When I was a little girl, I felt keenly entitled to being taken care of and any time anyone requested that I help with chores, I would huff with extreme petulance that I was not Cinderella (a book I was fascinated with, and -- oddly -- identified with the heroine regardless that I wasn't forced into indentured servitude by my evil stepmother). My grandfather thought my mother was too easy on me. But my mother had her own mental scars about weekend mornings wasted by doing housework and didn't want to do that to me. (You know, in hindsight, I was a really prissy kid? I wonder how that happened?) I did not do chores. In fact, you could barely get me to put my dirty clothes into the hamper. I resented not being rich. Really, I'm not joking. I used to make pronouncements like, "I'm not learning how to cook! When I'm an adult, I'm going to have a live-in chef!" To which my mother would reply, "You better hope that you're rich." And I would snap back with venom, "I WILL be." Yeah, that didn't work out the way I thought it would...
When I got a little older, I became much more philosophical as to why household cleaning was not to be engaged in. I'm a woman and until a man is willing to do his fair share of the housework, well, I'm not going to do it either! It was a moral stand! How dare my grandfather sit there and read the newspaper telling ME that I should be cleaning the living room. Not to mention that I was of Irish decent and for years Irish girls were indentured as scullery maids. I am not your maid, sir! My outrage ran high.... And then I moved out on my own.
I will admit that even when I lived on my own, I resented housework. Every time I picked up a can of Comet or took out the mop, I'd think of mob caps and pins curls. I'd think of Cinderella every time I had to sweep. But while I can be messy and lazy, I can't really live in dirt. It's gross. Ergo, I had to do what I had to do, so I bore my load and martyred on.
Fast forward to this past weekend. Over the last few weeks, we've been having a cold snap in SoCal, and we've been putting on the heat in the apartment. And as always, after a long summer's rest, the dormant heaters rush back to life pushing nine months of accumulated dirt and dust into the sealed off apartment. Since I've been waking up feeling congested, I realized that it was time for a spring cleaning. I was mainly interested in getting up the dirt and grime and less interested in the chores that are normally done in the name of a clean house like the bathroom. The bathroom will always be cleaned as it's a necessity as far as I'm concerned (seriously, how does one get oneself cleaned in a moldy shower stall?). I pulled everything out of my closet, out of my bedroom and used the broom on the ceiling, on the baseboards, and even high up on the walls not to mention the wood floors. I took out the comet and scrubbed the kitchen counters, the microwave, the toaster oven, and the stove backsplash. I took out the Swifter Wetjet and cleaned the floors, and Pledged the wood furniture. I pulled out the couch, and rolled up the carpet. I vacuumed. And I laundered linens. My fingers pruned and I smelled like four kinds of detergent, but by seven o'clock last night, I was done. And I felt...proud and accomplished. Weird.
I will not be hanging up my corner office aspirations to take up with Merry Maids, but I will say that there's something clearing about cleaning one's space. A mental preparation for something new maybe. Or perhaps just the pragmatic knowledge that I can drop something on the floor and not have to worry about picking it up. Whatever the reason, I'm beyond my childish notion that cleaning is a service that the poor and downtrodden perform for their "betters." In fact, there's something to be said for doing a task that requires a little physical labor in a time when nearly everything else is done sitting down behind a computer. And while I still enjoy utilizing my mind to the best of its ability, sometimes it's nice to just shut it off and do something with the rest of my body.
No comments:
Post a Comment