The Pissed-Off Housewife

Cleaning is kind of like exercise for me. It feels so great once I'm done that you'd think that feeling would motivate me to do it more often. It doesn't. Housework makes me resentful. I spend my time with the dust cloth angrily thinking about all the better things I could be doing (research! volunteering at a charity! going to the gym!). The fact that I probably wouldn't actually be doing any of those things, and would more likely be reading or baking or watching Oprah, is completely lost on me. So, yeah, I'm a little delusional as well as messy.

I hate living with clutter and messiness, but I've never been a neat person. My mother used to exhaust herself yelling at me to pick up my room when I was younger. My half of my college dorm room was the one strewn with clothes (clean and dirty), books, and papers. In my current house the clutter used to accumulate until I got really cranky about it and flew into a maelstrom of cleaning and organizing.

A couple of years ago, when I was laid up with a back injury, my parents got me a housekeeper for six months. Oh, my God. HEAVEN.

I cannot express the difference it has made in our home. Not in just the obvious, hey! clean countertops! way, but in that I don't find myself bitching at my husband and kids as much, or feeling the resentment build until I break down and attack the clutter. It worked out so well, that I made some cuts in the budget to keep her on after the six months were up. She comes every two weeks, leaving me with just the tidying-up cleaning in between. I figured that I was the most pathetic person ever if I couldn't at least manage that.

I still need to work on the organizing, though. The kids bring home a small forest's worth of papers from school each week. Right now my "filing" technique involves piling them next to my dresser, which is an improvement over the crazy pile I used to keep in the dining room. Sigh. Baby steps.