Cleaning

Whenever I get the broom out to sweep the floor, my son asks, “Who’s coming over?”  To him, it seems, I only clean when we are going to have company.  He might be right.  I often invite people over, just to get me motivated to clean the house.

Shortly after I gave birth, I asked several mothers much older than myself, what the biggest mistake was they made in raising their kids.  Each one told me separately the same thing. “I kept my house too clean,” they said.  They felt cleaning took away precious time they could have spent with their children reading books or playing games.  It also created unnecessary stress, as they were constantly after their kids to keep their things picked up. 

I have never been a clean freak, but I embraced this bit of advice.  Prior to this, I dusted once a year, whether it was needed it or not, but since then, I haven’t been so diligent.

Everyone has their own standard of clean.  My husband thinks the kitchen is clean if all the dishes are put away.  He fails to see the morning’s toast crumbs on the counter mixed with bits of peanut butter smears, or the sink stained with coffee grinds.  If there’s nothing out of place, to him, it’s clean.  I could care less about the clutter, since that’s mostly my decorating style anyway, I just want the counters and sink somewhat sanitary and not looking like they are a banquet table for unwanted critters. 

I’ve tried to teach our son to at least do a cursory clean up before he goes to bed at night.  When he was little, I told him if he left anything out on the living room floor, when he woke up in the morning, it would be gone.  In his little three-year-old mind, he then put me to task and asked, “If I fall asleep on the floor, will I be gone in the morning, too?”  I continue to lower my standards around housekeeping issues, so  his room rarely passes inspection, but then, our house doesn’t either.

My hillbilly grandmother had a poem hanging in her kitchen that I had painted on a wall in our house.  It’s the first thing a person sees when they walk up to the door and peer through the window.  It’s called “Apology,” and it goes like this:

Although you’ll find our house a mess,

Come in, sit down, converse.

It doesn’t always look like this –

Sometimes it’s even worse.

As much as I try to keep the house in a somewhat orderly fashion, I can’t handle the protests – so it often has that comfy “lived in look.”  I have embraced the mantra of a friend of mine who says, “If you want to stop by to see me, drop in anytime.  If you want to see my house, give me three days notice.”  But as a general rule around our place, three days might not be enough.