Compulsion Cleaning

Moms agree: there are certain types of cleaning that qualify as compulsion. It can be a three-week-long Spring cleaning binge or weekly cleaning before the cleaning lady comes. I have a friend who used to clean like a fiend -- for the exterminator. As for me, my compulsion cleaning is the cleaning I do before my Mother comes to visit.

What am I afraid of?

Will she disown me if she looks under the love seat and finds the lonely remnant of the stinky sock fight my boys had last night?

Will she click her tongue in disapproval at the tiny hand prints of my three-year-old left from watching squirrels play outside our dining room window? Will she check for dust behind the refrigerator? Will she scowl at an unscoured bit of shower soap scum?

Does she walk through my home judging, running her glowing white gloves over every surface?

Of course not. But in case you're listening, SC Johnson, if you ran television ads with only the words

YOUR MOTHER IS COMING

and the music from Psycho, I would buy every product in your product line.

What is funny is that my Mom and I have a good relationship, and I look forward to her coming. She is my friend and my children's treasured grandmother. But while she is here, I live in fear that she will notice something that needs doing around our home and utter those four fateful words no mother wants any other woman to say in her home.

"Let me do it."

When Mom comes to visit, I work myself ragged just trying to beat her to whatever job catches her attention. After supper, there is practically a race for the job I despise the most -- washing the dishes.

In any other circumstance, I would bring flowers to someone who washed the dishes for me. I have been known to pay my oldest son a whopping dollar to do a big load of dishes. Today's true confession of motherhood is this: our supper dishes usually wait until morning to be done. At the end of my day there are just a thousand places I would rather spend my last reserves of energy. So, dishes get rinsed or scraped and neatly stacked, but I do not load the dishwasher or wash the pans until morning. Need proof?


Voila. Last night's dishes. Martha Stewart perfection I am not.

Maybe that's what I'm worried my mother will suddenly "discover." It's my horrid truth of mothering, that I would rather have a tickle fight with my kids after supper or sit and watch the news with my husband than tackle a pile of dishes.

I guess that's why for the next five days there will be a race from the supper table to see which woman can get the fastest case of dishpan hands. It's a pride thing.

I suppose it's something I should work on. Maybe I should be more accepting of help or give my mother more credit for understanding the stresses of raising my brood. After all, she raised six of us, so she's no stranger to the cluttered life of a mother with young children -- right?

Right.

So, I'm resolving to do better during this visit, here, publicly, on Midwest Moms. (She arrives tomorrow... have I mentioned it?) I will try to let go of small details and stop this compulsive cleaning behavior.


Yep. I'll get started on that...


... right after I clean the grout in the front hallway. Anybody got a toothbrush?

- Midwest Mom

Super Quick Turbo-Cleaning Tips

~Your mother-in-law just called. She's "dropping in" for tea in a half hour.

~Your son announces that he's invited a friend for dinner. Tonight.

~Your husband calls. The guys are coming by for a beer after work.

~You just got home from a rough day at the office. The calendar tells you that book club is tonight -- and it's at your house!


You look around you and see an ocean of clutter.

You ask yourself, Why don't people just put things away?

Don't panic. We've all been there.

It's the problem with actually having human beings living in your house. I mean, I would challenge any home decorating magazine to photograph that lovely living room on the cover after my children had been set loose in it for 15 minutes. I bet their readers would be surprised at the transformation. Better yet, we could televise the metamorphosis as a new reality show called "School-Kid Room Makeover: Clutter Edition".

But the clock is ticking!
You've got to get this place cleaned up!

Tip #1: Vacuum and dust at the same time. A quick vacuuming job does wonders, but why stop at floors? Slap on an attachment to quick clean ceiling fan blades or dust the mantle. (Take care not to suck up that photo of Great Aunt Winifred or the glazed clay dinosaur your husband made in kindergarten!)

Tip #2: Choose a gathering place for Clutter. As you vacuum each room, choose a table that you can throw "loose items" onto. In our house, that usually means the Han Solo Ice Planet Hoth Action Figure that was defending the dining room table, one pink sock that had been sticking out from under the couch (that's where it was!), and yesterday's mail, newspaper, and 17 fliers from school that were scattered around the kitchen. Choose a central location as you clean and just pile up that clutter!

Tip #3: Use Laundry baskets for more than Laundry. Once the floors are picked up and the clutter is centralized, I make a run from room to room with a laundry basket. Clutter goes in and either A) gets put in its place when I get to the next room, or B) holy mother of heaven they're going to be here in 2 minutes! ...so into the closet goes the clutter basket. It's true. I do it. (Don't you dare check my closets next time you're over unexpectedly!) Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Tip #4: Give hard surfaces a Lick and a Promise. Ever heard of Clorox wipes? Love 'em. They are made for situations like this. A greener alternative is to have a damp cloth, a dry cloth, and a bottle of eco-friendly cleaner ready under your sink. Take a quick run through each room looking for jelly fingerprints, dirty light switches, face-prints on the windows, or toothpaste spit onto the bathroom mirror. Ew. Wipe down counters, door knobs, faucet handles, and anywhere else that grime rears its ugly "this is our house and we live in it" head. (Also, ever since Mr. Clean graced the world with his handy Magic Eraser, my love for him as increased tenfold.) You can always do a better clean-up job later when you have time. For now, a quick clean is enough.

Tip #5: Don't just use your eyes -- use your sniffer. Have you been cooking cabbage today? Open the window! Does your garbage can smell like a stink bomb? Take that bag out to the garage. (Or if you don't think your guests will need to use it, take the whole can out there!) And, have mercy on us all! Hubby's running shoes must be moved from the front hallway!

Tip #6: Use products that do more than one thing. Next time you're shopping, look for products that can do more than one thing. Swiffer Wet can clean a dusty floor and deodorize a room. Putting a dryer sheet in your vacuum bag can do the same thing. Some Green cleaners can be diluted to different concentrations to fit a variety of cleaning tasks. There is nothing wrong with saving labor -- especially when you're tight on time!

And finally...

Tip #7: Marshal the troops! When time is tight, everyone in the house should be helping to get things ship-shape. Ask your sons to clean up their toys and books from the clutter depot. Ask your spouse to put dishes in the dishwasher. Ask your daughter to assemble some snacks and drinks for your guests. And don't forget to schedule in 2 minutes for yourself when all the work is done, to change into a shirt with no spit-up and brush your hair. (If you have time, a glass of wine wouldn't hurt, either!)

Take a deep breath... Whew! You're done.

You can slap on a welcoming smile and answer that door.



- Midwest Mom

Be Careful What You Leave Behind

You know, graffiti is a wonderful thing. Anytime I see interesting graffiti, I try to push back any sense of annoyance at the defacement of property and just appreciate the art of it.

The thinker in me believes that what a person chooses to write for all to see says something about him or her. Maybe Midwest Moms is my own, carefully crafted form of graffiti.

Years ago, I lived in Washington, D.C. I was a carless college student. My job was far from campus, so I had to take the metro and a couple of buses to get there. Any bus or traincar I rode in always had graffiti from someone called "Cool Disco Dan."

Cool Disco Dan's mark could be seen anywhere the public transit system went. It was scrawled in the traincars or spray painted on the concrete barriers outside the train windows. It was on one or more of the seats of any bus I ever rode in the District. I always wondered about Cool Disco Dan -- who he was and why the heck he was riding the bus all the time? What was his day job? All I knew was that he was cool and he really dug disco. Maybe that's all I needed to know.

I like to think that graffiti says something about the person who writes it. My parents tell a story about when my oldest sister was in kindergarten. They noticed one day that she was in the bathroom for a long time. They checked on her a few times and she said she was fine -- she just needed more time to 'finish up'. When she finally emerged, apparently, she was grinning from ear to ear. My mother thought nothing of it.

Later that day, my mother went into the bathroom to clean and what did she find? My sister's name scratched deep into the toilet seat. From the way it was facing, it had to have been written by the, shall we say, toilet sitter. My sister may have blamed it on her younger siblings at first. But she was cornered into admitting the truth by the fact that, well, they couldn't write yet. And it was her name.

Which brings me to something else I've noticed about graffiti: often, it is truth-telling, even when you don't want it to be.

If you're wondering why I'm exploring this idea right now, I'll tell you. We've been renovating our children's bedroom this month. This weekend was spent cleaning up the mess from some of the renovation, including cleaning my boys cherry bunk beds. The beds were made by my husband's grandfather and first slept in by his dad. My husband and his brother slept in them as children, and now our boys do. As a way to honor the wonderful heritage of this particular piece of furniture, I thought I would give them a good washing.

I removed remnants of fossilized bubble gum and old adhesive from countless stickers. I washed and washed, and when the washing was done, I rubbed down the wood with linseed oil. The beds were beautiful.

As I started to move them back into their place, I thought, "Why just wash the beds? I should clean up the slats, too. After all, whoever is in the bottom bunk has to look at them all the time."

It was then that I found it -- a treasure-trove of graffiti from my husband's boyhood. Apparently, he had been the bottom bunk kid for a while and enjoyed writing from time to time.

He had drawn in pencil and crayon, and much of it was undecipherable. But one particularly prominent item stood out.

It explains a lot -- especially about my boys and what they get from their father.

In dark crayon in large capital letters was a word my husband, apparently, valued so highly that he wanted to look at it before bed every single night. As his lasting gift to future generations of our family that might sleep in the bed where he once slept as a boy, he wrote the word...






FARTS!




Yes, we had a hearty laugh at it and I couldn't bring myself to wash it off. Certain things should be kept sacred, especially those things 'passed on' from father to son.

Don't you agree?


- Midwest Mom