Mamaphobic: Bad Housekeeping
Frankly, I don't really want to believe there's such thing as Good Housekeeping. I mean, sure, some people are good at housekeeping, but there's nothing really good about it. No matter how many times Martha Stewart tries to say her mom made housekeeping fun and because of that she truly enjoys it (will Martha Stewart's housekeeper please stand up?) and no matter how simple Real Simple claims to make it, or how sexy Desperate Housewives' Marcia Cross looks doing it, I refuse to contend that housekeeping's fun or simple or sexy or good in any way. I mean, what's good about planning and cooking three meals a day, cleaning them up along with all the other messes and dust balls, and basically picking up other people's shit hour by hour? And that's not even including the real grunt work of mopping and toothbrushing grout and spring cleaning (I've read about this stuff). No one really likes it or thinks it's good stuff.
I mean, I've had moments where my obsessive compulsive side takes over and I just clean the crap of my house like a madwoman (believe me, this is rare anymore—unless, of course, I'm procrastinating something else, like this column), and of all chores around here, I don't mind laundry, as compared to cleaning toilets and plucking cat hair out of our rugs—all those clean clothes nicely folded—but they still sit crumpled in the washer sometimes, in the dryer other times, and nicely folded atop my dresser for days on end because I'm doing something else I'd much rather be or have to be doing. And man, I really love a good closet clean out after Christmas. However, even though I don't mind some aspects of housekeeping, it's surely not my top pick over say reading an email from a friend, watching a Netflix pick, doing a puzzle with my son, writing something that helps me understand myself, snipping obsessively at my cuticles, categorizing my online photo albums, or gee, doing a project I actually enjoy or for which I get paid money. This belief of mine about housekeeping goes back to my youth. Once, when my Dad got a new camera, he ran around snapping pictures of random things, and somewhere we have lots of browning, off-center, square photos of the house and tomato plants and our first puppy from all angles. Included in these photos is this one picture of my Mom ironing, in which she looks to be wholly disgusted and irritated. Maybe it was the fact that Dad took a picture of her doing ironing that made her face shift that way in the first place, but I tend to believe that she looked like that because ironing is crap work, and it's hard and lengthy if you let it go, which people who iron all seem to do, and it's no fun. And ironing is absolutely not top-notch on the momentous list of Things to Do or, God knows, to photograph and preserve for one's lifetime. So it's this picture and Carol Channing's raspy sing-song voice from Free to Be... You and Me The funny part about my having all these hateful feelings about housekeeping is that in some strange way (and I mean strange as in wrong here), I feel like I signed up to do more housekeeping when a year ago I made my move from a full-time career to an easy part-time temporary job in order to open up the other 20 hours a week to build up a freelance writing career and spend more time with Clyde. Now, I'm not going to use this column to get into the fact that the paid and unpaid work hours vs. hours allotted don't really factor out here. I'll save that for another column called "The Arithmetic of Motherhood" because I truly do most my work during naptimes and on weeknights and weekends when Ed's around to help with Clyde. My point herein is that even though I'm definitely working the same amount of time, I'm home more, and somewhere deeply instilled in that sickly guilt-ridden part of me "mother at home more" equals "mother does good housekeeping." Where the hell does this notion even come from? Who ever said being at home with a child lends enough time, energy, and brainpower for housekeeping too? So many stay-at-home mamas do most the housekeeping atop caring for their children, as do many of the mamas who work at home or do paid work in the evenings and on weekends. How did housekeeping become part of the at-home mama deal? When I think about SAHMs who also rigorously housekeep, I think, So when exactly do these mamas do anything they want to do, you know, for themselves? If naptimes are for dusting and vacuuming, cleaning up breakfast and lunch dishes, and dinner planning and making and nights and weekends are for marriage and family nourishment, where is the time for self improvement? You know, fun stuff? We don't expect paid daycare providers to dust and vacuum and plan and make meals. In fact, if I walked into my paid daycare and saw them doing any such thing, I would scoff. At the same time, I am so happy when I see them holding a Starbuck's cup when I arrive because that might mean they were able to take a much-needed break from kids for five minutes. No SAHM or WAHM I know gets a lunch break, let alone, a Starbuck's run free of kids. Of course, I can absolutely see how being the one that's home more makes this a tricky situation to be in. My husband and I do our best to maintain an egalitarian relationship around housekeeping and childcare. We pay a neighborhood guy to upkeep our tiny front lawn and we take our cars in for oil changes cause neither of us makes time for these things. And we try to keep what's left pretty even. However, I can't really dispute putting out the overloaded, once-again forgotten trash cans, his job, when he's already on the road to work, and I'm standing here perturbed looking out the window at them. And one of the first things I bragged about when I started working from home part time was that I actually had time to clean the catbox before the my one fussy cat shit on the floor outside it. Well, that didn't last and again, since I'm here, I kind of have to clean up the shit—or on good weeks clean the damn box every few days—because it's right here in front of me. Plus, it's not a problem to run a load laundry while I'm home. This is one of the best parts of being at home. You can do kick out a few of those short, pesky tasks. But, of course, those can quickly fall to the bottom of tasks accomplished—beneath all the regular old day-to-day kid upkeep: juice spills, crunched Goldfish, pee pee puddles. However, if my husband dared come home and eyeball the sink full of breakfast dishes, lunch dishes, and all my coffee and tea wares (and he has dared!), I would try really hard not to feel bad. After all, I truly believe I had as much a chance of getting to those dishes as he did while he was at work. And this is not to say that I can't multitask or that I don't understand the plight of the working person and all their deadlines and traffic. Believe me, I have multitasked. In fact, I took Clyde to work with me until he was six months old and did my job with him at my desk and breastfed every few hours. For the next six months, I worked full time and pumped every few hours, and for the next six worked full time with a partial period working Fridays from home with Clyde. I know what it's like to balance a job and a child (and the still-not-enough-time guilt that goes along with that). In having served both the work-more and home-more "positions," one thing's for sure. Full-time solo childcare is way harder than full-time work (and I say that, only doing it four days a week tops and only having one child). Granted, I'm not the President of the United States or the head of NASA or a brain surgeon, but the demands of work, no matter how stressful they get sometimes, are never as hard to tackle as the demands of a child—not now and not when I worked full-time in one job. My bosses, even the spastic one, never asked me to do something more than a fifty times in five minutes, never cried until I stopped everything and focused on her, and never depended on me to eat, sleep, and poop. And at all my outside-the home jobs, hidden people came in at night to vacuum, dump trash, and Windex the windows. No one ever expected me to perform "housekeeping" and do my job. Most companies are smart enough to want their employees to focus on the job at hand (which actually leads me to wonder if some at-home mamas clean a lot because no normal person can possible play Legos for all hours of the day and cleaning feels like the only guilt-free "out" to Lego laying). So why are so many SAHMs and WAHMs still expected to keep a pristine homestead while doing the job at hand? And why do I have this guilt even though I don't even believe this crap? So what does one do? I mean, the house has to get cleaned or at least maintain some order, and the mamas and dads also need to get some time to themselves. Well, the only way I've lived through this is by having a husband who cooks and cleans with me and brings home some of the bacon so we can pay the mortgage and the lawnmower man and the oil changers. I pay all the bills and handle all the paperwork hubbub, and he makes me coffee every morning and gets up on the roof with a smarter, wiser family member when it's leaking. He has also spent enough time with Clyde to know how little a person can get done while taking care of him. Sure, some stuff gets easier as kids get older, but just as much other stuff gets harder and lands on your plate as a parent. I stay up very late a lot doing money work and fun stuff like mamazine.com. Morning TV hour(s), naptimes, and weeknights are also spent doing a mixture of the two. We keep things picked up in general, and I am also training Clyde to clean up after himself (don't worry, he's not scrubbing toilets yet!). We just can't have toys in every room and twenty puzzles accessed at a time. When Madonna (who can afford and surely does afford a slew of housekeepers) recently said her household philosophy is "Pick up your shit," I couldn't have agreed more. Even if I weren't working at home for money, this would be my philosophy (this and "Give yourself a goddamn break!"). Raising a self-sufficient child is something I'm proud of. I mean, it's not like he's missing out on playtime to toothbrush the ring around the bathtub drain. However, at three, he picks up often without hassle, he clears his own plate, and he helps make meals by getting things in and out of the fridge and fetching utensils and whatnot. I was reading Hugo Schwyzer's blog awhile ago and came across his entry about feminist mothers and sons, and this bit rang very true for me: "The greatest feminist gift my mother gave her sons was not, however, an appreciation for the National Organization for Women or Ms. Magazine. It was the firm awareness that as males, we ought never expect women to do for us what we could do for ourselves. Women were not there to please us and meet our needs. When I was a small boy, I remember my mother saying to us 'I love you both with all my heart. But though you are very important to me, you are not the only thing that matters to me. My life matters too.' She said that in a loving way, and because she was so present and involved in every aspect of our growing up, neither my brother nor I ever felt deprived by our mother's insistence that her happiness was also important." This way of living, although sorely out of balance much of the time (I'm working on it!), is the only way I can do this thing. Only because I have a partner who shares the housekeeping and childcare duties, do I have the kind of life I want to live—one where I can enjoy my family and still make time for myself and my writing and other creative projects. And truthfully, the housekeeping slides around here. We keep the dishes, the laundry, and garbage rolling, but sometimes we won't vacuum for a few weeks or dust for more than a month. And sometimes we eat carbs only for days on end because we can't get to the grocery store enough or would rather do other things. We live this way, not without some guilt sometimes, but we do it in order to fit in our other priorities like each other, our passions, and our much-needed lazy days. The guilt, I'm working on… Sometimes I try to play the martyr card, but my husband doesn't even let me go there. Some days I get mad and say things like, "God, you don't even appreciate that I'm home more with Clyde! Maybe I should just go back to work." Usually Ed just smiles and says, "I do appreciate all that you do," but he never tells me that I should be staying home rather than working full time or doing anything just to make everyone else happy. And frankly, whatever life we choose, there's going to be hell to pay somewhere. But God (and my husband) knows the only thing keeping things in check around here is my knowing that I can choose the terms by which I live and mother, ridiculous or not, out of balance or not. And, you know, if that means I'll never really be good at housekeeping, so be it. |
Sheri Reed
 Sheri Reed is the co-founder and co-editor of mamazine.com. She is a freelance writer and lives in Sacramento with her husband and two boys. You can also find her at today is pretty, this joy+ride, and Home & Garden Buzz.
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