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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