Tidying up until I die

Or how I never seem to reach an end to it

I am sure then when I get to the end of my life I’ll be making my own bed before I crawl back into it and slowly expire. I’ll wash the Vaseline off the rim of my glass. Whilst going to the bathroom I’ll sponge up the talcum powder foot prints that lead from the sink to the door. Also wiping the explosion of blue spit out of the sink.

Before this I’ll clean the cat bowls, using my finger nails to scrape up the dried up bits of cat food. I’ll get a meat skewer, pick out the biscuits that have rolled between the floor boards. I’ll tackle this with a hand held vacuum but it’ll need charging so I’ll rifle through the bags on the cupboard door, find the charger and then get it set up on the kitchen counter so I can suck those biscuits up properly. I’ll notice that there is a a very dry stain of ketchup on the cupboard that looks like a pig has recently been slaughtered. I’ll find the bleach and give the cupboard one last spray. I’ll climb the stairs (hopefully my grown up family will be sitting around my bed waiting for me). My last thought will be - ‘I wonder if they will remember the charger on the counter and get those last few cat biscuits.’ Then nothing.

This cycle of endless cleaning and tidying started once my first kid was born. I found I got particularly good at carrying a baby under one arm, and scooping up mess with the other. I couldn’t control anything this baby did but I could at least control the mess she created. My partner was hands on, but when he went back to work, I found that I’d developed this special power. It meant that only I could see the mess. This is the mess that families make each minute of the day. I know it’ll slow down when I get older but there will still be stuff I haven’t noticed, stuff that I have to get to another day when I have a bit more time.

The mess creation starts when you open your eyes and continues until you go to bed. Tops left off of the toothpaste. Naked Sylvanians littering the carpet (I have to match their outfits up because they’re all different sizes and this takes me at least an hour). Socks washed and hanging on the radiator. Socks that only you pair up and put away. Like I’ve said my partner does the dishwasher and he puts the washing on, he hangs it up (which I’ve heard is pretty good going from friends) but it is the pairing up of the socks that I hate most. The drudgery of it. The sitting on the bed and trying to search for that one sock. And the pants- when you have girls then everyone wears similar pants (mine don’t have Paw Patrol characters which makes is a little easier), and so you have to hold them up for a moment to consider who they belong to.

I have written about this before- this thing where you can’t rest until the house is tidy which means that you never rest. And I KNOW that we judge one another on our ability to stay on top of this mess. We think that a woman with a crazy messy house isn’t quite up to scratch. We might even mention it to someone else and then feel guilty. Didn’t she get the memo about how we had to stay on top of this stuff? This smorgasbord of mess flowing in and never flowing out.

‘I don’t want to come to your house,’ I said to a friend, ‘Unless you can put skid marks down the toilet and leave some wet towels on the bathroom floor.’

I wanted to add that maybe a ball of hair tugged out of a hairbrush left by the sink would be disgustingly reassuring that she was human.

‘Don’t worry my house is always like that,’ she replied.

I have been to houses that are not like that. Ones where the host wipes up the minute you pick your cup up, so she can erase the coffee stain you’ve left on the work top. I don’t take this personally. I know what’s going on. The mess and the dirt is a barrier to relaxation. She won’t focus on what we’re talking about until it’s gone. In fact she won’t hear a word coming out of my mouth until the cups are back in the dishwasher.

What’s the solution?

Well distributing the chores is obviously the main one. The issue however is that our other halves don’t see the stuff as we do. It’s social conditioning. It’s the statistic I read that during lockdown it was girls that cleaned with their mothers whilst boys got on with their home learning (this wasn’t true in my house but that’s because the girls were perhaps too young).

I want to see a surface with no mess. I want to get to the bathroom and there is no blob of toothpaste waiting for me to wipe up. I want to be free. I want to rest.

As my soul catapults itself into the whirling pool of stars, I will open my arms and embrace the nothingness punctuated by dots of light. A voice will come out of the darkness: ‘No more blobs of toothpaste,’ it’ll say, ‘You can finally rest up.’

In that moment I won’t hear because I will be feeling nothing but unadulterated bliss. ‘Why did I even bother?’ I will think before my essence evaporates into a million shiny atoms.