“Quick! Dad is on the way home,” my siren like voice echoes across the kitchen, until it reaches the little people who are comfortably resting on the couch and taking in all the Sponge Bob that their little minds can handle without spontaneously combusting. This is the cue that all of my children have been trained to recognize as the signal to get off their lazy keysters and help me get the house in order before Dad walks in the front door.

You see, in our humble abode, the kids and I have a little agreement. I allow the cleaning to be carelessly tossed to the wayside while we engage in cooking lessons, educational bridging exercises, kiddie pool wading and various summer fun activities. The way I figure it, trying to keep the house clean while the kids are present and involved in the messy business of being children, is pretty much a losing battle. Choosing to fight such battles just makes for afternoons filled with nothing but bouts of hair pulling frustration and frantic attempts to erase muddy footprints with the mop before the next stampede of puddle jumpers descends upon the family room.

Why bother?

That is where my husband and I disagree. He is the advocate for preventative cleaning measures and holds the same ideals of keeping a perpetually tidy house, as every other clean freak in the nation.  If he only knew how truly disgusting the house becomes every weekday, from the hours of 7:00 am until he returns home, he would probably have a conniption fit. In fact, I have to keep myself from laughing, on the weekends, when I see him anxiously twiddling his thumbs in the corner of the kitchen as he watches us leisurely go from the first meal of the day to the first activity, without so much as a sweep or table scrubbing. He can only go so long, without asking if “I’d like some help tidying up the area before it gets too bad.” Usually I will oblige his need for immediate sanitation satisfaction, but sometimes I will tell him that I’ll get to it in a minute, just for the fun of watching him pick up a towel and peevishly start scrubbing dishes. It is mean, I know. Hey…after ten years of marriage, I have to find some way of paying him back for refusing to use the laundry hamper for the disposal of his soiled garments, over and over again!

Lucky for me, the husband has a knack for finding a bigger, better more efficient way of doing event he tiniest of household chores. Then, when I finally do get around to picking up a mop, there will be a more efficient way of getting the job done, in less time!  Thanks to his freakish enjoyment of inventing these methods, I have my five o’clock cleaning routine whittled down to a silky smooth forty minutes. His method even leaves me with five extra minutes to check my email and start dinner. When the mess-a-phobe…er, husband comes through our front door, he sees a clean house, a sane mother, dinner on the stove and is none the wiser. Bwahahaha! But please, keep this between us. It may ruin my ability to sneak in some occasional day time blogging and then life, as I know it, would be much less enjoyable. Shhh, it will be our little secret!

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I’m not. I swear to you, I am not. But, I feel all the time like the lead singer for a one song band. I’m the Lili Taylor character in Say Anything. “I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about cleaning. And I’m going to sing each and every one of them tonight.” Except, instead of a rollicking “That’ll Never Be Me”, or “Joe Lies,” my songs are: (the title hit), “I’m Not the Maid,” “I Was NOT Put Here to Clean Up After You,” and my all time favorite, the melancholy ballad, “There’s Got to Be More to My Life Than Cleaning Up Other People’s Messes.”

I don’t know whether I live with a bunch of primates or whether they’re just normal people and my expectations are too high. I know my mother (and her mother before her) was a neat freak. We had a cleaning person who came once a week, but my mother required that we clean the house before the cleaning person arrived. Not to impress the woman, but because she didn’t want to waste the half-day of cleaning she bought with the woman doing dusting, or making the beds, or cleaning the mirrors and windows. She expected deep cleaning from her cleaning person. So, my sister and I cleaned the bathrooms, did laundry, wiped down the kitchen, dusted and vacuumed every week before the cleaning person came. Actually, the vacuuming and bathroom cleaning was done mid-week, so those things were done twice a week, once by us and once by the cleaning person. Anyway, you get the idea, you could go into my mother’s house any given day, any given time and it would pass the strictest inspection. I thought she was nuts then, but now that I realize the cost of cleaning help and the value in making your kids do chores, I appreciate her reasoning more.

Somehow, I’ve dropped the ball. My mom used to refer to my house, endearingly as “The Filthy Little Hovel.” And then we’d laugh. I’ve already commented on my family’s sense of humor in another entry. I really do think she meant it to be funny, though. I thought it was funny anyway.

My house is not as clean as the house I grew up in, but I can’t really gauge how it compares to other houses, since I assume that whenever I’m invited over to someone’s house, they vacuum and dust and put everything away right before I get there, like I do when I have company. So, I can’t get a glimpse of how they really live.

But, this is how things go, this a snapshot of this morning: I get up and go to the bathroom. The toilet paper roll is empty, even though I just filled it yesterday. I get a new one from the cabinet (which I can reach from being seated on the toilet, meaning anyone could reach it from there, too, even the person who used the last piece of toilet paper) and replace it. I wash my hands and go to dry them on the hand towel and see a piece of crud (Toothpaste? Cream cheese?), grab it down and toss it in the laundry and put a new one out. I go into the kitchen to start the coffee and my feet get sticky from something that someone had spilled between 9 pm last night and 6:15 this morning. I clean it up with a soapy rag, I’ll have to mop (again) later. I get my son up, make him breakfast, he has a small spill and starts spazzing because the napkin holder on the table is empty. I get napkins for him in a hurry and fill the holder. And that was literally just the first fifteen minutes I was awake. There’s more to add, but you get the point.

I yell, I pout, I go on strike, I use behavior modification, but it’s like I’m a zookeeper accidentally locked on Baboon Mountain indefinitely. These people I live with, they’re like a different species or something. I don’t understand them!

I put them to work, and the older two are good at it. They vacuum, they dust, they change cat litter and fold laundry. My husband is very helpful on CLEANING DAY. He really does pull his own weight when he’s sent with a list of chores. It’s the in-between that makes me crazy. I want to have a cleaned-up house so that my day runs smoother. I mean, the whole purpose of going through the effort of replacing the roll of toilet paper, putting out clean hand towels and keeping a napkin holder on the table is so when you need those things, they’re there, ready for you to use. But, it seems I do all the replacing and never get to reap the benefits! I go around and tidy up, and tidy up, and tidy up, and I never enjoy making the messes that I have cleaned up. Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Wasn’t he also rumored to have a closet packed with a dozen sets of the same suit? Maybe Einstein had an idea there. I fantasize about going total minimalist. Living like a Franciscan nun, with just the necessities in barely furnished rooms. Bed, desk, dresser. Table and chairs and cooking appliances. Couch, rocker, television (I’m not a nun, afterall). But, I’m sure my family would find some way to make it all sticky and misplace half of it anyway (“OK, who used the bureau and didn’t put it back?”)

But, I have to admit, the final song on my cleaning album is entitled “Someday, My House Will Be Clean and Quiet…and Then I Will Hate It.” I know this is the hustle and bustle of family life, this never-ending battle against clutter will eventually end when the kids are off at college and have their own places to muck up. Then I’ll have endless hours of peace, when everything will be exactly just where I left it, and I’ll remember these days fondly, because like Carly Simon said, these are the good old days. No matter how grimy they may be.

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