The Mad Woman in the Attic

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte reigns as one of my favorite all-time novels. Darkly haunting with hope and love drizzled throughout, the book enthralls and inspires.

Sadly, the ravings of the mad woman recently in my attic were neither enthralling nor inspiring.

Boys 1 and 2 went with me to excavate and organize our attic. We have an amazingly spacious walk-in attic with more than enough room to store the items we do not use regularly. Rather than keeping it organized and neat as it was when we moved in three years ago, we have merely thrown items wherever there was a spot after using them. Consequently, the walkway through the attic to the room above the carport had been reduced to a mere footpath.

The boys and I decided to clean the attic as a Christmas gift to Mark. I knew it was a huge undertaking, but I felt pretty certain we could tackle  it in short order with a little hard work and a lot of cooperation.

We were all in a fairly rotten mood when we started, and the mountains of memorabilia, camping and hiking gear, and paint cans did nothing to ease the tension...enter the mad woman in the attic.

With teen and pre-teen hormones and attitude swirling about me, I did a poor job of playing the role of the calm, adult mother. Instead, I opted for the irritable, angry, mad woman.

Eventually, though, the attic was clean; everything had its own place and the trash was cleared away. And the mad woman came down from the attic (though in a much less dramatic way than Bronte's mad woman).