Quarantine: Sun. 4/19
There are many challenges to marriage. For us, one of those challenges is being forced by a global lockdown to clean our own house. We haven't had our cleaners here in weeks, for their safety and ours (we're still paying them, of course), and wow, I miss them almost as much as I miss long consecutive hours of absolute quiet.
I'm a very very tidy and organized person. Ask me where something is--anything! I challenge you!--and I'll be able to find it in a hot second. The worry dolls I made when I was eleven? Hold on, just let me find the box in my wooden chest. A contact-paper-covered collage of Pillsbury Dough Boys cut from magazine ads that I made when I was in seventh grade? It's right here, on the bookshelf in my office. This organization is a genetic trait. It's also a genetic trait to completely lose my sh*& when I CAN'T immediately find something.
But I digress. As I was saying: I'm a neat and organized person, but I am NOT a scour-the-counters type of person. I don't "clean the bathroom" or "mop the floor." Andrew has known this from Day One. In fact, one of the very first times he visited me in my (terrible, squalid, bad-neighborhood, post-grad-school) apartment, he cleaned my stovetop. Indeed, it was in dire need of a cleaning. Our house, too, with us being here 24/7 with no break whatsoever, is usually in dire need of a cleaning. Today it could be avoided no longer, and Andrew decreed it cleaning day.
We cleaned. I did all the laundry washing and folding to make up for the fact that I didn't clean the bathrooms. I did clean the kitchen (but not the stovetop--we have no steel wool and honestly I don't know how we can clean it until we get some). We both vacuumed and dusted. Andrew fumed when the vacuum jammed up after sucking in a small piece of scrap fabric. We didn't get to the basement; the girls and I will have to tackle that tomorrow. Oh, the drudgery of quarantine--both the drudgery of cleaning AND the drudgery of having nothing else to blog about. A thousand sighs.
The house is clean now. Our marriage is intact. But tonight, when I half-jokingly (three-quarters jokingly) suggested we stop having the cleaners come and just clean the house ourselves, Andrew glanced up at me briefly from his book and said mildly, "Our marriage would not survive that." We shared a queasy laugh but he was 100% not joking.
I'm a very very tidy and organized person. Ask me where something is--anything! I challenge you!--and I'll be able to find it in a hot second. The worry dolls I made when I was eleven? Hold on, just let me find the box in my wooden chest. A contact-paper-covered collage of Pillsbury Dough Boys cut from magazine ads that I made when I was in seventh grade? It's right here, on the bookshelf in my office. This organization is a genetic trait. It's also a genetic trait to completely lose my sh*& when I CAN'T immediately find something.
But I digress. As I was saying: I'm a neat and organized person, but I am NOT a scour-the-counters type of person. I don't "clean the bathroom" or "mop the floor." Andrew has known this from Day One. In fact, one of the very first times he visited me in my (terrible, squalid, bad-neighborhood, post-grad-school) apartment, he cleaned my stovetop. Indeed, it was in dire need of a cleaning. Our house, too, with us being here 24/7 with no break whatsoever, is usually in dire need of a cleaning. Today it could be avoided no longer, and Andrew decreed it cleaning day.
We cleaned. I did all the laundry washing and folding to make up for the fact that I didn't clean the bathrooms. I did clean the kitchen (but not the stovetop--we have no steel wool and honestly I don't know how we can clean it until we get some). We both vacuumed and dusted. Andrew fumed when the vacuum jammed up after sucking in a small piece of scrap fabric. We didn't get to the basement; the girls and I will have to tackle that tomorrow. Oh, the drudgery of quarantine--both the drudgery of cleaning AND the drudgery of having nothing else to blog about. A thousand sighs.
The house is clean now. Our marriage is intact. But tonight, when I half-jokingly (three-quarters jokingly) suggested we stop having the cleaners come and just clean the house ourselves, Andrew glanced up at me briefly from his book and said mildly, "Our marriage would not survive that." We shared a queasy laugh but he was 100% not joking.
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