My Husband is Channeling my Parents

If you've known me for very long, you know that I came from two wonderful parents who had a bit of an obsession with cleaning. That's putting it mildly. They were insane about cleaning. They spent a day on doorknobs. They vacuumed daily. They polished the copper pipes BEHIND the paneling. See, I mean they took it SERIOUSLY.

Perhaps in response to that, I am not particularly neat. I don't like DIRTY but I don't mind clutter. I tend to collect too many things (purses, Pooh characters, Mary Englebriet, etc.) I'd love for my house to be picked up and neat--I just don't want to be the person responsible for doing it. At one point, I found the PERFECT solution. One my bestest friends on the planet took a job as a cleaning lady and I hired her. It was great. She did the work, I got to spend time with her and she got paid. A real win-win situation. (I just don't understand why she won't do it for me anymore, just because we live 2,200 miles apart!)

So, our house is cluttered. Majorly. The kids do daily chores that keep the carpets fairly vacuumed, laundry hung up and bathrooms relatively presentable but that it where it ends. My poor husband has been saddled with much of the rest, from dishes to laundry. He does a good job of it but recently, he has been a tad unhappy.

He is tired--understandably--of being the only one who clears the kitchen table, picks up the dirty glasses strewn about the house, putting toilet paper ON the holder and generally navigating around everyone else's CRAP. He was raised in a neat home, not neurotically neat like mine, but still neat.

So lately, he has made cleaning a higher priority. Everytime one of us walks by him, he hands us something to put away, throw away or give away. After the fifth time, it gets a little old, lemme tell ya. He gets tired of doing it and we get tired of being given yet another thing to deal with. At this morning's "Family meeting", he repeated his desire for all of us to take more responsibility for cleaning up the clutter around the house. We all reluctantly agreed. Just because he is right doesn't mean we have to like it, correct?!?

So, we are keeping Goodwill well supplied as trash bag after trash bag after box after grocery sack leaves the house full of stuff that we no longer want, no longer wear, no longer like or no longer have any idea where to put it. The house keeps looking better and life with less clutter is nicer.

BUT if he starts scrubbing doorknobs and pulling off paneling in search of copper pipes, Imouttahere.