In my childhood family of seven kids, Saturday was cleaning day, the way Sunday was church day. Like well-trained poodles, we woke up, ate breakfast, did our assigned jobs, got our allowance, and promptly blew it on two candy bars and a grape soda at Schebesta’s gas station a one-mile bike ride down the road.
My mom, the queen of meatless meatballs and birthday cakes laced with wheat germ, turned a blind eye to how we spent our allowance. She was just happy we did our jobs. Plus, she’d sneak brewer’s yeast in our coffeecake on Sunday to make up for our sugar fest on Saturday.
I don’t remember when it was instituted. I was probably born into the assigned Saturday jobs, the way little Chinese children are born into Communism. My mom assigned everyone a job and we had that job until we left for college. There was no room for negotiation unless an older sibling left for college and then we could approach my parents and say, “Can I clean the bathrooms AND mow the lawn now that Stephen’s gone?”
The only boy, he always got the outside jobs. He didn’t have to deal with cleaning chemicals and stubborn stains. I coveted his jobs. He took advantage of my desire to get assigned outside work and would “let” me finish the lawn, “to see if I could handle his job”. I thought I was working my way up the ladder. But really he was just Tom Sawyering me, making a boring job look exciting, while he went inside.
When I finished the lawn exactly how Stephen instructed, overlapping the last mowed row to account for blade length, I thought this meant that he’d take over scrubbing porcelain, until I found him inside watching Dragnet with the volume nearly muted. While my sister was vacuuming the living room, my mom wouldn’t be able to hear the television.
No one dared stop working until my mom stopped working. It was an unwritten, well-understood law. The guilt was overwhelming if you broke that law. Think New Orleans after Katrina. It would be years before you’d get rid of the residue of Family Cleaning Guilt. Maybe never.
I still carry it over in my family. If my husband is cleaning the kitchen, I cannot sit down at the computer and blog. I have to put the folded laundry away. I move from one room to another, opening and closing doors and drawers. If I still hear forks and knives banging into the silverware drawer, and the laundry is done, I’ll look for another job. Any job where I have to pass through the room in which he is cleaning is ideal – carrying the recycling out to the garage, carrying anything through the kitchen to the basement, changing the tablecloth. When I see him wiping down the counters, that’s my cue to stop looking for stupid jobs designed to look busy while someone is still cleaning. It’s time for the next phase.
This is the tricky phase. When I first heard of the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I thought it was a movie about this phase in Family Cleaning Guilt. This phase is a dance that involves pacing, guessing, ducking, maybe going around the house and opening all the windows. That’s not really a job but it involves moving from room to room and it sounds like work. This phase is all about listening and watching for cues to indicate the unspoken: “We’re all done working now. You may carry on!” followed by a collective sigh of guilt-free relief.
I pace. I watch. I listen. If Skye moves onto another room and starts cleaning, I have to hold up my end and find another job of equal duration. I size up the job he has begun next. Oooh, he’s involving the children in the clean up. Plus 25 points! Darn! I’m really going to have to step it up a notch. I pull out the bucket and the rubber gloves. I’ll get to you later, blog! I’ll think of you the whole time I’m scrubbing the baseboards, I promise!
I have been unable to hand down the Family Cleaning Guilt to my children or my husband. This Family Cleaning charade is only in my head. No one else realizes their part in this play. I can turn on the vacuum and no one will begin looking busy until they hear the sound of the vacuum being put back in the closet. It drives me nuts. How’d my mom do that?
Maybe it’s just skipping a generation. Maybe my grandchildren will carry this burden or blessing, depending on how you look at it. I want to know my mother’s secret. I know if I call and ask she’ll just laugh. Perhaps it isn’t something you teach. It’s a gift. And as long as you’re alive the power of cleaning guilt is alive.
My mom reminds me of Evelyn Ryan, the mom in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, written by her sixth child, Terry Ryan. Evelyn Ryan made everything in the house operate on sheer will. When she was dying, appliances that should have stopped working a decade ago, started failing. The glass, four-leaf clover that Evelyn had suctioned to the living room window dropped with a crash, in the last week of her life. The thermostat on the wall read 88°F when it was really 96°.
Not that I want to write about “when my mother dies”, but like Evelyn Ryan, my mother held our world together with routines, some of them guilt-laden routines, but there was order where there could easily have been chaos under the wrong management. I wonder if, when my mom dies, this inherited Family Cleaning Guilt and the dance we do after we’ve completed a job will live on or one day, hopefully no time soon, crash to the ground like a glass four-leaf clover?
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Amy,
We only had three kids, but Saturday in our house was the same jobs week after week. We’d go to the dime store after we were done with our allowance and blow it all on candy. (When it got close to Easter or Halloween, sometimes I’d be able to save up for a couple weeks and splurge on bigger candy!)
And the lawn- how I wanted to trade for the outside jobs right up until I got them! I found out only a couple years ago that my older sister never touched a lawn mower until 2006 at 34 years old! My brother and I hogged it all the time as kids, she says. Interesting to consider the other side of the equation.
Thanks for your thoughts! Boy did this bring back some memories!
Amy.. I soo can relate to the childhood chores… we had contests as to who would be “washer, drier, putter awayer!!..sometimes calling for the job days in advance! Or when mowing the lawn.. “easy part, hills, short side” My Dad had “parties” that would include moving gravel from one far end of driveway to other far end or shoveling during the blizzard “gotta keep up”he’d yell over the howling winds! By the way there were no RSVP’s to his parties.. my sister tried that once and well none of us tried after that…. And now I too, can’t sit around while hubby does a “chore”… yet our kids have not picked up on this?? Perhaps the catholic guilt has been watered down… after all they did not attend catholic school forever as I did! Thans for the chuckles.. you write well and I envy that! OOps more guilt!
This is my first time stopping by your blog and I have to say – you are a great writer! I love your style.
I had a few chuckles because your mom is just like my mom with all the daily routine and now I am also like your mom and my mom with the way I handle my own family. It is amazing how things can be passed down. I think children run better with a routine to follow. I know I did and my children seem to as well.
Anyway, It was nice to read about your life. We are a lot alike.
And I also wanted to say thank you so much for stopping by my blog http://www.PainterMommy.com and commenting on my cruise post. The food is definitely one thing that I loved more than anything. We pigged out, but being pregnant and I didn’t need to pay any attention to weight gain – great excuse. LOL I still have not gotten on a scale to see how much I gained while on the cruise.
Well, I hope you have a great weekend. DAWN
I know I’m supposed to be thinking about the chores I did as a child, but I’m not. Instead, I’m gazing at the bright shiny dime my dad handed out for my allowance each Saturday morning, that bought two, count’em two, full-sized candy bars at J.J.’s Tobacco (Candy in a Tobacco shop–really?) about a half mile from our house. Come to think of it, skip the dime. The allowance WAS the candy.
Very funny! I can’t keep up with all your postings but this one caught my eyes… I relate with the pleasure, loyalty I felt as a child in helping my mother in her home tasks and my surprised misunderstanding of why it’s not the same for my daughter…
The kids have their routine. Cleaning is involved although sparingly and they try to weezle out of it if possible or pretend as if they do not hear about it.
I too cannot sit still when someone else is cleaning. I feel like a louse, a lazy person if I am the only idle one. I must DO something.
I love this blog. I have had friends who run their house like a machine. I have machine envy. I do.
Let me guess – your mom is catholic through and through? Just a guess
She is Mrs. Catholic! Was it the G word that gave it away??
G as in ‘Guilt’ – yes
You know, Amy, you are an extremely talented writer, and very witty to boot! Yay you!
We were never really given chores when I was a kid. Sometimes we would help, but mostly not– though we never got an allowance either, if we didn’t do anything to help out. And my dad, I swear the only thing I really ever saw him clean growing up was the windows, and that was (aside from the fact that my mom won’t do the outsides in the back because they’re too high and she doesn’t like hanging out the window) mostly because he decided that the rest of us did it wrong. Apparently there is a precise art to cleaning a window. And it includes newspaper, rather than any other form of cloth or paper.
Wow, and I thought it was bad when Nan made me sit under her chair as punishment… My Mom must have taken lessons, she always had us out pulling weeds in the huge lawn we had. We would get paid a penny a weed. I was determined to pull 1000 weeds for ten bucks. I got to about 800 and was still happy. Let’s face it 8 bucks would buy you a whole G.I. Joe and a couple of candy bars and you would still have change. Unfortunately, Mom inspected the weeds, if they were not complete weeds then they didn’t count…
Ames, You made me think of Nan’s house. I went there a lot (for dinner) when I was in college. She had a blackboard on the wall with a list of jobs. If you didn’t check off a couple of those tasks, you didn’t get fed. No work, no chow was the rule. It applied to all who entered. She never discriminated by only picking on family. No passing stranger was above pulling a few weeds near the fence. Grandmother guilt (applied properly, by a Master Jedi like Nan) is several skill levels above Mom guilt. There is really no way to compare the two. It is like comparing a Category 5 Hurricane to a summer rain shower.
Since then, I have never experienced the dreaded Saturday cleaning/work guilt. In fact, I refuse to mow the lawn on a weekend day (Friday’s included). I would rather mow in the dark on Tuesday night than be caught in the neighborhood’s weekend yard work trap. When young, Ethan needed to be moved by fork-lift so Laurene could clean the spot that he was in. I am pretty sure the THING skipped two generations on our side of the family. Poor Jenna!
Oh, I remember when Nan gave me the job of pulling dandelions every time we showed up. Another time she made me snip the ends off a big bucket of green beans. I got bored in the middle of it and wandered off to the sandbox. The GUILT!!! when she saw the bowl of only six or seven snipped beans.
This made me smile too. How to get the guilt in my house? And how much of it do I want? Does the house really stay clean? I totally get you though. I have it too. My husband thinks I am crazy. If he gets a broom and I am at the computer I immediately say “What are you doing” and start t stand up. He looks at me like an insane person and starts sweeping the stairs (one of the only things he does regularly – even if it has just been done). He would never clean because I am but I can’t help it. That story is kind of creepy about Evelyn. It makes me worried about what happens if something happens to Mommy when she is young and all the stuff she does is really needed….
Great Post! Still loving reading your blog!
This made me smile. Your description fits my childhood as well. Even more pertinent is how the pattern is repeating itself in our household in the present. What is it about my upbringing that makes me feel guilty if my grass grows between cuttings and why am I compelled to manage my schedule around the Saturday chores! Anyway, I don’t comment often but I really love reading your thoughts each day! Thanks for that.
Thank you, Matt!!! Hug your wife and kids for me. I love to see the pics you post. Feels like I’ve met them. XO
I would be happy for family-pick-your-clothes-up-off-the-floor-from-2-weeks-ago day.