I consider myself a very tidy person. Before bed, everything must be back in place, down to my shoes in their assigned slot, the coffee cups gathered up and all the dishes put away. I prefer that my clothes hang in the closet because folding them in a drawer leaves them wrinkled and I have no talent for ironing. I abhor stacks of mail on counter. Let’s face it. Nothing good comes in the mail anymore. It is either junk or bad news so just seeing the pile makes me anxious.
While I consider soap a necessity, I find it irritating to be sitting right there by the sink, scum accumulating around the nozzle and dripping out its nose like a congested child. Even in my car I prefer to keep it free of detritus. There are two towels to deal with unexpected dirty objects. There are also two reusable grocery bags. While I would like to say this has entirely to do with the noble practice of minimizing waste, if I am honest, I just don’t like them spilling out into my closet.
The paradox is that I absolutely hate making my bed. It feels so final, like that option is now closed for the day. The Navy SEAL that gave the commencement address about making your bed first thing when you get up doesn’t have his priorities straight. This man obviously missed out on kindergarten. One must always leave open an invitation to nap. Then you will actually have the energy to carry out all the other little things that you need to do for the rest of the day like carrying out top secret missions, capturing the enemy and being a hero.
I am very happy to sort, toss and organize. I am Marie Kondo without the book deal. I am the person silently judging you on how unorganized you are. I imagine coming in to clean out your cupboards and rearrange them into a more functional order. It is my personal mission and makes me feel like a hero. A bit of an obsessive-compulsive, presumptive hero but, hey, only after my nap.
While I am tidy, I hate to clean. A tidy person puts things away and makes it appear as though everything is well organized. A clean person actually cares if there are crumbs on the counter or spots on the mirror. While I do like a clean house, I find this to be a great burden. It ranks right up there with doing my taxes. While I appreciate a clean house the way I look forward to a tax refund, at least the taxes I only have to do once a year. Therefore, I admit that just like I do not do my own taxes, I do not clean my own home.
This trend started when I was in medical school. I was ambitiously clean at the time thinking that cleaning the house would be a fine break from studying. No, it is not. It is not a break from anything. It is not a break from cooking, studying, childcare, or work. I am pretty sure it isn’t even a break from cleaning sewers, telemarketing or slaughtering chickens. Anyone that says that keeping house is noble obviously has a nanny, cook and a maid. They probably have a gardener, too, just for good measure.
The first few weeks of med school my house got dirty enough I felt compelled to clean. The more I cleaned, the more I thought about my anatomy that I needed to be studying. I tried to recall all the muscles of the forearm allowing me to dust. I mopped and vacuumed with rising jealousy, imagining my classmates deep in their books and acing the tests. Why bother changing the sheets if I was going to pull an all-nighter to make up for all this time cleaning? By the time I got to the bathroom, I was convinced that I should worry more about crappy test scores than a clean crapper. I only cleaned that house once.
After a couple attempts, I found an efficient housekeeper. After that day, the vacuum was only white noise as I reviewed biochemistry. Nothing stimulated my brain like the smell of lemon scented 409 during neuroanatomy. I sat in a freshly made bed while whipping through my pathology flash cards. I could not afford this luxury and yet, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt riding on passing the board, I could not afford to clean my own house. I called it an investment.
I thought that as I entered residency, I would save some money and clean my own place. It was actually a smaller condo than the one I lived in during medical school so surely, I could manage 900 square feet of cleaning. Nope. 80 hours a week on my feet with frequent all-night shifts at the beck and call of pompous attendings still did not elevate housework to feel like a break. Once again finding a housekeeper took the urgency of a code blue. Trust me, the magic of Disneyland ain’t got nothing on a house that is magically clean every two weeks even though you are never home.
I have now risen to the rank of full doctor. I actually have time off. I still live in a very small apartment that I could easily clean myself. I have not even considered doing so. It is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity like water and electricity. Remember when you didn’t need a cell phone and now you don’t know how to live without it? Yes, that is my housekeeper. Besides, at this point as I recently realized, I own neither a mop nor a vacuum. I have a simple hand vac for popcorn that seems to actively escape from the bag and manages to find all corners of the room. I will make the bed only if company is coming since it is possible to see the pile of pillows and twisted blankets from the kitchen. Otherwise, I leave it to my cleaners who bring their own tools. If you are going to live simply, why keep the things that bring no joy and you will never use?
I am deeply grateful for the women that make me as clean as I like to pretend that I am, but I am ashamed to say that I know much less about them than they know about me. These woman have all treated me kindly, cheerfully asking about my life as we pass. They are aware of subtle changes in the house that reveal the ups and downs of my life. The extra toothbrush that appears and then disappears. The wrappers in the garbage that screams out if I am binging or dieting. The books stacked on my nightstand confess my flaws and insecurities. I’m sure they are silently judging me. I consider this a small price to pay for a well made bed.
I have only ever had female house keepers and I have never even met a man that cleans houses. It is telling that only woman have the strength for the most difficult, menial job in the world. I contemplate how our lives would be different if men engaged in professional house cleaning. Would a wide shield be implemented on all toilets to catch the piss they spray around? Would electric shavers come with a suction attached so that stubble isn’t left sprouting on the bathroom counter? Based on precedent the only thing we can say for certain is that if men did the job, it would pay better!
Due to the panic over COVID 19, my housekeeper suddenly canceled my cleaning. There is some irony in this since when we most need to keep things clean, she backed out. I can’t really blame her. We need doctors right now and I would like the opt out button as well. But after two weeks with no cleaning, my socks were sticking to the kitchen floor, the dust bunnies were reproducing in the corner and there was enough hair in the drain to create wigs for several cancer patients. So I decided to clean my own house for the first time in 14 years.
This was a task I was woefully unprepared for. Lacking the tools for the job was the first barrier. First, I had to borrow a vacuum cleaner from my mother which had a way of making me feel like an adolescent again. Then I discovered that I no longer owned a mop. Due to everyone’s newfound zeal for sterilization, the stores were out of every know cleaning product. I took inventory of what could find in my house. I had two bottles of Windex, a bottle of furniture oil (as if my pressboard Ikea furniture needs regular polishing) and a bottle of Barkeeper’s Friend. This meant that while nothing was going to get very clean, it was guaranteed to shine!
I am sure there is some rule about what order of tasks you are supposed to clean the house, but I decided that something was better than nothing. I started with dusting. I set to my task with great determination. Dust, it turns out, is everywhere! Where does this stuff come from? It also became clear just how tall my housekeeper is because everything above her head had a significantly thicker layer of dust. I made it 15 minutes before tedium set in and I took a break to scroll through the doom and gloom of the news.
Reassured by the experts that I or someone I loved was going to die soon of COVID, I returned to my work. I vacuumed the rugs and went so far as to move furniture where I found lost treasures like my grocery list from November and runaway hair ties. As I took out my garbage, I was waylaid by a nice conversation with my neighbor (at a safe distance, of course) about how she was fairing working from home. Everyone is very anxious to hear firsthand tales of people gasping of breath and dying in front of me in the ER. While this is actually part of my job with or without COVID, I reassured them that here in Arizona it has not come to Hollywood drama levels just yet. I returned to check my email, floss my teeth then I move onto the bathroom.
Bathrooms confound me. In principle, this is where we go to get clean. So why are they so gross? I wipe at spots on the mirror only to find that I have left new spots behind. Hair of various lengths and colors is everywhere. How am I not bald if all my hair is on the floor? Mystery scum appears on every surface. I pretend it is something benign like makeup or toothpaste. While scrubbing the toilet I find myself deeply grateful that there is no permanent male resident in my apartment.
I take a break to watch my bird feeders. I’m guessing that none of them feel compelled to oil their nest to a sparkly finish. I check my phone again for good measure. Another 948 people have caught COVID in my absence. The kitchen is next.
I scrub down the counter tops until they are glossy. Given the size of my kitchen this doesn’t actually take too long. The fortunate thing is that the stove is so rarely used I just skip over that. The true disaster lies behind the closed doors. The cabinets are littered with spilled salt, rice and something dark that might be molasses or balsamic reduction. I am not brave enough to taste it to find out. The refrigerator is no better. My veggie drawer is becoming its own mulch pit of liquifying veggies. Salad dressings precede my move to the apartment three and half years ago. I am not sure what is in the Tupperware anymore, but it smells like sourdough starter at this point.
I consider the kitchen difficult because you really must consider the timing of the cleaning. Either you make your snack and clean up the mess with the rest of the kitchen or you wait until you have a clean surface and then instantly get it all dirty again. Entropy is exhausting. I relent and eat my lunch on my shiny countertop pretending the trail of crumbs is part of the pattern in the granite.
I am down to making the bed. Instead I lay down to nap. Fortified, I check my phone to know which celebrity is COVID positive. Reassured that Tom Hanks is recovering in Australia, I stuff pillows into cases. I still don’t understand why sheet makers are not more helpful. Is it too hard to make a little tag that says which corner the fitted sheet should match? I find a corner, tuck it in and then attempt to stretch the sheet to the next corner only to find that I have the wrong edge and it is too short. I rip it off and start over only to find that the sheet is now on inside out. So I try again. And again. And again.
I declare my house clean, or at least as clean as Windex and my interest allow. My housekeeper is in and out in one hour. It has taken me four. Like driver’s ed or jury duty, I didn’t need to do it again to remember that I didn’t like it the first time. In the meantime, I can only pray that our president is right about something for once and this virus has magically run its course by Easter. For now it looks like the only thing stopping by my house are the dust bunnies and the damn things don’t leave chocolate eggs.
