I am a crappy housekeeper. I truly intended to marry someone who would be a full participant in the domestic arena, who would prop up my lack of housekeeping abilities. R and I discussed the household division of labor at length before we got married. He was fully on board with bearing his share of the household responsibilities. I wasn't until after we got married that I discovered that all that discussion was for naught. I don't think he lied, exactly, or if he did, it was a lie of omission. Sure, he intended to help, but gosh, he's so busy! All the time! With important matters such as working on his hobby cars. Oh no, it's not a hobby, he makes money on it! And didn't you know, he's earning all that extra money for me, people. How can he possibly clean the kitchen?
Now, that's what I call false advertising. (Dammit, people, I was halfway over the Atlantic when that post and all the fallout went down! I had to get my reference in somewhere!)
So yes, the house and it's varying states of cleanliness have been An Issue for us for as long as we've been together. I hate cleaning and would rather rip out my fingernails than get up every day and vacuum. R refuses to participate in any actual cleaning, but persists in nagging, nagging, nagging me until I want to explode.
I always tell R that he asks for too much from me. (Warning: extreme generalization to follow.) This is how I see it - while I am not into cleaning, I am also not into, new, expensive, or even good repair. I have willingly driven old cars for years. I don't really care what I drive. I don't need the latest anything. I am quite happy with one very old television. I am very, very low maintenance in terms of material wants. My personal belief is that when you get people who are into cleaning, and actually care about the state of the house, well, they also get into the whole Keeping Up With the Joneses deal that I actively avoid. If you care that your house is clean, you also care that your carpet is dirty and that your tile floors are cracked. Maybe you insist on replacing those things to the tune of thousands of dollars a year.
So, in my view, the person he wants me to be (a perfect housekeeper who is also a strict spendthrift and believes that the only food worth eating is food that is made at home and who also has no desire to be entertained in any way that requires money, no his perfect wife spends her off hours mending clothes for $3 an hour just so she won't waste time on silly things like resting) is simply not attainable. Actually, it's a little bit nuts. It's the kind of person he is - a workaholic who feels that any moment spent not making money is a moment wasted.
I have just had the horrific realization that I have married Mr. Krabs. Does that make me SpongeBob? No, to happy and optimistic. Oh crap - I think that makes me Squidward. [Hangs head in defeat.]
Thing is, (echoes of Dr. Phil) this isn't working for me. I hate the stress of having a disorganized home. I hate the fact that R continally bugs me about it. What I can't seem to escape is my own mental hangup - when I make an effort to clean, I'm really making an effort to keep R happy. I'm not doing it out of a sense of internal motivation. Then when R starts giving me a hard time about whatever, I just give up on the housecleaning because keeping up with it is so hard for me. Then things pile up and nothing gets cleaned and R gets mad and the cycle begins anew.
My mother fought the same battle throughout my entire childhood (except with more kids and less time). Our house was a pigsty, I kid you not. Mom tried, oh how she tried, to keep up with the work, to make us help her, but it was a futile effort. She simply could not be the one in charge of the house. She used to make these ridiculous lists of housecleaning tasks and she'd put estimated times out next to them, like this:
Sweep kitchen - 10 minutes
Wash dishes - 1 hour
etc.....
At the bottom she would add up all the hours and it would be something along the lines of 28 or 30. We teased her about it constantly, "Hey Mom, there are only 24 hours in a day! And you have to sleep sometime!" She would sigh and say, "I know."
We didn't help her. This was mostly her fault, because she truly wanted to be the perfect homemaker, and I think this led her to assume things would get done, which they never did. We would collaborate to make any effort to get us to clean absolutely miserable. She bribed, she punished, she cajoled, she threw things, she gave in, she tried to do it all herself, and eventually she gave up altogether. There were simply too many of us and too little of her to climb that mountain.
My father pretty much took care of himself in terms of laundry and food, but otherwise his idea of "helping" was to coerce me and my sister AN into doing the housework. The fights that ensued are legends in the family. It sucked, AN and I hated it, and we did not have a happy home during that time, believe me. By the time the younger kids were old enough to help, my mother had convinced my father than coercion did more harm than good, so he did a 180 and refused to do anything related to the house, leaving it all to my mother again. Poor Mom.
I find it funny (in a sad, sad way) that I find myself walking in my mother's shoes a mere 10 years after I swore that it would never happen to me. Oh, the irony.
I have decided to take steps to having a cleaner home. I tried FlyLady, but all those emails! So annoying, and really geared to SAHMs rather than to all moms. So now I'm trying Motivated Moms, which is really just a planner, but it seems to be more managable to me.
I'm gonna try.
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