Writing versus cleaning: My eternal struggle

It’s another one of those weeks when the housework has gone largely undone.

And I try not to let that bother me. I remind myself that housework goes undone when I have interesting writing projects under way. When nothing much is on the docket workwise, I have plenty of time for vacuuming and dusting. An unswept kitchen floor shouldn’t signify lack of sanitation to me; it should signify creative endeavors taking place.

But I have trouble being that sanguine about it. It preoccupies me, knowing that I’ve let my usual weekly housekeeping tasks slide.

But slide they have, because this week I have four different writing projects at four different stages of completion, each one as engaging as the next, and I just can’t seem to step away from my computer long enough to pick up a broom.

I know that this shouldn’t get under my skin the way it does. I remind myself that in the grand scheme of things – what the corporate folks I worked with years ago called the fifty thousand foot view – I won’t want to be remembered for the cleanliness of my kitchen floors but rather for the fine writing I produced.

But really, I want people to associate me with both. A clean house and a creative mind. And I don’t think the two need to be mutually exclusive.

Except that this week they are, because I’m just too busy to scrub. Yesterday I managed to clean some of the bathrooms, but not all of the bathrooms. That’s a small improvement, but since I didn’t get to all of them, I can’t cross “Clean the bathrooms” off my To Do list, so it feels as worthless as not cleaning any of them.

Perspective, I try to tell myself. No one would walk into this house and say “Ugh, dust on the bookshelf.” And even if they did, isn’t it more important to have books on the bookshelf than dust not on the bookshelf? Better still, books that I wrote?

Yes, true, all true. And I should mention that the reason all of these conversations happen inside my head is that no one else in my family cares a whit whether and when I clean. To them, the only outcome of my having cleaned the bathrooms is that they have to search in drawers for all the toiletries that were previously littering the countertop and therefore effortlessly accessible.

Soon, these four current projects will all be at press, I reassure myself. And then I can go on a cleaning blitz. A siege. A binge of cleaning.

Or I can hope for more projects. Because ultimately, I really would rather be a good writer than a good housekeeper. Although being both is still my ideal.

The up-side to housework (and laundry, and cooking, and errands....)

Whenever Rick or I complains about work, the other one says “Yeah, that’s the down side of having a job. The work.”

I was thinking about that this past weekend as I tried not to feel overwhelmed with household tasks. I’d had an especially busy work week – normally I’m at home mornings and on site with a client in the afternoons, but for the past week I’d been working on a project that had me leaving the house first thing in the morning and gone for eight or ten hours every day – and had that busy-mom feeling of the house falling down around me.

But then I reminded myself: No, the house is not falling down around you. It could use some vacuuming. It could use some dusting. Emptying the wastebaskets wouldn’t be a bad idea, and everyone would benefit from a load or two of clean laundry. But the house isn’t falling down.

And that brought me back to thinking about what Rick and I say about work. The down side of having a house is the housework, but conversely, the up side of housework is that it means you have a house. I thought about various people we know in Colorado, none of whom have lost their own homes but several of whom have seen their neighbors lose theirs, and some of the people we know can’t access their homes reliably even if their houses are still standing, so they have to temporarily move out. If your house washed away in a flood, I reminded myself, you wouldn’t have housework. Better to have the house….and the housework.

And then the same message seemed so easy to extrapolate to other things. Yes, there’s cooking to do… because we have access to healthy appealing ingredients with which we can make all kinds of things. And yes, I have a long list of errands….but I wouldn’t have any errands if I had no money to spend on things we needed.

This wasn’t just trite Pollyanna-isms. Thinking about the Colorado flood victims reminded me of what it’s like every winter when at some point we lose power for a day or two, or more: how all I want to do once the electricity has been off for a couple of days is wash dishes, even though washing dishes is never a high priority when the house is running smoothly.

Just as Rick and I say with work, the down side of having a materially comfortable life is having to take care of all those material goods. It’s reassuring to have a home, and food, and cars, and clothes. Taking decent care of them doesn’t seem like such a chore when I hold on to the perspective that these material blessings require a certain amount of maintenance. Pollyanna-ish or not, in that light, a Saturday filled with housekeeping, cooking and errands feels more like a blessing than a hassle.

No one looks at the floor

At some point yesterday I noticed something. Of the twenty or so women standing in my kitchen, not one of them appeared to be looking at the floor.

Some were stirring milk into their coffee. Some were helping themselves to the blueberry muffins I'd made the night before. Some were hugging old friends; some were introducing themselves to new friends. The clamor of cheerful energetic morning conversation rang in my ears: talk of summer plans, of the school year just wrapping up, of meetings recently attended and tennis games played.

But no one was looking at the floor.

So at least for that moment, I could stop worrying about the fact that the imaginary timer on my party-preparation minutes had run out just before I was able to take out the vacuum.

Two hours earlier, vacuuming had seemed like the most critical task in the world to me. I had twenty women (and one man) coming over to my house for the annual school library volunteers appreciation coffee. And as always, there was a generous scattering of sesame seeds under the breakfast counter where Tim eats his bagel every morning, not to mention a little dirt I'd tracked in from the deck after watering the herbs that morning, not to mention a few little shreds from a spiral notebook Holly had been tearing homework pages out of before she left for school.

But the fact that no one seemed to notice my omission of vacuuming reminded me once again of something I never seem quite able to remember when the responsibility of entertaining is starting to feel like a burden sure to outweigh any fun I might potentially have at the event: no one goes to a party to judge your housekeeping.

More specifically, I've come to realize in recent years, they're just happy that you're hosting and that they're invited.

It's what author Gretchen Rubin might call one of the Secrets of Adulthood, one of those little eye-opener nuggets that takes most of us years to discover, but once we do, it gives us a whole new perspective on our world.

It wasn't as if I'd been a slouch about getting ready for this party. I'd brewed coffee, washed strawberries and raspberries and blueberries, baked muffins and coffee cakes and cranberry bread, cleaned the bathroom, put out seltzer and ice. I'd even put a small sign out on the common driveway helping people to find our house, which can be something of a feat for anyone who hasn't been here before.

In short, I'd focused on the things that common sense tells me really matter to a guest. Good food; strong coffee; friends; conversation. Clean dishware probably matters, and a generally sanitary look to the kitchen. I'd been at a get-together not too long ago where there were tufts of dog hair scattered across the living room furniture; I admit that bothered me a little bit.

But not having vacuumed yesterday morning before my party? It just really didn't look to me like anyone noticed, or particularly cared if they did.

So if I had to distill this into a Secret of Adulthood, the way Gretchen Rubin does for some of her basic tenets in The Happiness Project, it might be this: guests care far more about food, drink and conversation than the level of housekeeping you've done to get ready for a party.

A little bit later, my friend Jean snapped a photo of me talking to our guest of honor, the retiring school librarian. I was self-conscious as I always am when having my picture taken, sure that my outfit would look silly, my hair frizzy, the background cluttered with items I hadn't remembered to put away.

But later in the afternoon, Jean emailed me the photo, and I was pleasantly surprised. I didn't see frizzy or frumpy or messy. I just saw myself, smiling and talking and looking happy.

All of it serves to remind me that I might sometimes have a tendency to worry too much about appearances: that of my house, and that of myself. In Jean's snapshot, I looked nice enough, and to my guests, my house seemed like a fine place for a party, even if the floor hadn't been vacuumed.

It's so easy to be self-critical, and sometimes it's a constructive stance to take, but other times not. Sometimes the best tack to take is just to enjoy your party. Eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may vacuum. But only if you really want to.

Housework anxiety

Sometimes I wish the judges would just show up and resolve my anxieties once and for all.

My most trivial anxieties, that is: not the ones about my children’s future or our family’s carbon footprint, but the ones about my housekeeping abilities.

And perhaps it’s a sign of the current ethos, dominated as it is by American Idol and other judge-centric TV shows, that I feel like the best way to determine how I’m doing is to turn it over to a panel of critics.

I picture them showing up unannounced and walking through the house dispassionately but with purpose, brandishing clipboards and taking notes. I’d see my home anew through their eyes as they gauged the cleanliness of each nook and cranny. Stainless steel appliances polished? Check. Sills recently dusted? Of course. But what’s this sheen of stickiness on the stovetop? What’s up with the piles of homework strewn across the kitchen counter?

I can be confident that the beds are made….well, sort of. The covers are smooth, but please don’t check for hospital corners. That pile of mail on the hall table? It just arrived yesterday, I promise! Yes, I know there are too many boots by the back door, but it’s been a rainy, muddy week. And really, you wouldn’t believe how often I sweep the floors, but with the dog going in and out from the yard so often….

Given my housekeeping shortcomings, it probably seems strange that on some level I actually want these hypothetical judges to show up. But then at least I’d have some answers. Left to my own imagination – and working at home, surrounded by this particular environment throughout the duration of my work day – I vacillate constantly on whether our levels of tidiness, neatness and cleanliness register as mostly all right or mostly insufficient. Our house is a lot less cluttered than many homes I’ve seen. But we don’t have cleaning help, and I’m not someone who always remembers to look for cobwebs up by the skylights. And while it’s true that my kids’ possessions seem to flow one-way only – from their bedrooms into the family room and never the reverse – surely that’s what everyone’s kids are like, isn’t it?

Turning it over to a third party to make the determination is not the answer, I realize. I have to make my own peace with how I choose to keep the house, and I shouldn’t need to think about it from the perspective of an outside arbiter.

Sometimes it reminds me of something the labor-and-delivery nurse who taught our birthing classes before Tim was born said at the first meeting. “How many women do you know who have won awards for how successfully they went through the birthing experience?” she asked. No one responded. “Exactly!” she said. “There isn’t an award for it! You do your best, you do what works for you, and you hope for the best results, without worrying about whether you did it ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’”

The circumstances with housekeeping are a little different, but I still find her words useful. Unlike writing an article or driving a car, nothing depends on whether someone else thinks you’re doing it well or poorly. You just have to do it based on your own priorities.

My priorities? Clutter-free surfaces and sanitary kitchen conditions, and no clothes on the floor. As for the cobwebs by the skylights? Well, those spiders have to live somewhere. And if they’re up there, I can take it as proof that they aren’t on the kitchen counters.

Extreme De-Cluttering: Yes, it's morbid, but it works for me

I love reading articles like this one from the Washington Post about housecleaning. I especially like reading about de-cluttering. It’s the lure of preaching to the converted, I realize. I’m good about anti-clutter. In fact, I’m almost to the other extreme. A new acquaintance visiting our house for the first time once used the word “barren.” I prefer to think of it as minimalist, or Shaker, but the fact remains that my spouse and I both favor clean, bare surfaces rather then clever arrangements of knickknacks.

But I still love reading decluttering tips. I always think maybe I’ll pick up yet another one that will make it even easier for me to keep picked up. And sometimes I do. In early January, I read an article that discussed the value of putting aside just fifteen minutes a day for little household projects rather than stockpiling them for a rainy day. “With fifteen minutes a day, you could finish 30 projects by the end of the month,” the article proclaimed. I didn’t keep count, but I did find it useful. Now I spend 15 minutes each month clipping out articles I’ve had published and putting them in plastic sleeves, one 15-minute session putting photos in my photo album, one 15-minute session each week entering credit card receipts into our electronic checkbook, and so forth.

I have one more de-cluttering tip to add to the list. I concede that it’s a little bit severe, but it has served me well. If you were to die suddenly, would you want someone else to have to deal with this particular mess?

The first time I remember thinking this way was one early evening when I was taking a run around our old neighborhood in Framingham. That neighborhood was full of smallish houses close to the street, and one day I happened to glance over and see what must have been a two-foot-high stack of dusty and faded folders piled lopsidedly against the window. I didn’t know anything about the house’s occupant, but at that moment the thought came so clearly to me: “Whoever those folders belong to is never going to sort through them or do anything productive with them. No one is going to touch those folders until their owner is dead and someone else is charged with cleaning out the space.”

Of course, I couldn’t have known this. Maybe the owner of the folders had every intention of sorting through them, or maybe they were the kind of records that you are supposed to keep for a prescribed amount of time and then discard. Even more likely, maybe the owner was nowhere close to his final years and would sort through them himself upon the occasion of moving out of the house, rather than dying.

Maybe. But for some reason, the sight of those folders had a lasting effect on me. Now, whenever I come across a pile of unsorted or out-of-use items in my own house, I ask myself the same thing: am I just leaving these here for some distant day when someone else has to decide what to do with them? Sometimes the answer is no, such as the kids’ school papers, which I store in paper bags but weed through occasionally to keep what I think best represents their work for any particular year and recycle the rest. Same with books: I might stockpile them for a few months, but then I pull out the ones I don’t want anymore and bring them up to the library’s yard sale. But other times I find items like clippings of travel stories on destinations I’d love to visit and think, “No; these could sit here forever.” And then I try to get rid of them.

If this was a sport, would we call it Extreme De-Cluttering? Probably. No doubt there are more upbeat ways of decluttering that don’t dwell on morbidity, but for me, this provides the last and best measure of what to keep and what to toss. And our closets, shelves and file drawers are a lot tidier because of it.

Housecleaning for the holidays

Last fall, while writing an article for NorthBridge Magazine about holidays, I interviewed a recent immigrant from India about the traditions behind Diwali. One detail she shared with me keeps ringing in my head like an insistent wind chime now that Christmas is just three days away: for Diwali, at least in her family, the first step of the preparations is a thorough house-cleaning. Because that’s how you make the house ready to honor the gods of Diwali: by being clean and orderly.

I love this detail. I love the notion of starting the holiday with, first and foremost, a clean house. Rudimentary research has led me to believe that housecleaning is a typical preparation for the Chinese New Year as well, but I’ve never heard of housecleaning as directly associated with any Christian holiday. To be sure, lots of people including me clean their house before Thanksgiving or Christmas if they are hosting houseguests or having a party, but I don’t think the practice of cleaning the house simply for its own sake typically figures into any Western holiday rituals.

But this year, I’m finding myself drawn to the idea of cleaning my house before Christmas. For one thing, I have time this year. For the past several years we’ve had guests – some staying with us and some staying at my parents’ house next door but spending plenty of time over here – during Christmas, and my preparations have centered more around making up beds and stocking the fridge than dusting or mopping.

But this year it’s just the four of us on the farm, and I managed to plan out my work this month so that I hit all necessary deadlines by yesterday and am essentially deadline-free from now through New Year’s, which gives me some time to tidy and clean. But mostly, I just like the idea of greeting the holiday with the serenity of a clean, neat house. It’s so different from the bustle-bordering-on-chaos that frequently marks the holidays for us. When Rick and I were in our twenties, we would often be in such a last-minute rush of shopping, cooking, and wrapping presents before traveling to wherever we were going over Christmas (which often involved day trips to three different households) that we’d leave our own home an absolute mess. I’d rationalize that once all the presents we were giving people were out of the way, it would be easy to pick up, and after Christmas was over we’d have more time for it too. In recent years I grew less accepting of leaving a messy house behind when we walked out the door, but we still tended to leave a small whirlwind of shopping bags, unwashed cooking implements and half-opened mail in our wake as we embarked on our Christmas festivities.

This year I have the urge to make things really tidy before Christmas day arrives. I’m running the washing machine right now and trying to wrap up my holiday baking tonight so that I can clean the kitchen thoroughly. I’m hoping to vacuum and clean the bathrooms even though with no guests this year, there will be no one but the four of us to notice (which, let’s face it, really means just the one of us – me – to notice, since no one else actually cares if the sinks are scrubbed or the rugs lint-free). I’m planning to wrap presents tomorrow so that I can get all the paper and tape picked up right away. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, but I no longer have the same merry tolerance for cheerful holiday mess that I once did. Furthermore, a decade of parenthood stands behind me to remind me that once the kids have opened all their Christmas presents, there’s more mess, not less, to deal with.

In a way, this pre-Christmas clean-up has a certain intrinsic symmetry. I’ve long appreciated the European observance of Boxing Day because of the purging effect of getting rid of any excess – clothes, toys – when Christmas is over. It seems therefore to make sense to want to start the holiday as well as end it with a level of emptiness, of clean surfaces and an absence of clutter.

Of course, intending to clean the house is a lot different from doing it. But I still have two days, and having just returned from yet another fairly dreadful shopping excursion, I have no desire to take to the roads again between now and Christmas. So maybe over the next two days I’ll do the scrubbing, dusting, sweeping and vacuuming that I’m dreaming of. If not, I’ll continue to make it a goal for future Christmas celebrations. And if not Christmas, there’s always New Year’s. I like the idea of starting the New Year with a neat and well-scrubbed house.

In the Diwali tradition, as I understand it, it’s to welcome godliness into the home for the holidays. Whether as a spiritual practice or just a way of making the household feel more serene at a generally less-than-serene time, I like the idea, and I’m going to do my best to honor it.