The Catholic Wife - Clean the House?

Clean the House? HAHAHAHAHA! (January 24, 2008)

by Rachel Hayden

I dream of the day when I can say I’m the perfect wife. My house will be clean, dinner will be perfect, and my hair won’t be frizzy. However, that will continue to be a lifelong dream because I have a problem: I hate housework. I detest it! When I was single and lived on my own, my apartment was frightening. I’d have stacks of stuff everywhere and it didn’t bother me. I’ll never forget the time I arrived home to my small apartment after school and found my sister there, having let herself in with her key, washing my dishes because they were all over the kitchen and she was afraid I’d be overtaken by rats. I struggle with finding the time to clean. When I get home from work, I normally have to fix dinner. Then, I either have to do homework or sew, depending on the evening. Before I know it, it’s time to get ready to turn in and start the day all over again. Weekends are my only chance to clean yet it seems like we spend our entire weekend zooming from point A to point Q and back to point C with no break in between. All the sudden, its bedtime on Sunday night again and there is now enough dog fur on the carpet and couch to gather up and knit into a fashionable sweater. I’m pulling clean uniforms out of the dryer on Monday morning to wear to work because I never got a chance to put away laundry over the weekend. In fact, the computer desk where I sit writing this is piled 2.5 feet high with schoolbooks, unprocessed mail, fabric, sewing scraps, an iPod charger, my Bible, a clean pair of socks (not sure why those are there), and an empty cup. Squeezed in the middle of all this junk is my laptop and mouse. This is a six-foot table holding 18 cubic feet of STUFF.

And let me just interject that my husband does help around the house. He’s not one of those men that believes that I, as the wife, must do everything around the house. There are tasks, however, that I would prefer he leave to me (vacuuming, cooking, and putting away dishes to name a few.) Yet even with his help, our house gets messy again very quickly. I do not understand how two people and a dog can junk up a 1000 sq ft home as fast as we do.

Anyway, I decided to make a cleaning schedule. My mother tells me that if I clean a little bit each day, I should be able to keep it that way. I want to believe her because she doesn’t lie….but do I have a “little bit” of time each day? So I now have a “Daily Agenda” book and I’m writing all of my cleaning tasks in it for the upcoming week. Then I plan to get home from work, fix dinner, pop open my little agenda book and begin checking things off my list. I am envisioning a day where I will have a neat home every single day and will be able to keep it that way. All this is dependent, of course, on my keeping the Daily Agenda book away from this computer desk. If I set it down here, it will be swallowed up like a rat by an anaconda and next Monday, I’ll be digging uniform pants out of the dryer at 5:30am, wondering what happened to my brilliant plan. Lord, give me the ability to stick to a schedule!