Such Great Lengths...

OK, for those of you who don't know, I work with Down Syndrome guys at a group home. Sleep overnights -- the perfect college job. I get to wake up three cranky eight-year-olds in adult bodies in the morning and get them off to work. It's almost like trial parenting in some ways... Ah, well... enough exposition.

This morning, after almost two years working there, I ran into something new. My boss left a note asking staff to be sure that Tom (name changed) leaves his underwear in the trash. Apparently, he has an entire drawer full of spotless white boxer-briefs, but chooses to sporadically rotate the same 3 pairs of 12-year old briefs. When we (the staff) tried to throw all three pairs away at the same time, Tom went dumpster-diving to alleviate his separation anxiety. So, we're going to slowly whittle them away one pair at a time. What scares me about this job is that - sometimes - I can almost wrap my head around the behavior. I can see how it would be tough for Tom, who's worn tighty-whities for all of his thirty-seven years in a child's brain, to feel right and normal in these strange new short-y things. I can also see that the house budget is equally tight, and we're not going to throw away about twenty-five pairs of brand new underwear. This is how I found myself in the utterly bizarre position of noticing only paper towels in Tom's trash and having to stand outside his room arguing with him until he changes out of his rescued briefs into the new undies and thrown the old ones away again. I brought the trash out as soon as he left.

Yes, yes, I know. This is a totally too-much-info kind of topic for a blog, and you have NO IDEA how I've struggled to avoid the kind of sensory language that's just begging to get out. The point is that I realized in the midst of this surreal situation that there are some things in my life that have long since outworn their usefulness and are now just plain nasty. This all-too-visceral living allegory managed to cut through all the romanticizing rationalizations I've built to justify hanging onto my mess. I need to do some serious emotional and spiritual housecleaning. Now. Thanks to Tom's undies of all things, I can joyfully and wholeheartedly say "bring it on!" As I drove home from work, I did a little confession. I had the strange sense that God and I were both choking back laughter at the lengths He had to go to to shatter my illusions.

And, apparently, God is already putting fences around the potholes of navel-gazing introspection. When I got home, I turned on the TV to quietly zone and make plans for eliminating my psychic deadweight. Sitting on my bed, wielding my spiritual shovel and wondering if there's such a thing as a spiritual backhoe, a Fruit-of-the-Loom commercial caught my attention. The dam that held back the laughter burst, and I nearly passed out laughing. Their new slogan?

"You can't overlove your underwear."

I beg to differ.