It’s six o’clock on a Saturday. As soon as I write that, the strains of “It’s nine o’clock on Saturday… making love to my whisky and gin” from Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man’ float into my head. Except, I’m talking about Saturday morning, and there’s no drinking going on here.
There is, however, a lot of housework happening. This is the way I get it done. Early in the morning, while everyone else is asleep. Two loads of handwash-only clothes are soaking in tubs in the laundry, the washing machine is doing its thing, and a sprinkler is damping down the patch of back lawn that is still mostly dirt after having a rabbit hutch on top of it for five years. The grass is slowly creeping back over it, erasing the evidence of a pet living on that spot. They say that rabbit poop is great for gardens, but that’s not so true if it comes with a rabbit itself, eating any new growth down to the ground as soon as it sprouts. I have read that regular short bursts of watering will encourage quick grass growth, and that’s what we need – creepers spreading over the surface of the sand so that the dirt isn’t being blown around in Perth’s regular strong winds. Once it’s covered, we can go back to twice a week watering to allow deeper growth.
I am both pleased and annoyed with myself for doing housework first thing on a Saturday morning. I’m glad it’s getting done early and is out of the way so I can get on with other things. I’m very used to staying quiet because I desperately need time by myself to sort my thoughts and write things that I don’t want others to read over my shoulder as they walk past. We live in an open-plan house, so the only rooms where you can hide are the bedrooms and bathrooms, as they’re the only ones with doors. Oh, and the laundry, but I use a desktop computer rather than a laptop, so there’s no point locking myself in there!
If I keep the laundry door shut, nobody hears the machine, and I get to have some time to myself, either to google whatever takes my fancy or write, as I am doing now. This morning’s ‘me time’ almost didn’t happen because while I was loading clothes into the machine, my oldest son (OS) stuck his head around the door, scaring me half to death. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s well used for a reason! My heart thumped, I jumped, and I said, as have many before me, “Oh, you scared me half to death”. He said he thought he’d heard his alarm going off and then heard me, so he came in to say hello. He’s gone back to bed. Everyone else in the house has a gift they clearly inherited from Hubby’s line – they can all go back to sleep. I can’t. Once I’m awake, that’s it. I have trained myself to be able to go back to sleep (most of the time) if I wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but once my brain registers that it’s true morning, for some reason either 4:50 am or 5:40 am on Saturdays, I’m done. If I try to stay in bed, I get itchy and need to move, so I get up and get on with the day.
On the other hand, it’s not always a good thing that I get up and start pottering about straight away. Because I get much of the work done early in the morning, the boys (and the husband) have the perception that there isn’t as much work to be done as there really is. But if I wait until they’re up, there goes my chance to get floors washed. I can mop the floor and then retire to my computer to work or play, and it dries while I’m doing so. If others are up, I have to warn them and then put up with constant repeats of ‘Is it dry yet?’. I have been known to mop the boys into their rooms and my husband into the lounge quite intentionally, but if I’m already up, it’s easier to do it while they’re still slumbering.
You know, I say boys, but they’re actually young men – aged 19 and 23. The man of the house is significantly older, but tarred by the same brush of only doing whatever it is he has to do. He cooks dinner most nights, but that’s it. He doesn’t put the dirty pans or utensils he created into the sink, or return all of the ingredients used to their respective places of storage. He will help clean up if visitors are coming, but only the bits that I direct him to do. His reasoning is that I know what it is that needs to be done, so I should organise everyone. The bit where he’s standing in front of a bench cluttered with empty milk containers that weren’t put in the recycling, or odds and ends that people placed there instead of taking them to where the items belong is completely lost on him. Oh, to have eyes that don’t see!
I would say that Kinne’s ‘magic laundry basket’ video is one hundred percent correct for this house, because they have no idea that there was work to be done in the first place or that it has all been done by me. I’ve tried to show them, I’ve tried to corral them into actually doing something, but it’s gotten me precisely nowhere. I’d rather tell myself it’s my choice to get up and get it all done so that I can relax than spend triple the time trying to force them into doing it. I’m not one of those people who need it done perfectly or who feels the need to go over whatever the kids managed (although I’d probably still double check the toilet if visitors were coming) – I just need it done! If it isn’t done, I can’t relax.
I have managed to make it very clear that I will not come home from a holiday to a messy house. If we’re going away, the house is cleaned before we go. That doesn’t work as well now that Hubby and I are starting to take short trips away without the boys since they don’t want to go anyway and can both drive, and have a car each to use, because it only means the house was clean when I left. They were pretty good last year at keeping it clean for the couple of days we were away, but they forgot to put out the bin for collection because we weren’t there to remind them and harass them into doing it on time. I never thought I’d be the parent of children who were slugs, but here I am, killing it!
My parents made us clean the house every Saturday morning. We all pitched in. Beds were stripped, clothes were loaded into the washing machine and hung out when washed, floors were mopped, and various bits of furniture wiped over and then polished. I still love the smell of Mr Sheen. I must remember to ask Mum one of these days how she got us three girls to do it! I do sometimes write a list for the boys to work through. I have to remember to make both lists equal in the number of items and intensity of work, otherwise Mr ‘OS-ADHD-ASD-champion-for-social-justice’ will point out that the workload is unbalanced. Of course, he will only point that out if it’s uneven in his direction, not if he has less to do. The stress it causes me making them do it just isn’t worth it on what is supposed to be a day off for me. I’ve tried getting them to do it Friday night, with a marginally greater modicum of success, but the problem there is that as soon as I sit down after dinner, I am likely to fall asleep, and they get away with not finishing their tasks!
I got away with the forced clean a little more easily for a while because we had a support worker coming at 8:00 am on Saturday. That meant we all had to be up and have the house ready for him to walk into. After a few months of regularly being caught out in our pyjamas and realising that we like hanging about in our bedclothes while we eat breakfast, we changed his time to 9:00 am so we could lounge around a bit more (or have more time to get the house ready). Recently we moved the time to 1:00 pm. That helped greatly in not feeling pressured to have to start making the boys clean things as soon as they got up. Today, the support worker isn’t coming at all, but I still wanted the house to be clean because it’s going to be a massively busy weekend for me, and I prefer to run in and out of a tidy home.
I do wonder, quite often, if I would be in the same position had I given birth to girls. I want to think they would have been more amenable to keeping a house tidy, but the conversations I have with my friends who were blessed with girls tell me that isn’t necessarily the case. So I’m just going to go out there and say, to whoever my boys end up talking into marrying them, “I’m sorry. I tried!”
Oh, and as a side note for those who wonder why I didn’t get a cleaner – I did! I even got a male cleaner to show my sons that men are perfectly capable of cleaning up. It was somewhat helpful while I was recovering from major surgery, and wasn’t allowed to put my body into positions that might lead to injury. But really, it was two years of racing around putting everything on top of beds (because he didn’t make beds) before I went to work, only to have the boys put it all back on the floor when he left. I was tired, and I genuinely believed it didn’t help them sort themselves out in the slightest. Why would you change your habits when someone is doing everything for you? Getting rid of a lot of the stuff that kept being picked up and put down again was what made the difference, and questioning people before they bought things where it was going to go and whether it replaced something, improved functionality somehow, or only added to the pile of things we already have.
I can also see the answer to my own problem in the lines I wrote in the previous paragraph: “Why would you change your habits when someone is doing everything for you?” Sigh. I know, I know – I have to either make them do it by not doing it myself, or do it and shut up about it, because hoping they will step up to the plate themselves has gotten me precisely nowhere. I much prefer the third option: do it, and make a lot of noise about the fact that they don’t help out while I’m doing it 😉 . It’s both the hardest way and the easiest at the same time. It would also turn me into my mother-in-law, and I already know her approach didn’t work on my husband, so I guess I am going to have to work out a solution that eases my load while increasing my family’s to a level that is equitable for four adults using the same spaces, and stops us from having to run around doing a panic clean when visitors are due to arrive!
It will be interesting to read this post again in a year and see if anything has improved. Stay tuned for updates on this frustrating situation.
A Glorious Mess 