I’m decluttering my apartment. I’m plugging away at it in between
doing my taxes and beta reading, both of which I’d rather be doing.
Doing housework has never been one of my favorite activities. But
I’ve learned to do it and do it well. I just tend to put it off. These days, I’m
seriously considering hiring someone to clean my apartment every few weeks.
Only thing is, I’d feel obligated to clean the place before the cleaner
arrived.
As a child, I admit I was a bit spoiled when it came to helping
around the house, but there’s a reason for that. When I was two years old, I
was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. If Mom wanted to vacuum the living room
rug in peace, she had to draft someone to take me for a walk.
By the time I was eight, my parents were fairly certain I had
gotten over that nonsense. So, early one Saturday morning, Mom flipped the
switch on the vacuum cleaner, turned it over to me, and pointed me in the
direction of the living room. Within minutes, I had toppled a couple of lamps,
knocked my little brother into the magazine rack, and scared the cat out of
three or four of her nine lives.
“Do it yourself before she kills us all,” Dad hollered, extracting
Mopsy from his shredded trouser leg.
Unfortunately, my father’s instinct for self-preservation
condemned my mother to doing most of the housework forever.
When I was thirteen, my parents decided I was old enough to start
helping out around the house on a regular basis. But, by that time, I was
beyond rehabilitation. I just couldn’t seem to get the hang of housework. Mom
complained that I dusted around knickknacks and doilies and failed to vacuum
the corners of the living room—or any room.
My incompetence annoyed Mom even more when it came to keeping my
bedroom picked up. She claimed the place looked like an explosion at a rummage
sale. “How can you tell the clean clothes from the dirty ones?” she frequently
asked. Sometimes I couldn’t. I also suspected that I held the town record for
having the most overdue library books. I had a habit of shoving them under my bed. They stayed there until the librarian reminded me that the books were due back weeks ago.
When Mom couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore, she cleaned my
bedroom. Coincidentally, she usually did this right before we were expecting
guests. Throughout my adolescence, Mom had a recurring nightmare in which a
guest took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom, stumbled into my bedroom,
and disappeared forever.
[Note: A slightly different version of this mini-essay was posted
on Blogger in May 2005.]
