Creating a Dust Bunny-Safe Zone
I don’t like to clean. I realize that most people don’t, but I stand apart from most people—most women, anyway—because not only do I not like to clean, I don’t clean. The majority of women will recognize that something is dirty, grumble about having to clean, and then get to work. I stop at the grumbling part and wait for my husband to notice.
My husband is a phenomenal cleaner—I would even call him a clean freak. He doesn’t enjoy it either, but he does it. And even better, he’s good at it. The advice I always give my single friends is to marry long-time bachelors if for no other reason than they know how to clean. Either their mothers taught them well (thanks, Sandy), or they learned somewhere along the way that if they don’t clean it up, it’s going to remain that way forever.
But while I’m not a clean freak, I’m a neat freak. I can’t stand clutter of any kind. In my house, there are no stacks of mail or bills, no clothes on the floor, no magazines in a pile, and the tops of my dining room table and breakfast bar are clearly visible. I can’t think of anything that makes me crazier than looking at clutter.
My husband, the clean freak, doesn’t get it. But then again, I don’t understand why the shower needs to be scrubbed more than once a year. (It’s where you get clean—why do you need to clean the place where you get clean?!)
I blame my lack of cleaning interest—and, let’s face it, skills—on my parents. Naturally. I never had to do chores as a kid, which I always appreciated. My mother, while not a bad cleaner by any means, has been against the concept for a while now, which is why she usually brings in a professional to do it. My father, on the other hand, is a great cleaner. So good that he gets nervous when other people clean his stuff. My one attempt at laundry as a teenager came to an abrupt end when he shooed me out of the laundry room and said he’d prefer to do it.
However, that no-chores, carefree childhood came back to haunt me when I moved into my first apartment during college. About a year into my lease, a friend came to visit and stopped short in the kitchen. “When’s the last time you mopped this floor?” she asked.
Mopping? I knew what it was in theory, but since I didn’t own a mop, I told her I supposed I never had. She went out immediately to buy me a mop and then mopped my floor. While I appreciated it, that probably wasn’t the best way to teach me a lesson; I don’t think that floor ever saw another mopping. But at least there was no clutter in the apartment.
With the invention of Swiffer wet mops, I’ve made progress in the mopping department, but there are still things I have no intention of learning at this late stage. Things like ironing. I didn’t own an iron until I got married. Technically, I still don’t—it’s my husband’s. I’ve never ironed anything in my life, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise to the people I see every day.
My major contribution to our household—in addition to de-cluttering and birthing the babies—is cooking. My cooking experiences growing up were limited to exploding Pyrex on the stove while attempting to make mac ‘n cheese and a spectacularly awful batch of snickerdoodle cookies. But despite this inauspicious start, I ultimately discovered I’m quite good at cooking. My husband loves my cooking, which I’m convinced played a part in our eventual marriage. Maybe the way to his heart really was through his stomach; it sure wasn’t through dust bunny eradication. TPW