down and enjoy a snack or meal unless I have just washed my hands, or at least sanitized them, and sometimes (it seems arbitrary at this point) I’ll wash them after my meal too. Even if I go out with my friends on the weekend, I manage to shower and change before bed.

I remember one night, probably about half way through my first semester, walking slowly down the hall of my dorm building, a big ball of sheets in my hands, sobbing hysterically. Someone had sat on my bed with their outside clothes on. The distinction here between outside clothes and inside clothes is very important to me. Outside clothes are any article of clothing, not including undergarments, that one wears into the outer world. Inside clothes are the comfier clothes that are to be worn when lounging around your house, and especially when you get into your bed. It was past midnight and I was washing all of my bedding. I could not wrap my mind around why anyone would be so cruel to me. Once the hysteria subsided, I needed to get all of the frustration out of my system. My first instinct of course was to call my mother and complain, but I knew she could never understand the complexity of the anger and disgust I was feeling about something so seemingly trivial. I called her anyway. 

I like to think that a lot of my propensity to be clean just comes from my mother and the way she raised me. She is a woman who is very particular about the way her home is kept. Hardly ever is anything found out of place in my mother’s home- unless I am home she would tell you. She keeps everything orderly, and compared to the average person’s dwellings, damn near spotless.

One habit I can confidently say I adopted from my mother was the need to have everything in order before a vacation or a weekend away. As a child, my mother would usually travel a lot with me. We often took one large vacation every other summer, Europe, some island, Disney World. And in the off summers, something smaller like Myrtle Beach or Corolla. Throughout the year we would visit friends and family from out of town, and take long weekend breaks whenever we could. Although the destinations or length of these trips were not quite constant, one thing always was (and still is): my mom. Before a trip she has a ritual of keeping the house in order. A few days before, she cleans the kitchen and family room, then the bathrooms. By the time she starts packing, she typically has all of our laundry done, our sheets washed and our beds made, and the upper floor fully vacuumed. It is her absolute pet peeve to come home to a messy house, especially after time away. My mom also had a sneaky habit of cleaning up my room and making my bed when I was at my dad’s house when I was younger. I became so used to returning to a clean room, that this is something I find myself doing now. This semester, I have been taking lots of weekend trips. Sometimes I will go home, others I will go with my boyfriend to visit his parents, but overall just a lot of exploring. Even for these short trips I find myself reassembling my dorm room before I go. I will always take out all my trash, wash my sheets, do my laundry, wipe everything down, vacuum, mop, and organize. 

However, I am becoming more aware that this is not all to blame on my mother. I can say that maybe that is where the habit came from, but I know it is not entirely her influence because of the intensity of my fixation and the way that many of my habits have grown to be off putting to even her. I often find myself feeling so uncomfortable, suffocated by even the smallest messes in my room that I will completely deep clean my room as if I’m leaving for a trip a few times a week. I convince myself that I could not possibly do anything productive with my space in that state that I sometimes even find myself cleaning up for my roommate. She often jokes with me that if I was able to reach the ceiling she thinks I would scrub that down too. It is as if my internal self has such an overwhelming need for control that I lose any sense of autonomy and go into autopilot, into my most primal state; cleaning.