that’s life Messy mom comes clean about fantasy
By Tammy Keith
LITTLE ROCK — I can tell I’m getting older by my fantasies.
This is a recurring one - I come into the house after a hard day at work, slip off my shoes, walk toward my bedroom to change into something more comfortable and - here’s where it gets really exciting - every room I walk through is clean. Spotless. Uncluttered.
The maid has been here.
Oh, yes, I love it.
But I’d never do it. I feel guilty just writing about it.
Women in my family do not pay for those sorts of services.
I know everybody’s doing it these days, but I just wasn’t raised that way.
My Nano, my mom’s mother, was a lunchroom cook and cleaned houses on the side. Cleaning and cooking were her life, bless her heart.
I had a short gig as a maid myself.
W hen I was in college, I cleaned a big two-story house for my mother’s friend for sorority money. I think I made something like $12 a week.
I grew up with a mother who had floors clean enough to perform surgery on. I have told the story before about the vacuum-cleaner salesman who couldn’t get an ounce of dirt out of my mom’s carpet with his fancy, schmancy new model, and he left, dejected.
I probably have Ajax lung from cleaning the bathtubs so much growing up.
I was likely the only fifthgrader to come home after a sleepover and mention, with disgust, the ring around my friend’s bathtub. (I still remember it vividly at age 45, which tells you something. Yes, that I need therapy.)
If I heard it once, I heard my mother say it a million times, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”
I once thought I was like her.
But the truth is, I can’t do it like she did. It’s overwhelming.
When I talk about how my mother kept such a clean house, people often say, with a smirk, “ Yes, but d id she work ?”
She taught school, got her master’s degree and chauffeured my brother and me around.
I never remember our house looking like a bomb exploded, except for maybe 10 minutes on Christmas morning before my mother had the wrapping paper picked up and put in a trash bag and gift boxes neatly stacked.
I walked into my house tonight and thought maybe it had been ransacked.
Then I remembered my kitchen always looks this way.
Except for when my mother’s coming to visit, and then my husband and I kick into high gear and get it in tip-topshape (which includes some creative stashing).
The thing is, when I clean, I’m really good at it. It just doesn’t st ay t hat way long enough. And I don’t have the energy to do it often enough.
Thus, the maid fant asy.
But hiring one would feel likefailure. As if dust so thick you can write your name in it is success.
My husband just put some clothes in the dryer, and I noticed he washed the dishes.
That’s pretty exciting. If I’m lucky, maybe later tonight we can cozy up on the couch and he can talk clean to me.
- tkeith@ arkansasonline.com
This article was published Sunday, September 28, 2008.
Tri-Lakes, Pages 124, 134 on 09/28/2008
