I’m a sick, twisted, attempted-murderer. Oh sure, I come off as a mild-mannered mom. But that’s not the real me. The real me is one evil woman. And the worst part is – it’s my vacuum that’s making me evil.
For months I’ve been envious of my mother’s vacuum. I know it’s stupid. I mean, how many people get vacuum-envy? It’s ridiculous. But one day I visited my mother, and I realized that I was happy to see her – so I could vacuum her house.
How sick is that? Who on earth wants to vacuum? I hate vacuuming. It’s boring. And loud. And I don’t care how long the cord is, eventually it gets pulled too tight, and I trip over it.
But I’d go to my mom’s, make some small talk, then rush to the hall closet, grab the vacuum and start sucking up dust bunnies. I’m telling you, I needed help. But I didn’t know that at the time. At the time I just thought I needed a new vacuum cleaner.
So I started some serious plotting to get one. The problem was, my old cleaner was perfectly fine. And everyone knows that in order to get a new vacuum cleaner, the old one has to break.
You see, vacuums are like husbands. If you have one at home that still works, you can’t just go out shopping, find another one you think is better, bring him home and sell the old husband at a garage sale. It doesn’t work that way. You have to kick the first guy out, hide all the assets and then bring the new husband home.
It’s the same way with vacuums – only you don’t have to hide the assets. But you do have to either a) find something irreparably wrong with the vacuum; or b) kill it. And I had to kill mine.
Unfortunately, I’m not married to a stupid man. I realized right away that I couldn’t just beat the old vacuum with a hammer and tell Harry it had fallen apart on its own. Obviously, I had to find another way to kill it.
Turns out that murdering a vacuum is more difficult than you’d think. For one thing, vacuums are pretty
sturdy appliances. They’re made to withstand heat, loud noise, and sucking up large quantities of LEGO. So they’re hard to kill.
But that didn’t stop me from trying. I vacuumed Junior’s room with the entire contents of his closet spread out on the floor. The darned thing sucked up NASCAR trading cards, Magnetix and old potato chips without pausing. It never even burped.
So I ran the vacuum into walls. I vacuumed the carpet on the bare floors setting. I vacuumed the bare floors on the carpet setting. I tried to wedge it under the couch and leave it there, running, until it just gave up.
But it wouldn’t die.
And then one day, I gave up. I figured that my vacuum cleaner must be a pretty good one to take all the abuse I was giving it and still keep sucking. And wouldn’t you know it, the very minute I came to my senses and stopped trying to kill the vacuum cleaner, it caught on fire.
So I let it burn.
Smoke billowed out of it. It coughed and sputtered. And I just watched. Oh, I felt bad. I’ve never killed
before. But I never once moved from the burning vacuum, until Junior unplugged it to put it out of its misery.
I don’t mind admitting that I felt awful for the rest of the afternoon. I had just stood by and watched an innocent vacuum burn. Clearly I was evil and sick and twisted. But I grew up Catholic – so frankly, I’m good with guilt. And by the time Harry got home, I had put the vacuum on the back patio to cool off. I led Harry out and with a straight face told him that I had tried everything to save it but it had died. I even managed to not smile when I told him the news.
And Harry looked at me. He looked at the vacuum. He turned it over. He took off a couple of plastic pieces. And then he said, “Don’t worry. I can fix it.” And he did. And he fixed it so well, it’ll probably be DECADES before I get a new vacuum.
In the meantime, I guess I’ll just have to spend lots of time at mom’s – vacuuming, of course.
Laurie Sontag is a Gilroy writer and mom who wishes parenthood had come with instructions. Her column is syndicated. She can be reached at la****@la**********.com.
