The Half-Assed Housekeeper

 It's possible that I'm the worst housekeeper in the country, except maybe those people on Hoarders. My family kept things neat and somewhat tidy, but no one was frantically scrubbing floors or bleaching every surface. In fact, when we'd walk home from school and find my mom vacuuming or dusting the living room, we'd ask, "Are we having company?" She'd give us all a dirty look and shoo us away while she finished her cleaning.

 When I first lived on my own, I had a bad habit of letting dishes pile up and I'd vacuum every new moon or so when I wasn't busy living my working single girl life. When I was older and got married, my housekeeping skills never really improved. Sure, I owned a mop by then, but I still wasn't obsessing about whether or not I could see my own reflection in the linoleum or whether my glasses had water spots. It wasn't until I had moved on to Husband #2 that I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. My husband went to visit his mother and she said he needed his shirt ironed. He said I had already done it and she called me--called me!--and told me in so many words that I had done a crappy job and that I didn't know what I was doing. After that, I noticed I didn't measure up in many ways: my laundry didn't smell as good as hers, my floors weren't as clean as hers, my kitchen wasn't spotless like hers.

 Still, the cleanest my subsequent homes got were when I was moving out and needed my security deposit back. It wasn't until very recently, when we moved out of our old house and into this one, that I realized I had a condition my family calls House Blindness--we just don't see mess. We're so used to seeing the ignored stack of mail on the dining table that it seems normal. We only look around at eye level, so we don't notice the colony of spiderwebs in the corner. I just don't care that my fitted sheets are sort of wadded up into blobs in the linen closet instead of folded like American flags.

 So I am trying something new in this house: I am actually trying to keep it as clean as possible...well, at least for me. It's sort of my dirty little secret that I'm a dirty little housekeeper. Now I try to make sure I run the dishwasher while I Swiffer the floor each night and I try to actually pick things up to clean under them. I throw out the mail instead of thinking I'm actually going to read it some day. I still have a problem with ironing, but really, who irons nowadays? I'll also never have Martha Stewart-esque folded sheets in my linen closet, but as long as my mother-in-law doesn't look in there, I think I'm okay.