Lately I am noticing a sharp decline in the quality of my evening house clean-up. I’m slipping.

My mental and emotional state is intimately linked to my environment. The amount of mess, number of items stacked in little piles, the general stickiness rating of most toddler-height surfaces, increases my agitation as they increase throughout the day or week.

A bottle of 409, a paring knife and a Magic Eraser duly applied after the family is asleep has often returned me to homeostasis and feelings of peace before I move onto writing, reading, consuming celebrity gossip, or e-mailing my friends.

I accepted somewhere in my third year of marriage that my lovable, dependable husband’s tragic flaw, being a premier level slob, was probably never going to change. The house would be as clean as I care to keep it. I was free to choose whether to work with that or make myself miserable. I chose shalom in the home for all our sakes.

And I was successful. . . as long as we only had one child.

Then came my second daughter. As the workload increased, my motivation has slowed. Increasingly, over the past months, I fall onto the couch with a novel, or e-mail my friends and discuss adult and big questions. Often, the dishwasher isn’t running, clothes and food is strewn about, and I go to bed without cleaning any of it.

Frankly, my house is sometimes pretty grubby when I wake up.

I am starting to hear from my own imperfect voice in this matter. I want that “room of one’s own” after the family circus of the day, where I can be alone with my yet unthought ideas and scrambled feelings.

I need more interior room and have started to buy it with the price of organization and cleanliness. My voice is lurching out, messy and unfocused, but worth it. My imaginary weaving together of a tidy, inviting home and a growing space in my own mind is slipping away. My resolve to beat back the forces of entropy is failing, but feels shameful rather than freeing.

Messy, this sorting out a mother’s priorities, hoping to be able to do more than is possible.

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, bottle of 409, cleaning, Magic Eraser, messy house, one child, room of one's own, slob, two children

Stumble This Post

On my desk where I write sits three combs; a tiny nail clipper; an orange bead from a broken kiddie necklace; two pink pipe cleaners; a broken calculator; my camera; Purell; wipes; bank statement from a year ago; an unsent thank-you note to Auntie Boo from Christmas – whoopsie!; a random unfunctioning TV remote; a January Us Weekly stolen from the dentist; a Rolodex from the ‘90s; mouse stickers; a 2004 birthday card; T-Ball raffle tickets expired in March; Target sunglasses; Miss Kitty sunglasses; sunglasses with one lens missing; spinning “organizer” crammed with 30,000 pens; pencils; air tire gauge; more hair combs; mangled Post-Its; broken iPod earphones; rusty Leatherman; red puzzle piece; very tired hair elastic; Aleve cold & sinus packet of eight with one missing. . . need I go on?

And this is just my desk. A 4” x 3 ½” foot space.

Now take this list of crap, times the size of everything by twenty, add wheels or dust or broken musical bits to most of them and – voila! – that’s my basement. Crammed. Full. Stuffed with crap.

So here my house is, overwhelmed by crap and I’m feeling boxed in, swarmed, like I have thousands of mini, black ants crawling all over my body and I can’t – get – them – off!!!!

And then I stop.

And remember.

As a child of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, my indoctrinated guilt kicks in. I remember the sad tales our parents would tell of the kids in Ethiopia who didn’t have enough food on their plates followed by the frightening pictures of tiny, stick bodies with bloated bellies, giant brown eyes staring up at you in desperation.

“Mommy, why are their bellies so big?” we would ask. “Because they’re filled with air, honey,” would come the reply.

Air?????

This was usually followed by an, “And how lucky you are to have this broc-turk-cheese-brussel sprout stew on your plate! Eat every – single – drop!” And boy we were lucky to have that broc-turk-cheese-brussel sprout stew on our plate!

And that’s the ambivalence I have about the crap in my house. I am completely, totally, and absolutely very, very lucky to have every single yellow plastic paperclip that continually gets stepped on in the laundry room by the basement door, but I am, at the same time, completely overwhelmed and disgusted by it all. I am full already, Mom!!!

Our consumerism disgusts me. And we just can’t stop it. And it’s getting worse as the kids get older. I am full. My house is full.

I am overwhelmed by crap and I just can’t stop eating.

By Annie B. Yearout

Labels: Annie B. Yearout, appreciation, cleaning, colorful foods, consumerism, crap, Ethiopia, laundry room, mess

Stumble This Post

Growing up, I knew two things: My mother loved her four children. And she hated the ancillary jobs that came with raising us.

My mother detested housework and considered cooking an unpleasant necessity to be gotten over with as quickly as possible.

For Thanksgiving when I was thirteen, she presented a pre-cooked turkey roll she had purchased at the grocery store. My mother’s pride in finding a shortcut to the burden of preparing a holiday feast wasn’t diminished in the least by my father’s complaint that it didn’t look like any turkey he'd ever eaten. She placed the steaming tube of poultry concentrate on the table with a “tah-dah!” next to the cranberry sauce that still showed rings from the can from which it had emerged.

I never heard my mother call herself or any other woman a housewife. When someone else described her that way once her face turned stony. Later she hissed to us: “I am not married to my house.”

I'm not married to my house either. But unlike my mother, I work outside the home so I guess that technically spares me from the unfortunate title that often haunted her. Still, the house has to be cleaned and the meals made. And, like my mother, I detest housework and despise cooking.

It's a distressing dilemma because I want to raise my two sons in a spotless home and I enjoy as well as anyone a tasty, healthy meal. My husband helps, but frankly his standards are a little, well, relaxed.

So I clean. I wipe down the kitchen counters grudgingly and announce in sarcastic joy how much I LOVE spending Saturday mornings scrubbing toilets.

And I cook. But I disappoint even my own low expectations with my heartless creations. There are, after all, just so many crock pot concoctions you can pour over rice.

I wish there was someone to help. Someone beyond the cleaning service lady who visits a few hours a month for whom I have to pick up so much that I might as well do the scrubbing myself.
Someone different. Someone devoted. Someone who really LIKES to clean. Someone who considers cooking -- every meal, three times a day -- an opportunity for creative expression.
Someone like the woman we once assumed the housewife to be.

As far as I can see -- she doesn't exist. She didn't live within my mother and to tell the truth, I never missed that.

My mother was an artist, a painter and photographer. She traveled, too, and cared for orphans alongside Mother Theresa in India and took me on a safari in Kenya. She gave me gifts she might not have to give had she been the housewife of my fantasies. I, too, have gifts my family enjoys.

Still, every now and then, especially when faced with a bathroom floor that needs mopping and the knowledge that even the space behind the toilet has to be scrubbed, the fantasy returns. And I wish someone would give me one more gift.

The gift of my very own housewife.

By Laura-Lynne Powell

Labels: cleaning, four children, Laura-Lynne Powell, mothers, working mother

Stumble This Post

There is something I do not understand, but have long admired – neatness.

When I go to someone’s home and nothing is out of place, I become a bit uneasy. It’s admirable and efficient.

Still, I don’t get it.

I simply can’t understand when a friend tells me she has spent three hours cleaning her house. I go there and it is spotless. There is no exaggeration. She really did clean for that length of time.

Then the kids come home, play and within minutes – there’s a mess that will take hours to clean.

Which she does again and again and again.

I just can’t imagine putting the time in to do that because it’s just not that important to me, though I understand its importance to her.

I consider myself fortunate because we do have someone who comes twice a month to clean. And it’s a good thing. While I’m big on dusting the kitchen and bathrooms, and always make the kids’ and my beds daily -- that’s about the extent of cleaning and keeping my home neat.

Good friends know me and don’t judge my lack of talent in these areas. But you just don’t know how others think so I usually shove things in bags before my daughter, Mimi, has a play date. Especially when I know the child’s parent will be picking her up.

I love it when a new mother says, “Your house is just immaculate.”

“Oh, no,” I’ll protest with a wave of my hand and a look of feigned embarrassment on my face (feigned because I know that I am such a liar).

I don’t care about my son’s friends. For them, untidiness rules. He’s a teenager and his friends usually run to the corner and yell out, “Guitar! Cool!” Then they walk over to the refrigerator. Things generally become quite messy from there.

Less you think I am totally talentless in the cleaning department I want to share that I do sweep the upstairs floors because there is something meditative about it. But I ONLY do this when my husband is around so he can see how hard I am working. I sometimes even dramatically wipe my brow, stop and sigh.

Shameless, I know.

Pointless, too, since I don’t think he even notices. What I observe is that he’s usually laser focused on finding food so he can have something to eat while he watches sports downstairs.

My guess is that my cleaning aversion is due to how I was raised. My home was immaculate. My mother spent hours cleaning. Baseboards were of utmost importance to her.

“Dust!” she would yell and quickly wipe it away with a disinfected cloth, as if she were saving us from spore-laden disease.

Every Saturday she would make her four children wake up early and stand in line as she handed out cleaning sprays, vacuums, cloths, and brooms.

Saturdays were meant for sleeping in, we would protest. No, my mother would insist. Saturday mornings were made for cleaning.

My daughter believes Saturday mornings, say six-thirty to seven, are when you are supposed to get Mommy up.

Better to awaken to love than to Lysol.

By Dawn Yun

Labels: By Dawn Yun, cleaning

Stumble This Post