A fresh start

It's been ages since I've blogged anything. Mostly because life has been a little weird for almost a year, and I've just been trying to figure things out—including myself. But I'm not ready to kill the blog yet, so I'm making a fresh start. And, since my very, very first blog post ever  was about laundry, it seems fitting that, for a new beginning, I should talk about housework.

Anyway, for the New Year of 2016 I made an outstanding goal: I was going to make my bed every. single. day this year. This is what my bed looks like today at 11:00 a.m.:

It's also what my bed looked like all day yesterday. Not so great. I'm afraid I have to admit that I've only followed through with this goal about four to five days out of seven so far. It's just so much easier to grab my book, lay on the unmade bed, and read for hours at a time. This is so unlike the way I used to be that it's kind of astounding!

When I was eight years old my mom took a full time job. I didn’t worry about it too much then, but I’ve thought about it a lot since I’ve grown up.

My sister Melanie (who was thirteen at the time) says that my parents gathered all us kids together for a family council, and Dad told us that now that Mom was going to be away from home so much we needed to be more helpful in the house. I don’t remember this and neither, apparently, did most of my other siblings. Melanie took up the slack of the housework and when I was old enough to be willing—between nine and eleven—I worked with her. Melanie taught me how to take care of a house.

We did the dishes almost every day. This meant we washed them by hand for a few years until my parents could afford the exciting luxury of a dishwasher. It meant we put away leftovers, it meant we scoured the sink before and after the dishes were washed; it meant we searched the house for dishes so we wouldn’t miss any; it meant we washed all the pans; it meant that we dried and put away any dishes that would create a precariously high stack in the dish-rack; it meant that when the dishes were clean and drying we wiped down the counters, the stove and the table. And then we swept the floor. This whole process is what we called "doing the dishes."

But we didn’t stop with the dishes; we took care of the entire house, at least upstairs, which included the kitchen, dining room, living room, den, and two bathrooms—daily. This meant that we had to figure out where to put everyone’s stuff (often to be yelled at later by our siblings if they couldn’t find their things). It meant that we dusted all the furniture, vacuumed the carpets, and swept and mopped the floors. It meant we cleared and washed counters and tables. It meant we scrubbed two toilets, washed sinks, counters, bathtubs and showers, washed mirrors, and scrubbed two bathroom floors. It meant we cleaned our own bedrooms. Every day. It also meant we washed our own laundry, and did the community laundry, like towels and dishrags. (Luckily for us our grandmother, Vovis, folded all the laundry.) We also cooked dinner two to four times a week. This work that Melanie and I did every day, my kids would consider deep-cleaning now.

Sometimes we deep-cleaned. This meant taking all the books off of the shelves (and there were lots of books!), dusting the shelves, and putting the books back in their places. It meant taking everything out of closets and reorganizing them. It meant cleaning the common area of the basement—a space as big as the living room, kitchen, and one bedroom.  It meant scrubbing walls or degreasing kitchen cabinets. It meant shampooing carpets. It meant waxing and polishing wooden floors. Sometimes it meant washing windows. And, besides all that, sometimes we even canned apricots and tomatoes.

Melanie and I did the regular chores every day. My parents didn’t ask us or remind us, and we didn’t complain about it—not even to each other. We did simply because it needed to be done. We worked together until Melanie got married, when I was fifteen years old. And then I did it pretty much by myself until I got married and moved out at twenty-two.

Looking back I have sometimes wondered if this could all be true because, in addition to the housework (and school), we also had dance lessons every day, piano lessons (and you know  that I practiced a lot!), and jobs. So sometimes I'd get to thinking that maybe I've just been painting myself in a really, really magnificent light: I was such a good girl! Just look at all the work I did! But from talking to Melanie—and Bruce, too—I know that I'm not just making this stuff up. 

I do  have to admit two things though: First, half of my siblings had moved out by the time Melanie got married, so I was cleaning up after six people instead of ten—and none of them were little kids. Second, when you do all the housework every. day. it's a lot easier to do than if you only clean up once or twice a week. I mean, how dirty does the toilet really get after only twenty-four hours? Still, we really did do all of those things and there was a lot of satisfaction in getting it done. 

I kept it up after I got married, too. (Well, except for the laundry. There's no keeping up with that!) Even when I had lots of tiny kids around I kept a clean house.

And look at me now, twenty-six years later: I have discovered that there are chores I just really do not like to do. They are mostly easy things, which doesn't make any sense—you'd think that if I'm going to put a job on my "hate to do this" list it would be something like cleaning the toilet (which I don't mind doing so much). Nope. Not so. Actually I don't like vacuuming. Yes, it's very easy to do and a clean, vacuumed floor makes the entire house look cleaner, but to me it seems tedious; I just don't like to do it any more. A few years after vacuuming, sweeping and mopping the floors joined the list. And my number one, "hate to do this task" is...

...wiping down the table and counters. Don't ask me why. Maybe it's because I know those jobs are easy enough that my kids could do them instead—so why should I have to? Hm. That's one theory.
Or maybe I'm just getting lazy. But the first theory sounds better.

Well, the good thing is that I can still have a goal of making my bed every day, and I can start now. 

So I just stopped to make my bed, and this is what it looks like now:

And, speaking of fresh starts, I'll try to write more too.