My Goat? Oh, It’s Been Gotten.

There’s a rug that’s really getting my goat right now.

No matter how many times I wash the damn thing, someone steps on it immediately, making it a dingy, repulsive shade of gray. I know, I know… rugs exist to be stepped on. They live on the ground, after all.

But, still, I go round and round with this rug. I wash it. The dog leaves a muddy paw print on it. I wash it again. Jane steps on it with a dirty boot. And her boots are elementary-school-dirty, which is it’s own special brand of funky. So, I wash it again. Rinse. Repeat. Literally.

I’d throw the rug away. But Jane swears she loves the rug. She acts as if baby Jesus himself gave her that rug. I could just dispose of it while she’s at school. Then it would just be gone. But that’s not really how we roll over here. The rug technically belongs to her. It’s in her bathroom. She picked it out to match her shower curtain. And I don’t throw her stuff away (if I can help it). It feels… sneaky. And like it might breed some justifiable mistrust.

BUT I HAD NO IDEA HOW AWFUL THIS RUG WOULD LOOK ALL THE TIME. It makes me feel dirty, just to look at it. And, let’s be honest, I’m not the best housekeeper in the world anyway–so this rug is just mocking my inadequacies.

I’m sure there’s some larger lesson here about how we allow small, easily changeable issues to become seemingly insurmountable thorns in our sides. Or about how sometimes we get so bogged down in our own reality we don’t see the simplest, most freeing solutions even when they stare us in the face.

But I can’t focus on any of those lessons now, because THIS RUG HAS ABSCONDED WITH MY GOAT.