The Clean Gene

You know you are domestically challenged, when given the opportunity to work from home, the luxury that all of us strive for, you think, "I don't want to sit in that crap hole all day." No, the squalor called home, is just were you come home at the absolute end of the day to lay your head and leave in a rush the next morning. You rise and leave before you have time to really look around at your own filth. That might be why pigs sleep so much. They look around at the mud and think, I can't handle this, so they roll around in it, close their eyes and sleep. Are we as humans much different if we go to bed with dirty clothes at our feet?

You know it's bad when at the thought of company coming to visit, your significant other cheers like a six year-old who just won a trip to Disney world, "hell yeah, they can come, that means you'll clean up!"

I think the clean gene skips a generation, at least in females. My mother would rather find out that she had to have a limb removed than realize that her base-boards have dust, and, gasp, someone came over and saw it! When cooking, I would use a spoon to stir something, turn to look at the recipe and the spoon would be gone - she would have already cleaned it. My step-father used to joke that if he got up in the night to use the bathroom, he'd come back and the bed would be made. I'm sure it's not far from the truth.

So it seems, my mother, while not infected with the sloppy gene, was merely a carrier. My grandmother wasn't dirty, but cluttered. When you first got to her house, your eyes would be dizzy with all the things to look at. Although, now that I reflect, it was clean clutter, because my mom would constantly clean when we were there. We'd go over to visit and my mom would sterilize the stove or some other project, while I watched Lawrence Welk with my grandmother. Once, in about 1997 my brother was in the kitchen looking for some jelly for a biscuit. He opened up the jar to spread it on. Something looked awry, he read the label...it had expired ten years prior.

The living room, kitchen and bedrooms at my Grandmother's were decently cleaned, but we all knew what lurked behind the mysterious door in the dining room. It was the dark family secret. Yes, it was was the largest room in the house, packed floor to ceiling with what could only be described as junk. Judging from the outside of the house, this room had windows, although I never actually saw them from the inside.

It was a 'spare' room, which makes sense, because it had a spare of everything, spare beds (stacked on their sides), an extra couple of dressers, an spare refrigerator, you get the idea. I'm sure when her preacher came over for Sunday dinner, he had no idea that the wall to his left was being held up on the other side by 4 mattresses and a box of macrame.

When you're on the planet 90 years, you accumulate some stuff. Which frightens me about my multiple junk drawers. That's how it starts out, a small harmless junk drawer in your kitchen. Then a harmless misc. box in your closet. Next thing you know, you're sitting in a rocker watching As The World Turns, with the contents of half of your home a virtual mystery to you.

Although my mother rarely spoke about this room, other than exasperated plea's to clean it, I know it haunted her. Sometimes as we got in the Lynx station wagon and drove away, she'd look at the back of the house, with a sad look in her eye. I remember overhearing conversations with my mom saying to my grandmother, with the same frustrated love that one might have convincing their loved one to check into rehab, "if you can't do it on your own, you've got to get help."

While I was away in college, there was some sort of intervention, because once I went to see my grandmother and it had been cleaned. It was odd, like the house had been remodeled in a room no one went in. In fact, I'm not sure that the walls were structually sound without furniture holding them up.

I've noticed the clean gene not only in my family, but in others. Messy moma's have clean daughters, it's just a biological fact. So, for the sake of my future potential daughter, I'm willing to sacrafice my own cleanliness, just to ensure she has a healthy dose of obsessive complusiveness.