I’m drowning in a sea of housework, swept away by waves of wet bath towels and vicious dustbunnies. My tasks thrive like infant Godzillas– starting ugly, but small, and maturing to colossal proportions by the day’s end no matter how many missiles I launch at them. If my house were Tokyo, there’d be big lizard footprints all over the den. It wasn’t always this way.
In my single days, it took approximately 12 minutes each morning to keep things in order. And those were the shag carpet days, when vacuuming was like a safari. You just never knew what wildlife was lingering in that stuff. Then I got married.
My husband is reasonably neat, although we have different standards. When he wipes down the counters and a few crumbs escape, he shrugs his shoulders, falls into his recliner and hopes one of the cats wants a snack. When I wipe down the counters, I don’t rest until each and every crumb has been hunted down like the James gang and summarily executed. And any cats found on the counter better know how to outrun a broom.
Once when I went away for almost three weeks, I left my hubby with a long list of things to be done. I really didn’t expect to return to fresh-cut tulips and beef stroganoff bubbling on the stove and I didn’t. The house had crumb residue from its stem to its stern and I immediately pitched in and started scrubbing. When I spoke to my husband, he confessed he’d never gotten around to changing the beds in my absence — one of the things on my list. But, he told me, it was OK.
“I only slept on my side of the bed so your side’s still clean,” he rationalized, as serious as a tax collector on April 15th. I chose to change the bed anyway, but at least he tried. My kids are another story.
They have a completely different attitude toward housework, which they rank right up there alongside finding spare body parts on their dinner plates. Even small tasks induce more work than their Poke-mon-besotted little brains can absorb.
Take the refrigerator. If there’s so much as a drop of food or drink residue clinging to a container, they put it back in the fridge. That’s why I constantly run out of orange juice, since I labor under the naive notion that two orange juice containers in the refrigerator mean we actually possess orange juice. Instead, they’re both empty except for an amount so small Thumbelina would go thirsty. But they’re put back because it requires slightly more effort to walk across the room and place the empties into the recycling bin.
Similarly, I find wet towels on the floors, shoes littering the hallways, crayons floating around the den like an asteroid belt and even a few shriveled up grapes under their beds. And when I insist they clean up after themselves, they strike martyred poses. My son even had the nerve to complain he was tired of “Doing all the work around here.” He says he’s going to marry when he grows up so he’ll have help. He’ll tackle the outside stuff and his wife (who undoubtedly will dress in black and white and come equipped with a feather duster) will do the inside stuff. Sort of a maid you don’t have to pay.
You know that’s not such a bad idea. In fact, I like it a lot. So much so that when I finish this column, I’m going to ignore that pyramid of filthy clothes that’s taken over the laundry room and read a book.
But first I’m going to see the ladies in classified about placing a want ad for a wife.
(To see more of Carole's work, visit www.funnywords.com or www.thehumorwriter.com..)
