Cutting cleaning to essentials
By some standards, my new year’s resolutions should have something to do with dusting, sweeping and mopping.
I am a marginal housekeeper, after all, and becoming more so, as I age into a self-actualized woman who has better things to do than check the ceiling for cobwebs.
Let me put it this way: With the exception of ironing, I would rather eat anchovies than clean house. And anchovies make me gag.
Regarding ironing, I’m more like the British, who iron the equivalent of a mile a week, according to a survey conducted by Comfort, a fabric softener company in England. Eighty percent of 2,000 people interviewed said they iron their jeans. A third said they ironed tea towels.
I don’t go that far. But I do love slamming a hissing, hot iron down on a freshly washed Oxford cloth shirt. I push the iron forward. The heat disperses into the fiber. I pull back the iron. Voila! Instantaneous reward! The wrinkle has disappeared!
Not only that, but I think when I iron. Hunched over an ironing board in an obscure corner of the basement where nobody dares tread – lest they be enlisted to iron, too – I appear to be working, when what I’m actually doing is basking in deep philosophical reflection.
It was the same with breast feeding.
“Don’t bother Mom. She’s breast-feeding/ironing.”
“Daddy’s making dinner tonight while Mommy irons/breast-feeds.”
As for the whole of housekeeping, whether to use Comet Multi Room Liquid Gel Cleanser with Bleach or just plain, hello, water, I find housekeeping to be tedious, a time hog and most significantly, inconsequential.
So what if the bathroom faucet isn’t polished? Who really cares if there’s a blob of dried tomato sauce under the counter top that’s been there since the baby sitter dropped the spaghetti when we moved in eight years ago? Nobody can see the blob. Nobody’s going to eat it. What’s the big deal?
Yes, of course, I’m familiar with the adage coined by 18th century Methodism founder John Wesley, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” which might be used to support housekeeping. The Koran has its own saying: “God loveth the clean.”
With all due respect to the authors, I doubt they were using “clean” to define a polished bathroom faucet, as much as they were using it to define the human heart and soul.
Besides, not every great philosopher is down with cleaning. I believe it was Mark Twain who said, “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”
And at least one social historian, Susan Strasser, author of “Never Done: A History of American Housework,” suggests our approach to housework is a modern phenomenon, artificially hatched, ironically, by industrialization.
Oddly enough, while Maytag rendered the essentials of housework easier, mechanized housecleaning tools also put more focus on the nonessentials. Women, many of them home at the time with more free time inside the house, had to find something to do. It was no longer enough for the dishes to be cleaned. Now those glasses had to be spot-free.
Add germ-phobia and our tendency to buy! buy! buy! stuff that constantly has to be moved around to make room for more stuff, and housework easily becomes a full-time obsession that sends most of us over the edge; a 2002 study by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research shows that most people rate routine housework as the least enjoyable use of their time. Duh.
When all is said and done, I am the kind of woman who will probably always and alas scrub pots and pans so we don’t all get dysentery. I will keep the grit off the kitchen floor because it will feel yucky on bare feet in the morning otherwise.
I will also engage my children and my husband for “help,” which, let’s face it, is about all I’m going to get. Despite feminism and the rise of women in the workplace, U.S. women still spend 60 percent more time on chores than men, according to the Michigan study.
I will change the sheets when they get gritty. I will engage family members to help me keep the laundry in check and wash the toothpaste out of the sink when it gets to the disgusting point.
These are the essentials.
As for the nonessentials, this year I vow to just say no to cobwebs – to obsessively worrying about removing them, that is.