So, I have a topic I am going to just throw out there. This may sound crazy, but maybe you folks who live inside my computer have some insight.
Can you be addicted to cleaning? I'm not talking about the usual OCD type of thing where you wash your hands 100 times because you fear germs. I'm talking about making cleaning the center, top priority thing in your life. Is this an addiction in the same vain as an alcohol addiction?
I think we all suffer from addiction. Some people are more susceptible than others and some addictions are more dangerous than others. I am probably a bit too addicted to the Internet, and despite my very decent diet and regular gym visits, I am easily 30 lbs overweight entirely due to my addiction to chocolate. But when does a bad habit become an addiction and is there such thing as a good addiction? I'm thinking a habit becomes an addiction when it causes harm to you or others and despite this you don't stop. For example, I do believe I could cut down on my Internet usage by just putting my mind to it and setting a time limit, perhaps with a sticky note on the screen. I have total confidence that I could do that. And right now, I don't think my Internet usage is really a problem for anyone, except that I could be reading more good books or something instead. I mean, I'm not on the nets when I could be spending time with the kids or anything. Chocolate is more complicated. It would be really, really hard to give that up. And it probably does cause harm to my health. Cutting down some is a reasonable goal, though.
Okay, so back to cleaning. (And by the way, we are totally NOT talking about me here, as many people can attest to.) Cleaning is good, right? It is much better than a heroin addiction, of course. Is it a little personality quirk or is it a major problem? I'm actually starting to think that cleaning obsession runs in my family. Naim is a cleaner and an organizer. Right now it is really cute and all. And every night about 5 minutes before we get ready to go to bed, I sing our little "time to clean up" song and he gets all excited and runs around and puts away his toys. And I say, "thank you, Naim!" And that is that. But sometimes, I worry that he isn't playing and relaxing and having fun as much as he is waiting for me to tell him it is time to clean up, and trying to clean up every time Aaron takes a toy out. So I've drastically de-emphasized cleaning for him, and don't even mention it until the end of the day. I've also let toy clutter go a few days on purpose so he knows we all won't die because of it. This has improved things drastically over just a few weeks. He plays more now. He is more creative in his play. He is starting to pay attention to books and words more. He seems to have less anxiety. And when it is time to clean up, he still likes to do it, but it is more of the five minute thing we do that he gets a "good job" or a "thank you" for, not a big event.
Why I worry is because of my dad and my sister. They are both cleaning freaks. And I realize here that people have different comfort levels about cleanliness. D and his family are more into hording and clutter than I am. And it gets a little irritating at times, but when D and I lived together we were able to come to compromises about the level of clutter.
I am not a neat freak, yet I like things orderly. But not at the expense of living life. I have some kind of long and psychotic history with cleaning. When I was a kid, we cleaned every Saturday Morning. We divvied up the house and cleaned. My cleaning was never good enough. Was this a blindness thing or a youngest kid thing or was I just too incompetent to clean? I was never sure. But I hated it, hated it, hated it. And procrastinated like crazy.
When I was in high school, I worked at Taco Bell. I had help getting the job from a voc rehab counselor for the visually impaired named Nancy. Part of my job at TacBell was to clean the dishes, the floors, etc. I was so nervous that I was going to do a bad job that I took forever to clean and the boss was always saying, hurry up! Finally, she called up Nancy and asked if she could teach me to clean faster. Nancy, my boss and I spent a couple of days at Taco Bell together working on cleaning. Basically, Nancy taught me some of the blindness techniques for cleaning, which aren't anything too technical, mostly common sense stuff. Make an imaginary grid, start at the left hand corner and work your way down to the right when cleaning floors. Feel things as well as look at them. Stuff like that that was already known to me. But what I remember about this is that I was doing everything they said, yet I would go back and do it over and over because I would feel just one more bit of dust on the floor, or just one more smudge in the sink. The problem wasn't my cleaning technique or blindness, it was my over-eggsaturated expectations for myself. They both told me that there is no possible way in the universe to get something perfectly clean, and that I needed to get in, do the job quickly, get done and not worry about it being perfect. Everybody has stray dust on their floor after they clean. Well, this was news to me. My problem was that I was trying to clean too well, not that I wasn't cleaning good enough.
So, my cleaning issues continued through college. I was very inconsistent. I would try to be so perfect and when I couldn't maintain that, I would just say, "fuck it" and the place would end up a dump. Then, I would be so overwhelmed by it that I would get depressed and just stop living the rest of my life until I got everything cleaned up. I would skip class to clean, I would skip out on socialization, on just being outdoors. I would punish myself by cleaning obsessively for a few days.
Some of my friends in college started to notice that they couldn't just drop by without me cleaning my house first. And that I would say I couldn't do stuff because I had to clean my apartment. Once after finals, some friends came by unexpectedly to invite me somewhere and the house was messy and I said I couldn't go, I had to clean the house. And they were like, "You aren't serious, are you?" And I was so embarrassed about them seeing my messy apartment, which, was mostly books and laundry and dishes piling up. I'm not talking like, mold infested crust on the walls or anything like that. My friends were like, "Lisa, shut up. Nobody cares. Just come out with us tonight and clean it tomorrow. Shit. We'll come over and help you." And so they did, and we got it done in like an hour or so, and we kind of talked about it and joked around about it, and they couldn't believe the ideas I had about cleaning and how I was so ruled by it sometimes. They were kind of shocked at some of the stories I told them about how we were raised and how so much of the value in my family was placed on how well you could do housework.
I also started to notice at this time how comfortable some of my friends' families houses were even with some clutter and dirt around. I didn't care and it was actually relaxing to be there. Their parents valued things like their children's compassion, music abilities, their community service, their cooking interests, whatever. They even made good hearted jokes about their kid's messy room. Housework was a distant priority that they just did when needed like watering the lawn or taking a shower. It was maintenance, not the center of things.
So, I'm making this too cut and dry. My upbringing was not as simple and whacked out about housework as I feel like I'm making it out to be. But it was definitely a bazaar element of my childhood that I had to shed and get over.
So, it honestly took several years, but finally I figured out the place that housework needed to have in my life. It is kind of like brushing your teeth. You've got to do it, but you want to make it as small and insignificant part of your life as possible and not get too caught up with it. It is just maintenance for god's sakes. It is not something that you have to put too much thought or energy into. And it certainly doesn't have very much to do with your worth as a person. I refused to care if my family thought I was worthless because of housework, of all things. And once I lowered my standards and de-prioritized it, my living space actually was cleaner more of the time. I knew I could take an hour and do a quick cleanup and even though it wasn't perfect, it was good enough.
Okay, people, I know this whole post is just domestic drudgery. You can bail if you want. But here is where I talk about the weirdness that I have dealt with with my family in regards to housework.
I did not spend much time at home from age 17 to age, well, 33 because being at home with my family was not usually a place where I felt welcomed or like I belonged there. My mom and my sister were a clique that I was not going to ever be accepted into, and my dad usually went along with whatever they said. So, I spent small amounts of time there, and then when the nagging about how I used too many cups or was too fat or had bad hair or the wrong boyfriend or the wrong job or was not disabled enough for this or was too disabled for that or I had too much laundry or I took too long of showers got to be too much for me to give a shit about, I bailed. Much of what I was nagged about was issues around housecleaning.
I always thought that this was just a difference in personality traits. We were like "the odd couple" and our different levels of clutter tolerance were just at odds to each other. So be it. They can have their perfectly clean and non-cluttered houses and I can visit and then live my life as I see fit elsewhere.
Until the year my mother had cancer and I spent several months at home. You know how, when a crisis happens people talk about how the little, petty stuff just falls away and seems so unimportant and thank god we have our health and why were we worrying about spilt milk? This is how I've come to live as a disabled person. With D and others I've cared for, I've had to live with real messes like leaking bodily fluids and clumsiness that causes messes (including my own) and having to put function over form for accessibility's sake and how to NEVER taken health or life for granted and make like petty shit like housework was all that important. Well, I expected this to happen when I went home and my mother had terminal cancer.
It didn't happen. The pettiness actually got worse.
The very first night I was home, my mother dropped a glass and it shattered all over the kitchen floor. My mother dropped it because the tumor was causing brain damage and she was loosing functioning in her left side faster than she could keep up with it. It was my first day back, my mom was scheduled for major brain surgery in just a few days, and my sister went berserk over a broken glass. She ran around like a drama queen screaming and panicking and being over-traumatized by the cleanup. At first, that didn't make me mad. I figured everyone is under a lot of stress, and sometimes little things will cause people to blow up when they wouldn't ordinarily.
It was what happened later that night that put the "twilight zone" tones in my head. My mom had gone to bed. My sister and my dad were talking and she was still going off about that glass breaking. She said something like, "Well, if she can't hold a glass anymore then obviously she should know not to use glass and only drink from plastic. I'm not going to clean up every goddamned glass she drops on the floor." Whoa. Way to prioritize, sis. Way to not have any empathy whatsoever. Way to be sensitive to how bad my mom must be feeling about, oh, I don't know, loosing her brain functioning and DYING.
That wasn't an isolated incident. It got worse and worse. She started cleaning the floor when just a crumb would drop. I'm not talking picking up the crumb with your hands. I'm talking getting the vacuum cleaner out like several times a day. The sicker my mother got, the more my sister wanted to control little things like the housework. My mom even started to complain about it. She would say that the vacuum was on constantly (and I can attest to this) and that she was not getting some of her care-giving needs met until after my sister would get done with some cleaning.
So, she cleans when she's upset. Is that so bad? Why not just let her? Well, fine. Except when cleaning takes precedent over living life. Since at least my teenage years, we have not been able to put up a Christmas tree or have really Thanksgiving Dinner because my sister finds it all not worth the mess. Nothing is worth any kind of mess, because life is about cleaning. I really wanted my mom to have some kind of special day for her last Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nothing that big. Just get a Christmas Tree and get out the old decorations and have the dinner with all the fixin's. I said I would do all the work. All the cooking, all the cleaning, etc. She fought me every step of the way. For thanksgiving, I tried to do a traditional meal but with some shortcuts to appease her. So it was not a whole turkey, gravy from a mix, stuffing from stove top, mashed potatoes from real potatoes, corn from the cob, cranberries from the can, bread from some kind of Pillsbury premade dough, a store bought pie. Not too big of a deal, right? All I heard was complaining about the mess it would make in the kitchen and how it would use too many pots and pans. And then! I committed the huge crime of spilling some of the gravy on the flat glass stove top! Oh, the humanity!
I had this really stupid, stupid fantasy that we would all sit down together to eat this Thanksgiving meal and go around and say something nice and have a nice meal. Well, my sister and my father sat down, ate up the meal in like the first five minutes, and got up and started cleaning the kitchen. My mother and I were left alone for most of the meal by ourselves.
For Christmas, my dad and I went out and bought an artificial tree and spent a day when my sister wasn't there putting up decorations. It is one of my favorite memories of the last years with my mom. We took out old ornaments and decorations that hadn't seen the light of day since my childhood and reminisced. My mother was too tired to help, but she sat with us in the living room and I would hand her the ornaments to look at before I hung them on the tree. I remember my father carefully cradling the tiny baby Jesus from an old nativity scene in his hands and saying something like, "I've got to be careful with the baby Jesus because we need his help this year." It is the closest I've heard my father come to a prayer. We laughed and it was a nice day.
Until my sister came home and bitched about it. I think it was about two weeks before Christmas and every single day that tree was up, I had to hear her complain about it and how it all better be down by December 26th. I told her I would take it down by Dec. 31st for sure. On December 26th, she couldn't wait for me to do it and she took it down very unceremoniously herself, complaining all the way. I said I would make Christmas Dinner as well. Whatever they wanted and I would clean it up. They flat out refused to let me (they can do that because they are my ride to the store in the no public transportation outskirts of Kansas). They compromised to a catered dinner from Albertson's. Fine with me, but the whole talking through the meal about how much easier this was than my cooking and how the turkey was better was not all that festive. Again, mom and I were left in the dust while they packed up the disposable food containers.
Now, I live in my father's house with two active and messy one-year-olds. I have several part-time jobs as sources of income. None are very demanding but still have to keep track and put in the time. And I am a single mom with very little respite in the caregiving of the kids. I have a partner who has had very serious health problems for the last year and has spent several months of it in the hospital and is still looking at an upcoming long term hospitalization. I have a kid with a (hopefully minor) pending seizure problem. I have to spend my time figuring out how to get things done without the convenience of a car. Sure, I like a clean house, but I have bigger fish to fry.
There was a time, when the kids were about three months old and all the newborn help had faded out, where I made myself a schedule that enabled me to get everything done, including the housework. The problem was that I was going from 8:00am to 11:00 pm (with a feeding or two in the night) with absolutely NO break. I'm talking none. LIke maybe ten minutes to grab a lunch or five or so minutes to go to the bathroom. Showers were sometimes optional. So this schedule lasted approximately three weeks until I figured out that I can't live like that. So I had to prioritize. The most easy thing to knock off was the housework. So, that is what went. Not totally, of course. but it became less frequent. Life got better. Life got good. I started to enjoy motherhood, going to the gym, the occasional social function, Sunday school teaching, etc.
Here is my basic housework plan now: Everyday the kids pick up their living room toys before bed. After bed, I clean the kitchen and do a quick sweeper vac of the floor. About twice a week, I pick up their toys in their room. On Mondays, I get the trash together and clean their room and put new sheets on their beds, etc. On usually Sunday nights, I sort of go through the whole house and pick things up and spot clean and vacuum. About once a month (or it may get stretched a bit farther than that) I do a housecleaning week, in which throughout the week, I take an hour there or twenty minutes here to really do some more heavy duty cleaning. Toilets, sinks, showers, hardwoods, mirrors, major dusting where I move stuff, major vacuuming where I move stuff, etc. It does end up taking the whole week of little minutes here and there to complete. I have learned to live with the fact that I cannot have the entire house spotless at the same time. There are days when I get behind and have to deal with it the next day or whatever. This is the best I can do--and we are not living in filth.
Well, this horrifies my father. He comes here and does nothing but bitch at me about cleaning. He cleans the entire downstairs every Saturday morning and I am not allowed to have the kids downstairs until he is done. Fine. But it is all the piddly-ass crap he complains about during the week that gets to me. I am a stacker of dishes in the sink and clean the kitchen all at once at the end of the day. He cleans the kitchen like, 57 times a day. He gets mad at me for cooking. He eats a frozen dinner every night and uses like, one fork and a cup and then throws away his frozen dinner dish. I try to cook balanced meals for D and myself and the kids. (I'd cook for him, too, but he usually doesn't want to eat with us and instead eats his frozen dinner sitting on the couch by himself). I'm not a gourmet cook by any means. I cook relatively quick, easy stuff that takes no more than a half and hour to make. Last night we had Quesadillas, a pasta salad type thing, and honeydew melons. Tonight we had "breakfast at dinner time" and I made sausage, scrambled eggs, french toast and bananas. Usually its an entree, a vegetable, a bread or grain, and a fruit. I try to cook fresh organic, but I also take shortcuts as well. He doesn't eat the same time we do, and then he complains that I've dirtied up his clean kitchen.
Okay, so this is all just domestic tedium, right? We should be able to work this stuff out. It is just housework! I'd be fine with coming to some compromises with him if he could talk about it like a rational adult. He isn't patient enough to sit down and have a tactful negotiation of duties and guidelines. He just wants things his way and despite who owns the house, I insist that everyone in this house has equal needs that need to be considered and worked with. There is no Lord of the Manor here. I refuse to put up with that.
Today I made something in the microwave and when I took it out, I accidentally spilled a little bit of it. I was CLEANING IT UP when he has a shit fit from across the room because he thought it exploded in the microwave. I tried to tell him that I just spilled a bit of it, but he wasn't listening. By the time he figured out that it didn't make a mess in the microwave, he started yelling about something that did leave some spots last week. So I told him I wasn't going to listen to him yell at me like that and went upstairs.
About ten minutes later, I try to go down to patch things up. I went up to him and said, "So, I understand you want me to cover what I make in the microwave so it is easier to clean and doesn't leave a mess." I was going to go on to say, "I'd appreciate it if I'm doing something that is bothering you, you could just come and tell me nicely instead of yelling at me and treating me like an idiot." But I never got that far. He went off before I even finished the first sentence about how the whole place is a mess (its not) and how "Cleanliness is next to Godliness"-- it says so in the Bible. (NOTE: If you want to debate me on an issue, quoting the Bible is usually never a good route to take. I'll be all over that before you even knew what hit you.). When I said that I refused to have petty, disrespectful arguments about housework and that housework is not the center of life. He says, "Well, it should be and it is the top priority." To which I mentioned things like being kind and considerate, loving your family, respecting your daughter, raising children, educating yourself, doing volunteer work, voting, working on a vocation, working on a vacation, sports, taking care of your health, giving to others, arts, crafts, and music, and spiritual growth as maybe just a few examples of things that might be slightly higher priority than housework. But what do I know?
Here is the thing: I'm used to this. I can blow him off and not care about what he said. But he told Naim the other day that he had too many toy dishes out when Naim was play setting the coffee table. He started scolding him to put them back. All night, he kept telling Naim to put stuff back (he was telling Aaron, too, but Aaron couldn't give a crap.) I kept saying that we would take care of it at the end of the night. (My kids are only downstairs playing for about 3 hours in the evening. The rest of the day, my father has the whole living room to himself.) So then, when Naim did pick up all his toys, my dad went goofy telling him he was a good boy and why can't Aaron pick up his toys? (I'm working on Aaron, but he usually averages one or two toys put away a night.)
So, you just know that some day my kids are going to draw on the walls with crayons or something. You know that they are going to trip and fall and knock something gawd-awful onto the carpet. I may give them a stern talking to about the crayons and make them help clean both messes, but I don't want them thinking their self worth is wrapped up in something as dumb as housework and the worshiping of stuff as a higher value than people. I also don't want my kids seeing my dad yell at me all the time. I'm his daughter, the only woman in the house, and the mother of his grandchildren who quite frankly, already does most of the slave waiting on men hand and foot work around here.
So, is cleaning like this a mental illness/addiction of some sort? Is it just a disguised form of control/abuse over people? Can it be "cured"? Have you ever heard of this before or is it perfectly normal and I'm just a lowlife slob?
And what do I do about it? I'm all for just having a calm discussion and working some of these issues out. But I have too much stuff to worry about in my life and D's life to spend more than two iotas of energy arguing about how many spots in the microwave are my fault. Is it worth moving out? He's only here about four to five months out of the year. Can I handle it? Can the kids handle it? How long should I give him to see if this improves?
I ended up going to D's tonight with the kids and cooking dinner over there. Felt like I should let my dad sit alone in his clean house if that is what is important to him. D is gearing up for a skin graft surgery that will probably put him back in the hospital for six weeks or so. But we've already started a very tentative back up plan in case I have to bail. We can pretty easily move into a three bedroom in his building for less money than we are paying now combined. (About the same for me individually). We would lose about 400 square feet combined. There are, of course, pros and cons to staying and going. It isn't a decision I'm going to rush into especially with his health right now. But it was definitely nice to cook dinner (and clean up) in peace an harmony. Even if his kitchen is a bit too cluttered and smallish for my taste. I'd rather deal with tight spaces and respectful quiet family dinners than worrying that every time I get out a new spoon or drop a grain of rice I'm going to get yelled at.
How's that for tedious, boring bloggery? Any advice?