Women Like Me : Entrepreneurs and Con Artists

Housework: The Real Dirt

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Apply Emotion and Guilt Liberally

We clean with emotion and guilt and this allows housework to expand and fill all the time available. It takes all weekend to clean if you have all weekend or thirty seconds if a friend's car pulls into your driveway. We fear that a less than perfect house will tell the neighbours that you are a poor mother. Dust on a top bookshelf will prove his mother was right all along - you are a failure as a wife. We often make the error of confusing love and services; there is no connection between amount of love enjoyed and cleaning services performed.

We have"Cinderella Guilt" caused by the beautiful long suffering housecleaner who never told her father how she was being abused. She suffered and got happily ever after; so we scrub on. This irrational guilt is expressed in an interesting variety of ways.

Many of us clean with mother or mother-in-law sitting on our head. You cannot clean to meet your mother's twenty-four hour a day standards. If you only have Sunday to clean tell your mom that Sunday evening visits are best, a Monday house is acceptable and by Thursday "it's use at your own risk," at your home. If your mother-in-law worries you, even though she lives in Rome, call the airlines and make a deal. They can call you when she reaches the Rome airport giving you a lead time of at least 9 hours.

The second illogical sign of Cindy guilt is cleaning for friends. Why do you think they are gathering at your house? They probably cannot sit down in theirs. If they are not interested in your company but only in the state of your cupboards then you need new friends.

The third most popular sign of guilt is the fear of being robbed. When I first encountered this fear I thought it bizarre and personal; now I know that it is common. Women have been known to go home from work at lunch to make their bed, clean for weeks before going on vacation (and are apparently tired and crabby through all the vacation quality time). Are you afraid the thief will decide your house is not eligible to be robbed because you store your towels in the dryer? Do you really fear local headlines that announce "DIRTY HOUSEKEEPER GETS WHAT SHE DESERVES"? Look at your chaos as an inexpensive security system preventing the thief from finding anything of value.

Lastly, women clean for God. They fear that She will lift the roof from their home and tsk, tsk at the dustballs. Forget it. God is busy too. She needs time and energy for the trouble spots of the world. As messy as it may be your house will not attract her attention. Her bed probably isn't made most of the time.

Our mothers kept perfect homes because they had the twenty-four hours a day it takes to do it. I am home about 20 minutes a week. Perhaps I could rent my house to another family during the day to help pay for the mortgage. It's a shame to pay for an empty building. My ideal guiltless dream home would take little time or energy. It would be plastic, with a drain in the middle of the floor and a fire hose by the door. Every morning as I rushed out the door I could blast it clean and it would drip-dry by my return.

Our mothers needed the perfect home as a show place for their creativity and skill but our lives have ever increasing areas to build our self esteem. My mother's standby expression of praise for a departed female friend or relative was "you could eat off her floors". You do not want to have this as the sum total of your life.

TO BE CONTINUED