The Genetics of House Cleaning, by Annick Labadie

My mother is no Martha Stewart. Neither is my father, which is a moderately comforting thought. I’d be a little worried if swan-shaped napkins and bow-covered collages ruled his daily thoughts. Unfortunately, origami aversion is only the beginning.

You see, both my parents suffer from some kind of mild cleaning phobia. Cleaning ranks just above dishwasher shopping and just below colonoscopy on the list of tasks they least enjoy. As a result, our “house cleaning habits” have always lacked the “habit” part. Cleaning is always done in binges. Unhealthy, allergy inducing, fight catalyzing, where-did-you-hide-the-goddamn-Mister-Clean-refill-bottle binges.

We all hate cleaning, but not as much as mom. Because while my brother, father and I are at peace with our pronounced preference for anything over CLR cleaner, mom isn’t. She’d like to be more like Martha. But things ain’t so. You see, her hatred for the act of cleaning only mildly overpowers her hatred for unclean things. Because of that imbalance, our house is still messy most of the time. In turn, the cluttered wardrobes and unpaired bed sheets are constant reminders of her own inadequacies, further compounding her hate. She hates that she hates cleaning. This, combined with our shared disinclination for mopping, turns a peaceful home into a war zone whenever it’s time to rub the tub with Vim multipurpose cleaner. Which is never fun.

Here’s an example of such developments:

Sunday morning, and it’s sunny outside. My brother’s Giants are playing my Favre-led Whoevers. Dad has a tight schedule of hockey meetings interspaced with hockey phone calls, but was hoping to slip under the radar with a few white lies (i.e. I’ll be back in half an hour). The timing, is perfect.

The idea of cleaning comes up at 8:35 am, when the sun rises over the glass coffee table, revealing its streaks. Mom is wearing pajamas and sipping on her coffee while Sports Center loops on the flat screen for the 5th time. She observes the shining smudges. Passive aggressive mode engaged. Uh oh. The comments quickly expand to other problematic areas. The entrance. While four of her pairs of shoes block the main door, it’s the five windbreakers my dad’s deposited over the stair railing that get her going. Onto the bathroom. I’ve once again soiled the dirty-anyway mirror by brushing my brace-covered teeth in the dentist-recommended fashion. Downstairs, The TV room. My brother’s been overdosing on chips and Pepsi with his buddies, hiding the empty containers inside the lamp table. She doesn’t know that yet, but she will.

It is now decided. Our lifestyle is unacceptable. Mom takes a stand. Time for a revolution! Today is cleaning binge day. Siblings are coming for fondue at 7:00 after all. Plans will be dropped and lives will be halted. Which is fine, communal life implies communal responsibilities. Except the decision-making isn’t very communal, and the overall process is hell.

End of example.

But, what’s so bad about the state of the house anyway? We could simply be a bunch of perfectionists. Not so, I assure you. Our family unfortunately possesses deadly attributes. Like making sure we have no free time. Like purchasing whatever is on sale. Like being easily attached to physical objects, and having no soft spot for feather dusters. We could qualify for any TV show featuring a nasally host, gay designer, and buff carpenter. Our house can get horrible:

Every non-matte surface always looks like it’s last been cleaned with melted butter rather than Windex. The refrigerator. Oversized tubs of mayonnaise, Cheez Whiz, ketchup, and pickles my parents buy serially at Costco – because their thoughts converge but not their schedules – are covered with a layer of raspberry jam from the shelf above. The twin or triplet jumbo containers are sometimes surrounded with stuff whose nature – dairy, vegetable, or meat – is no longer identifiable. The state of the two bathrooms is similar.

But above all, clutters. The wardrobe next to the main entrance, for instance. Its shelves are covered with golf balls, a phenol red bottle for the swimming pool, dad’s last five cell phone chargers, spilled sunscreen, Swix ski wax, a Santa Clause hat, and a pamphlet Jehova Witnesses left at our doorstep 3 or 10 years ago. Among other things. And the basement, a gigantic version of the every drawer, wardrobe and shelf also overstuffed with some variation of the list above, is a clutter. A very shameful clutter.

So, when do we get our act together? When does the mess finally tip mom’s hate hate scale? Likely answer: grandma.

Growing up, the neurotic cleaning episodes invariably preceded evenings with people owning a different permanent address from ours. Select couples my mom and dad had befriended, for example. Or relatives. The task was to dupe everyone into thinking we had our shit together; that there existed a bit of Martha Stewart in each of us. Unfortunately, our proverbial “shit” was about as “together” as Woods and Nordegren. And as I’ve tried to convey, Martha has more in common with a 442 V8 engine than she does with anyone of us.

I’m not sure who we were trying to fool. I do know that the countertop was shiny by the time someone else rang the doorbell.

That someone else was often my grandma. The one whose hardwood floor could be volunteered as a surgical table. The one using a refrigerator version of the Library of Congress classification system. Inspector Grandma, whose words say, “the kitchen is better than last time”, but whose eyes scream, “what are the workout videos doing next to the decorative candles?” She’s the one responsible for mom’s double hate. Grandma is Martha.

At one point in time, she visited bimonthly, providing our household with some cleaning constancy. As the frequency of her visits declined, however – Christmas, Easter, birthdays – so did the vacuuming episodes. This had the perverse effect of increasing the workload and overall stress every time a binge came along. In Pavlovian fashion, this disposition still remains today.

Now living in my own place, still slightly deer-in-a-headlight at the sight of a mop, I ponder over our cleaning methods. There ought to be a way out of this cycle of madness. A solution. After returning home for Christmas, and experiencing exactly the chain of events outlined in the earlier example, I have some thoughts for the three souls I’ve left behind.

1. For brother:

1.1. Cleaning does not consist of making a symmetric pyramid out of the Staedtler erasers, McDonald happy meal toys, Herbal Essence mail samples, and screws dad forgot to return to Costco with the rest of the malfunctioning shelf unit. Recycle the Captain Hook spyglass toy, place the erasers in your pencil case (that also means, find your pencil case first), and throw out the shampoo samples. Even though mom says she wants to try them, she won’t. And if she somehow remembers to, the empty flasks will remain on the ceramic floor next to the bathtub, until the following cleaning session. You don’t want that.

1.2. The TV room is not clean just because all seven remote controls and X-box controllers are neatly aligned over the large leather foot stand. Especially not when popcorn and chips remain underneath the couch cushions.

1.3. The walk-in wardrobe annexed to your bedroom is not your personal dumpster. It counts as part of the house, and the “walk-in” aspect of it should be conserved at all times.

2. For dad:

2.1. You know the Orange bowl sweater you won at a coaching clinic circa 1983? Or the bag full of orphaned mittens you kept in your bedroom for a decade before clandestinely moving it to brother’s Walk-In, when mom said it was time to throw them out? See clause 1.3. for consequences of such actions. And another thing, remember the twenty team baseball hats you sold the “Jonquiere Voyagers” before taking them back because the stick-on crest fell off in the rain, circa 1993? Maybe, jus maybe, you should consider throwing all of those things out. For good.

2.2. Do not, under any circumstance, get rid of any of the notebooks, t-shirts, shoes, I’ve left behind. Those things could be useful somehow.

2.3. Delaying the reorganization of clutters because you’re in a hurry and “things look good from the outside anyway” will bite you in the ass in the end. With the added bonus of you buying the same seal and crack tape for the bathtub 5 times because you don’t remember where you stored it last.

3. For mom:

3.1. When dad slow cooks pork chops, and you claim that the leftover broth will make the “best soup in the world”, and you keep the cauldron out in the snow for 3 weeks before finally throwing out the chunky ice cylinder? Who exactly are you kidding?

3.2. I’ve been repeating this for years now: “don’t expect of others what you wouldn’t do yourself”. But I think it is time for a new tactic. Here here: it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.

And it won’t be my fault either, if ever my daughter hates cleaning. Cleaning will not be done in binges. Cleaning will be fun. I will not make passive aggressive comments, even though I spent the last eight paragraphs in such a mode. I will accept my cleaning shortcomings. I will throw out my high-school notebooks and my hole-covered sweatshirts. Some day. I will not buy four barrels of Heinz ketchup. Unless they’re on sale. I will be more like Martha, and more like grandma.

Yet, considering the present state of my room and of the communal refrigerator; considering that it’s now 8:30 am, and that I feel a knot in my stomach because a friend is coming over for lunch; considering that the living room looks like a frat house, post flip-cup tournament… what are the odds of that?

In the wise words of Charlie Baxter, “fuck, and alas”. Because at the end of the day, I guess I’m just like my mother.