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.

Clean-up time

Holly is invited to a sleepover that starts at dinnertime tonight, and I’ll celebrate her absence the best way I know how: by cleaning up her room.

I realize how many principles of good parenting this comes into direct conflict with. Holly should clean up her own room. In fact, cleaning up her room should be a prerequisite for going to a sleepover. In fact, her room shouldn’t even need clean-up; tidying should be part of her everyday routine.

In the best of all worlds, yes. In my world, not hardly.

Holly’s room is a mess. Holly’s room is always a mess, with the rare exceptions of the times that I absolutely insist we spend some quality time together cleaning it up – which is less fun than a dentist appointment followed by a trip to the transfer station – or the times like tonight when I wait until she’s out of the house and then do a kamikaze cleaning job on it.

And it’s not good for any of us. The stress of seeing so much stuff all over the floor and furniture gives me a headache. Both Rick and I have stepped painfully on small, hard, occasionally sharp objects in the dark while up in her room saying goodnight. Things she needs get lost in the strata of materials. Small containers of colored water left over from painting projects have splashed on the rug. Beads have become embedded in the carpet strands. Library books have gone missing.

But she seems unable to improve in this area. She loves her mess, and as I wrote about last month, our trip to an Open Studios event didn’t help at all: Holly considers herself a practicing studio artist, and when she discovered that almost all of the professional artists whose workspaces we visited that day also favored a colorful but chaotic mess of art supplies and works-in-progress, it only served to fortify her argument that this is how artists need to work. “I like to see what I have, Mommy,” she says by way of explaining the necessity of keeping cloth swatches, sets of scissors, containers of beads, paint sets, books, paper, markers and more piled all over the floor in her room. “It helps me figure out what I want to do.”

Perhaps this is true and perhaps she’s just being devious, because the fact is that the way to put something over on me is to pledge creativity. Holly must know on some level that claiming her mess inspires her is the best way to ensure that I’ll never really truly insist that she keep neater. As a writer, I’m all about the creative process, and not a bit willing to stifle it in someone else.

Still, on that rare opportunity when Holly is out of the house while I’m home and it’s not what I consider work hours, I make my move. Tonight, I’ll pick up, and until she gets back home, I’ll enjoy the absolute sense of serenity that comes from a tidy, well-ordered room. She won’t be happy with my efforts. She will immediately start asking for items that she’ll insist she needs but that we won’t be able to find: the stub of a blue-green Crayola, a tiny booklet that she made for a tiny doll, three beads strung on a segment of floss. Inevitably, I’ll end up going through the same garbage bag I just filled in search of some obscure project.

But at least I’ll have until Saturday morning to know her room is neat. I’ll sleep soundly, happy with the order I’ve imposed on her chaos. And if once she’s home she starts creating that chaos once again, I’ll suppress my frustration. It’s all part of the creative process, I suppose. And who knows, maybe someday that same process with inspire her to create a new way to keep her things in order.