A Cluttered Home

I’m not going to lie. I am not the neatest person in the world. Don’t get me wrong. I’m neat in a cool, hip and happening way, it’s just that I find it difficult to keep my abode neat and clean. To the rest of the world, and probably to most of you, the home I share with my husband and daughter would probably be considered cluttered, chaotic, disorderly, messy, dirty, untidy. The thing is: you’ll never see it in such a state. Why? Because we do our best and sometimes only cleaning, just before guests come over. This is one reason we never invite guests over.

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My dad told me long ago that he couldn’t believe his daughters lived in such squalor. (I shared a room with my older sister Julie.) He threatened to bring guests in to look at our bedroom, to bear witness. His threats never concerned me. I didn’t really care what his guests thought of me and my hygiene. And, I knew that my dad was unlikely to share my slovenliness with guests because they might deduce that I learned my untidy practices from him.

Julie and I had an understanding. We would take “turns” cleaning our room. Cleaning the room didn’t involve dusting or window washing. It was pretty much defined as picking stuff up off the floor, straightening the furniture, and maybe vacuuming. We didn’t clean the room regularly and we never cleaned the room voluntarily. Cleaning was only done when Mom so ordered. The point of alternating turns was to cut down on the number of times either of us had to clean. Julie had a turn. Then me. Then it was Julie’s turn again. It was a good plan except that I spent most of my youth believing I was being ripped off. I thought Julie, who was (and still is) four years older than me, took advantage of my gullible nature. It seemed to me as though Julie always said it was my turn! And when I would argue that it was her turn, we complained to Mom who seemed to always take Julie’s word over mine. (This, I attributed to Julie’s being the oldest, the most likely to argue, but mostly because she was undeniably, the cuter one.) Mom’s agreeing with Julie over me added was further verification to my belief, during a period of my youth, that I was adopted. (A story for another time.)

Julie and I cleaned our room very differently – at least, in my view. After she “cleaned” the room, I’d return and see that all she had done was pile everything that was on the floor onto my bed! She claimed that it was all my mess. But the point of alternating the cleaning cycle was to clean up the other’s mess too! That was my understanding, anyway! Maybe that’s why I felt that it was always my turn to clean – because it always was!

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At any rate, I’ve lived over fifty years and my neatness habits haven’t improved much. I think that if I were to live alone, I’d be a much more orderly person. Instead, I have internal arguments. Why should I have to clean that plate when I wasn’t the one who dirtied it? Why should I have to pick up those shoes when they’re not mine and I didn’t put them there? Childhood arguments, not those of an adult parent. Unfortunately, I have no excuse for not wanting to dust, scour bathrooms, clean windows, or vacuum except, like chores in general, I don’t like doing them. I know what you’re thinking. I’m untidy and self-important (aka selfish). You’re not wrong.

When we were first married, Pat worked at a place where he wore a suit, white shirt and tie every day. I didn’t really like having to launder his work shirts, but I sucked it up. Pat had been living with his parents up until we got married and his mother had always done his laundry. One day, I came upstairs after I had washed his shirts in the basement. I remember this like it was yesterday. Pat was standing in the kitchen when I handed him about five freshly laundered shirts, all on hangers. Pat gave them a critical once over and said, “They’re not as white as when my mom does them. Are you using hot water? Are you using bleach? They look kind of yellowish to me.” And that, my friends, was the last time I ever did Pat’s laundry. More than 30 years later, Pat is still doing his own laundry.

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I have a difficult time remaining focused on a task. I have diagnosed myself with Attention Deficit Disorder. (I would say “ADHD” – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but there’s no hyper about me.) ADD manifests itself in several ways: my inability to tell a story without digressing multiple times, being easily side-tracked, and my having several in-progress “projects” with none of them having a discernible finish date. The fact that these projects are associated with an equal number of messes that hang around the house for several weeks doesn’t really bother me. Instead, they act as my reminder to finish them. The messes themselves become my “To Do” list. I’ll get back to them when I’m ready.

Unfortunately, my having multiple messes around the house at any given time is not really appreciated by Pat. He much prefers orderliness to chaos, completeness to “almost done.”

I can start a project that takes up half the kitchen table and not feel compelled to either finish the project or clear the table. Instead, we adapt. We eat dinner on the other half of the table. I know this drives Pat crazy; that’s why we don’t discuss it.

Years ago, a jigsaw puzzle Meghan and I may have started on the kitchen table one day, stopped being worked on a week later, and then ignored completely two weeks after that. The puzzle would lay unfinished for two months, taking up half the table, until finally, Pat would insist that it either be finished that day or boxed up. On multiple occasions, puzzles would be taken apart and boxed. Never completed. (I hope everyone knows that the puzzles I’m writing about were at least 500 pieces – not 25-piece children’s puzzles.)

Ten years ago – my original, unfinished blog, which I am now updating, began with “Two months ago”! – I started a new project: sorting, scanning and organizing thousands of pictures taken over the past fifty years. A new mess that took up half of a downstairs hallway, a significant amount of floor and furniture space in the family room, and considerable space in the playroom which was, at the time, being used as Pat’s at-home office. When he was on Zoom meetings, I used to worry – well, Pat used to worry – that other participants might see the piles of photographs scattered on different surfaces in the room. Finally, Pat had had enough worrying about what his colleagues were seeing and about the messes around the house. I argued that if I put them away, I’d forget about them and never get around to scanning them. Pat didn’t bite.

I had already purchased about ten briefcase-sized containers each containing twenty 4”x6” transparent photo storages boxes. I began organizing my photos: “1976 Christmas”, “Cabin Pics 1971-1980”, “Maui 1990”, etc. Some were just named “Old Pics” because I hadn’t sorted through the pictures that those boxes contained.

Then, I put in one of the suitcases, all the boxes that contained photos that I had already scanned. Just one. I hadn’t made much progress in my scanning. Then all ten suitcases were shoved neatly onto the floor of our linen cupboard.

Ten years later, I have not scanned any more of the photos.

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Before COVID happened, we had the luxury of having a woman come to our house every two weeks to clean. Before we had a cleaning lady, the only cleaning I ever really did was before we had company, which was next to never. But as soon as we started using a cleaning service, Pat and I started cleaning the house every two weeks, the night before the housecleaner came. We really just picked up stuff and hid it in closets and cupboards, out of sight. Sometimes things were hidden in such random places that they were never seen again. We did this last-minute turbo cleaning just so the housecleaner wouldn’t think we were slobs.

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Truth be told, I have not led by example on how to maintain a tidy household. I know, I know. I have a responsibility to teach my daughter this life skill and to set a good example. I’m doing Meghan a disservice; I should wait and be a slob after Meghan’s formative years. Again, I know.

One Sunday, when Meghan was ten years old, Pat announced that we would be cleaning the house. I hate these announcements. Ugh.

So, two things happened that Sunday that proved to me that I should not have cleaning responsibilities.

Number One. I decided to put Meghan in charge of dusting the end tables in the family room. I took the lamp, phone and coasters off one of the tables and handed her a can of Pledge and a dusting cloth. Pat came into the family room a short time later, as any foreman would, to critique Meghan’s work. He was not impressed. He told her to do her first table over again. She did. Me? It didn’t occur to me to check Meghan’s work. But I didn’t deem myself the foreman either.

Pat left the room and Meghan was ready to dust the second table. She asked me to take the lamp off the table. In the process of removing the lamp, I nailed my temple on the sharp corner of our steel stair rail. I was dazed. I can’t afford to lose anymore cognitive skills than I’ve lost already, but the blow was hard enough that it had me concerned. I sat. Meghan asked if I was okay. (And bless her heart, she didn’t tell me about a similar blow to the head that she had experienced!) It really hurt, but I told Meghan I was okay and carried on.

Number Two. A few hours passed. Pat was in the kitchen and looking critically at the kitchen counter where I had left the can of Pledge and the dusting rag. I braced myself because I figured he was about to ream me for leaving the cleaning supplies out. But instead of reaming me he asked, “Why is the Lysol out?”

You can imagine my surprise. Or can you? The can of Lysol Pat is holding in the air is the can of Pledge I had given Meghan to dust the end tables! And I had given her the can before I sustained the violent blow to my head! When I told Pat of the mistake I made and the reason for it – it is the exact same color yellow as the can of Pledge – he retorted in a rather unfriendly way, “They’re completely different! One has “Lysol” written on it and the other one has “Pledge.” (He was holding what I thought was a second can of Pledge up to the can of Lysol.) He immediately rushed over to one of the end tables and pointed to a whitish film on the dark wood.

“I think the Lysol may have ruined the finish on the wood,” he exclaimed.

Luckily, after three vigorous dustings with the real Pledge and a new dust cloth, I was able to erase all evidence of my ineptitude for cleaning.

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So, now you know.

You now know that you should not stop by our house for an impromptu, spontaneous, “we were in the neighborhood” visit. We need at least a few hours to get the house presentable. I really wish this wasn’t the case.

You now know better than to go looking in our closets, cupboards and crawl spaces when you’re here. These are the places where we have shoved all the stuff we don’t want you to see.

What you may not know but what I’ll tell you now: I wouldn’t pet our dog Cash when you’re here – especially inside house. He’ll just keep coming back to you to get rubbed again and again and before you know it, your clothes have turned into a white fur coat and you’ll have to spend two hours with a lint roller before you feel confident enough to put them in the washer. If you pet Cash outside, the within minutes, the neighborhood will be in a snowstorm of dog hair. And yes, I’m thinking about myself too. For every rub-down Cash gets inside, I know that a bucketful of dog hair is dropping onto my probably-freshly-swept floors. And I’d like to enjoy our clean, free-of-tumbleweeds-of-dog-hair, house for at least a couple of hours after you’ve gone.

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