The Vision Thing

[naomikritzer]

pegkerr today had post about her family's failure to notice messes that must be cleaned up. After her husband's birthday, there was a pile of wrapping paper in the middle of the living room. Peg left it, for fifteen days, wondering if anyone else would notice and throw it away. No one did.

This got me thinking about my own process, as a kid and young adult, learning this -- and living with people who hadn't (yet) learned.

I grew up in a clean, uncluttered house. My mother is a much better housekeeper than I am. So is my father. They were egalitarian about housework: my mother probably did more of the indoor work and my father more of the outdoor work, but they both cooked, both washed dishes, and when my father cleaned inside the house, he wasn't "helping my mother" but just cleaning. The same went for when my mother did yardwork; she was participating, not "helping out."

I was lazy and self-centered in all the typical privileged-young-kid ways. I had few chores, and I complained about performing the chores I had (particularly because I was the oldest, and had to do stuff my younger siblings didn't do). I absolutely would have stepped over wrapping paper every day for a week and a half without picking it up.

To be fair to self-centered kids everywhere, we spend the first ten years or so training them to leave stuff alone if it doesn't belong to them, or if we haven't given them permission to use it. It's not really surprising that they develop blind spots that also cover messes they didn't make.

Anyway, when I was seventeen or eighteen, I got a lecture from my mother (in response to some act of obliviousness which I no longer remember at all) in which she pointed out that as a member of the household, I could simply notice when something needed cleaning and clean it. This one time, for whatever reason, it sunk in. I immediately became much more helpful. I would notice dishes left out, and put them in the dishwasher. If I'd taken the car out and it was low on gas, I bought gas. My mother remembers this very clearly (we talked about it recently) and said it was the weirdest thing, because it's not like we hadn't had that conversation about 8 million times before. Looking back, this was definitely one of the moments where I made a big jump in maturity.

Then I went off to college. My first summer, I got a job on campus and shared an apartment for the summer with probably_lost and another guy named Geoff. I was not dating either Curtis or Geoff, but I was the only woman in the apartment. Remember this point, as it will be important later.

Curtis and I had no idea how to cook, but fortunately Geoff was willing to cook for all of us if we cleaned up. That worked out reasonably well. But there's more to maintaining a clean living space than just dishes. There's also the bathroom, the kitchen floor, the appliances... To make matters worse, the apartment was filthy when we got it. (We were subletters. The student apartment scene in Northfield didn't work the way normal apartments do -- at some point surely a security deposit was paid and a lease was signed, but we just left a rent check with the desk clerk at the Archer House and paid the utility bills that arrived addressed to a bunch of names we didn't recognize.)

Neither Curtis nor Geoff really seemed to notice messes, at least not the kind that accumulate gradually, like sink grime. I did, and they drove me increasingly crazy. Also, although Curtis and Geoff are not exactly macho sexist types (Curtis went on to minor in Women's Studies), I attributed their failure to notice messes to sexist conditioning. So, being a responsible, mature adult, I handled my frustration in a responsible, mature way: I said nothing, simmering silently and getting more and more fed up until I exploded in hysterical, volcanic rage one evening and stomped out.

(College was so much fun. I sometimes fantasize about having the freedom and opportunities of college without the angst and grief of being an 18-year-old through 22-year-old who was still working out Interacting With Other Human Beings 101.)

Now, what's interesting is that Curtis and I did share living space again our senior year -- we were both residents in Science Fiction House. Curtis was the house manager. We did actually still get cleaned by housekeeping: they came and did the shared areas. We were required to wash our own dishes, clean out the fridge, take out the garbage, and maintain a couple of other things. Also, since we hosted two or three events every single week, we did a lot of extra cleaning. Curtis, by then, had long since learned to see the messes, and he told me that he understood now why I had gotten so frustrated. Though he thought I could probably have handled it better. (Ya think? *snort*)

*

As a mother, I have to strike a weird balance between seeing and not seeing messes. At one point I signed up for a mailing list run by someone called the FlyLady. I have a whole lot of issues with the FlyLady, but here's the one that was the biggest problem with me: when I was cleaning as much as she wanted me to clean, and decluttering and all the rest, I actually saw the messes all the time. And it was driving me crazy. Molly is five, and Kiera is two. There are certain messes that they make and fail to clean up over and over again -- and when I was doing FlyLady, it drove me insane that the mittens were always, always ending up on the floor. It just wasn't worth the angst.

My office is another example of this, depressingly enough. Every time I clean it, the girls mess it up again. If I see the mess, it drives me crazy. So I don't see it, and as a result, I have a really messy office. The solution here is to be more assertive about keeping them from leaving their toys in here, but most of the time that just seems like too much trouble.

*

On a separate thread Peg created about this issue, someone linked to a posting about The Shiny Economy, which is a system for getting housework done originally designed by a polyamorous household. Reading it over, I was struck by how well it would have worked in the shared housing arrangements I had in college. I described it to Ed over dinner, and Molly perked up her ears; she thought it sounded like a great idea. Except, since she's only five, letting her do chores is significantly more work for me than just doing them myself.

*

I don't know how to solve Peg's problem. I don't know how to make an adult learn to see the mess that's there, and take responsibility for it. It is tempting to say that this is a gender-based problem -- that women are socialized to see the collective mess and feel responsible for it, while men are (at best) taught to clean up their personal debris, while taking no responsibility for the messes that everyone contributed to. However, I've known plenty of adult women who were every bit as blind to squalor as I was at 15.

*

I wish I were as good at housekeeping as my mother. My mother has a LIFE, too, it's not like she spends all day cleaning. When I was a teenager, she was in graduate school. Now she's a tenured professor. She spent the fall directing a play. And yet her house is immaculate. She scoffs when I say that -- she says my standards are just low. But no, I've seen a lot of houses, and my parents are unusually tidy and clean. It helps that they are really good at de-cluttering; if there were one housekeeping skill I wish my mother had consciously and deliberately instructed me in, it's how to declutter.

When we visit my parents' house in Madison, Ed has observed that he has to hold onto his teacups or they get whisked off and loaded into the dishwasher while he's heating up water for another cup.

I have speculated a few times that my mother really does have a house-elf, and that's how she does it.

Comments

[probably-lost.livejournal.com]

Not exactly my finest hour, that. At least I did catch on eventually (though I'm not sure exactly when).

[naomikritzer]

That summer was such a learning experience, wasn't it? :-D

Rambling response

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I cheat. About six or seven months ago, a friend of ours went into the all-organic, natural product house cleaning business. And I signed up. We now budget for house cleaning and general yard maintance, and it really does make life just generally easier. I know not everyone can afford it (and I'm getting a friend/early-adopter discount), but I've found it to be worth every penny.

I hate cleaning house. My mother and I never did it well when I was growing up. Being a single mom with a very very busy child, mom always put housework last, and it showed. It still shows in her house, and although I've tried to overcome it, touchstone commented on Sunday that there are some messes that I just don't see. Mostly it's the out of the way ones -- stuff that's fallen behind a desk or a dresser -- that I'm simply oblivious too.

For us, the thing that works best is combined cleaning. At some point, I reach a stage where the house is too chaotic, and I declare a straightening session. Daily chores are divided up (he does dishes; I do pots. He puts away books; I do laundry) in a rough fashion, and it generally seems to work.

I read the article that Peg referenced, and thought about its relevance to my life briefly before mostly dismissing it. I do do a lot more of the household stuff than my husband, but it's more because of a fundamental difference in personality than because of gender roles. I am incapable of sitting still and paying attention to one thing for more than 10 minutes at time. So I'll play a round of Civ 4, then wander the house. While wandering, I'll make the bed. Or read a chapter of a book. Or wash a pot. Or go plant some flowers. I'll then go back and play another round. Repeat for several hours while my husband is steadily playing his own Civ game. I could have played Civ for four hours. I just chose not to. (Because it would drive me insane.)

(College was so much fun. I sometimes fantasize about having the freedom and opportunities of college without the angst and grief of being an 18-year-old through 22-year-old who was still working out Interacting With Other Human Beings 101.)
Dear gods, that would be nice.

Re: Rambling response

[naomikritzer]

The article Peg linked to annoyed me. She seems to think that college-educated women who willingly give up paid work to care for their children are a huge PROBLEM, and since giving us "choices" didn't work out well (we chose to stay home!) something else Needs To Be Done.

My response to this might violate someone's obscenity filter, so I'll just leave it to your imagination.

Re: Rambling response

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

I followed her underlying logic: How can women win the 'equality wars' if we're constantly giving up positions of power.

However, I found her position that we should all go out, work 80-120 hour/week jobs that we hate and compete for the highest pressure jobs possible because we are otherwise failng our sisters to be...well, laughable to put it nicely.

grrr...

[dmyersta.livejournal.com]

having read these comments I had to read the article.

I find the author's paradigm crippling and wrote an entire paper my frosh year of college for my feminism class about the harm the idea of the super-mom has done to society. In that paper I argued the solution is not to find more ways to induce women to enter the work-force, but rather to make it socially acceptable for men who wish to stay home to do so and also to give more value to the invaluable service that "tending the home fire" serves our society!

grrr...

[perimyndith.livejournal.com]

My mother claims to have spent two days cleaning house last week--not decluttering, actual cleaning. I don't think I believe her, because I can't recall ever seeing her house actually dirty. Certainly not since my brothers both moved out a few years ago.

Somehow my husband has developed the occassional ability to notice mess, but only if it's in the kitchen or the living room. All other messes remain invisible.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Oh. And what did you not like about Flylady?

[naomikritzer]

Her perkiness annoyed the living heck out of me. And the more I cleaned, the bitchier I got to everyone around me. Cleaning is demoralizing enough when you've got a toddler who follows you around making messes, and the more time I spent cleaning the more irritated I got by this. I pulled up my rant that I wrote after trying FlyLady for a couple of weeks, and I was feeling incredibly used up at that point: Molly was 16 months old, she napped in my LAP, she stayed up until eleven at night and slept with me for much of the night. I got almost NO time to myself. So you can imagine how thrilling it was to have the FlyLady nagging me on top of that.