Ok, we really need more stuff to post on around here!

I'm pondering doing an essay sometime on cleaning and how it is an obsession to a lot of people (almost all women that I know, I'm afraid, and not one guy!). And since a lot of people on here seem to be really concerned with how clean the house is...who's up for a poll?

* If it's not easily identified by your name here, what's your gender? * Are you a clean freak or not? Why are you what you are? * Were you raised to be the way you are, or are you going on cultural expectations? If you're a woman, were you told that you'd have to be in charge of the house, children, and men when you grow up, or not? If you're a guy, what were you told? * Are you on top of all cleaning that needs to be done all the time? If you are, how do you manage it? If not, how do you feel about it? Are you writhing in agony at the thought (as a lot of people I know seem to be!), or can you shrug it off and worry about it later? * If you live with someone, who does what amount of cleaning? If the house has mixed genders, which gender does the most work? Is there any particular reason behind that (chore division, etc), or is that just how it worked out?

Thanks! Jennifer

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

Answers

And since I'm bored, I'll answer first:

I'm a big slob. Since my parents have always raised me to be a neat freak, I can only assume that I am this by some freak of nature messy gene or something. My parents -always- told me that as the woman, I -had- to care about the cleanliness of the house to impress relatives at the very least, and that once I got married, I'd be required to clean up after the husband and kids for the rest of my life.

Naturally my family considers me a freak for not beating myself up horrendously for not having everything spic and span...but shoot, I have other work to do that takes priority. The dishes can wait, but my due date for the project/paper's tomorrow, you know? But it surprises me how many people are hugely busy, and yet kill themselves over not having everything picked up too.

My current household is 3 women. None of us are clean freaks, and one is almost never home except to sleep. Basically any cleaning gets done "whenever", if we do any. The last time we cleaned the place, it was a mess within ten minutes (I'm not kidding. It's a really bad house.), so we no longer waste the time and energy on it.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

When I was a bachelor I was extremely tidy and cleaned things all of the time. I kept my law school apartment in ship shape, scrubbed (scrubbed) the shower weekly, used to wipe out the wheel wells of my car, that sort of thing.

Then I got married and, frankly, lost control of my house. Nothing was kept where I felt it belonged, and certain piles of stuff had to be where they stood in order to remind my wife where they went. Finally, I gave up. I've decided that the house is not my responsibility until I get to pick where some things go. Now my office and files are very tidy, and the home reflects the fact that someone else is running the place.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

Our place is a tip most of the time - it's clean but really messy. And we're too lazy to even hire a cleaner. An obsession with cleaning is just not something to which I can relate.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Me neither.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Ouch, this one hurts!

My place looks like your typical single guy's place, although looks are deceptive in this case. Sure, the mess is bigger than I would like it to be, but there's a reason for that. I live alone, I have a fulltime job which causes me to spend 3.5 hours a day commuting, and when I get home there's dinner to be cooked as well, so on workdays there's precious little time left for chores. Same goes for weekends - too much to do in too little time, so I have to set priorities if I want to spend some quality time with family and friends as well. Dishes come first, then watering the plants, then laundry, then vacuuming. All things considered, it's not surprising that, for example, there's a huge pile of laundry in my bedroom. What IS surprising is that it's all clean. I just don't have the time to put it all away, not after spending a few hours each weekend ironing my shirts. Other than that, I just tend to ignore the stacks of paperwork, magazines, newspapers etcetera. So yes, my place looks messy, but I make damn sure it's not filthy.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

I'm neat, but I dislike dusting and vacuuming. So there's very little clutter, and the bathroom and kitchen are clean, but the furniture tends to get pretty dusty. If you're going to write your name on my furniture, I only ask that you don't put the year. :-)

When I was married I did *all* the housework. I can count on one hand the times my ex did any cleaning during the four years we lived together. I don't think it was a cultural expectation or the way I was brought up, it just seemed that my tolerance for filth was much lower than his.

I live alone now, so I *have* to do everything. I just can't justify spending money to have someone else do cleaning that I'm perfectly capable of doing myself. It doesn't get done as often as my stay-at- home mom did it when I was growing up, but it gets done eventually. I don't worry about it.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

female. and definitely not addicted to cleaning. When I'm busy I just pile things around my room. Then I get a fit of frustration (usually when I should be doing some writing or research) and clean it all up. but never dust. I do like a tidy room, but I never feel I have enough storage space..

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Big picture: Our house looks like the Highlander just experienced the quickening in a Target store. Not for the faint of heart.

* gender? Male.

* clean freak? Not.

* Were you raised to be the way you are? Sort of. I have two older brothers who were teenagers in the late 60's, just over the hills from Berkeley. So long as I didn't drop out of high school, burn down the tree house, get drunk or arrested for demonstrations (as my brothers did), my parents gave me free rein to do (or not do) anything I wanted.

* Are you on top of all cleaning that needs to be done all the time? Buh-huh. Hah. snort. My goals are to keep all fragile things off the floor so they don't get broken, keep sharp things out of the way so people don't cut their bare feet, and clean up spills before they ruin the hardwood floors. Other than that, we go through clean-messy cycles every month or two depending on how many guests we're having over (and how fussy they are), or how much sewing my wife's doing (it gets really clean before she sews because she has to lay the fabric out on the floor; once she starts sewing, the clutter begins to creep back out into the center of the room).

I clean the kitchen and bathrooms, do the dishes, and mow the lawn. My wife cleans the living room, dining room and family room. We yell at our kids to clean their rooms and sometimes they do it.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Neat freak? Anally retentive? Maybe, but i like things put away in their place, if only to make it easier to find them the next time they are to be used. Now that I am alone, I do take some shortcuts. 15 to 20 minuites a night on household chores ( vacuuming, floor washing etc. ). If you load it right, you can have clean and dirty dishes in the same dishwasher without any cross contamination. My gym is quite close to where I work, so every morning I go, maybe workout, and shower there, so the bathroom and towels can go a long time without needing cleaning, and other time savers like that.

Even when my SO was alive, I did the majority of the chores and cleaning, simply because I had more time than she did. i was the better cook, so dinner and groceries were my baliwick.

Maybe that's not typical, but it worked for us.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

My father worked and my mother was a housewife. He gave her an allowance to run the household. Once a week, the family went out to dinner (supper), to give Mom a night off. To Morrison's Cafeteria, in West Palm Beach.

When my father got home from work, supper was ready. We ate at 5:45. After supper, my mother washed the dishes and my father dried.

Weeknights, they had choir practice, or he had a City Council meeting. Otherwise, they watched television.

They bought what was advertised on television, not as soon as it came out, but after the price came down. Labor-saving appliances, or home-entertainment centers.

My mother checked the sale ads in the paper, and bought things that were on sale, at the grocery stores, shopping at more than one store.

She kept the house clean, did the laundry, with the aid of a washing machine and a drier.

Maybe twice a year she'd have a colored maid come in, to help her with heavy cleaning.

I didn't want to live this way, especially, but it was the example I saw, growing up.

Nobody told me I would earn the living and my wife would raise the children and keep house.

My father had wanted to be a songwriter in college. But he came home to run the family business, after college.

During WWII, he was overseas, and my mother ran the household, by herself. She got an allotment check.

When I was in the 7th grade, my father went off to seminary, to become a minister, on the GI Bill, but my grandfather, who depended on him, had a nervous breakdown, and my father came home again, for good.

I don't think my mother was disappointed. She liked being the mayor's wife better than living in a parsonage in Chittlin' Switch, Georgia.

From this I learned, or inferred--again, nobody told me, directly, but the message was clear--that family came first. Your responsibility to your family came ahead of what you wanted to do. If you could earn a living as an artist, go ahead and be an artist. But if you were married, and wanted to be an artist, and couldn't earn a living at it, you had to earn a living however you could and do your art before and after work. As an avocation, or hobby, like.

When I got married, I was going to be a writer.

Brenda didn't want to be a housewife. She wanted to have a career, outside the home.

She nursed Owen, then Balder, and was out of the work force, for several years. Until Balder was old enough to wean, and put in nursery school.

I brought in the paycheck, working as a laborer, and clerk. When I worked. She minded babies and kept house.

I wrote before and after work, and on weekends.

I might say that I spent eight years in the military, and had to keep my area clean, in the barracks. I pulled details cleaning common areas--dayrooms, latrines, offices.

I also had to keep my personal belongings down to the 66 lb you could carry in a duffel bag on an airplane. Your uniform issue weighed 66 lb.

In other words, every time I got transferred, I got rid of things I had built up, and started fresh. I might have owned a transistor radio, a dictionary.

Brenda is a nester (a Cancer), and doesn't throw things out. She accumulates things.

Also, she doesn't put things away. She leaves them out, for the next time she wants to use them. Half-finished projects, tools, and so on, clutter the area. All the area. Every surface area.

I'm a Virgo. Everything must be en place. If it's not en place, it's dans la merde.

When Brenda went back to work, I started doing more around the house. Doing my share.

I worked more, around the house, but we had more money, with her paycheck.

There was conflict over who was doing more, and who was doing less. Tension. Arguments.

The middle years were bad. I was controlling and she was passive-aggressive. I was a dry-drunk and she was codependent. I was mean and she was depressed. It was a bad 20 years.

Then the kids were grown, it was just the two of us, we each have a room of our own, with a guest bedroom, for company.

A front porch and a deck, out back.

The yard is small enough I can mow it with a push mower. She has a garden and keeps chickens.

We each do our own laundry. We take turns cooking. We each do the dishes, clean the bathrooms, vacuum the carpets.

The house is clean, and neat. If we need a maid, or a yardman, we hire one.

I keep my room, and we keep the kitchen, fairly neat. Ditto our bathrooms. (Mine doubles as the guest bathroom.) Her room, and the living room, are more cluttered. Lived-in.

Just before she moved up here (Atlanta), and we bought our house, she lived alone, in Florida, and I lived alone, up here.

The separation did us good. Living alone did us good. The kids growing up and moving out did us good.

Growing older did us good.

We just lived through the bad stretch.

Q: Didn't you leave something out?

A: What?

Q: The five years you were the houseperson in the home.

A: Oh, yea. I'll put that in under domestic arrangements, when I get to that chapter. Also the years at Bachelor Hall.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

My mother was Hitler incarnate, so, yes, I was raised to clean. When we had a sitter, we cleaned the base boards & the area in between the carpet. We shined the paneling. During summers we cleaned each day - and my mother came up with all these weird little things we had to clean.

Point: It takes me freaking forever to clean the house.

SO I HAVE A HOUSEKEEPER.

She comes once a week & takes the layer of mung off my stuff. She organizes and does my laundry. It takes her about 2 hours to do all this and I couldn't do it all in an entire weekend.

I go to school fulltime & work fulltime, so it just works out better for me. She doesn't do everything I would do, but since I accumulate stuff, she helps weed things out for me.

And she saves me from what is, for me at least, a very stresssful & neurotic chore. I like my things clean, but it gives me anxiety attacks at the enormity of the task.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

I'm NOT Monica from Friends. I was never raised to be freakishly neat. My mother was always after me to clean my room, rinse my dishes, etc, but it never really got through to me. When I moved out, I lived with a friend, and she was a total slob who called me her "domestic" and pitched a fit when I didn't do the dishes (Despite the fact that more often or not she had dirtied them). My boyfriend and I spent an entire weekend cleaning the apartment. She came back from a trip and the place was messy within 5 minutes. I'm not kidding. It was really frustrating.

When she moved out, and I got my own place, I tried really hard to make sure it was neat, if not spotless. I'm slowly winning that battle. I'm usually good with doing dishes right away, but I've let it slide the last few days. Another problem is my boyfriend got a fish, which is living at my place for now, and he tried to remove some of the plant material from the top of the water. He did this in my bathroom. Now I have tiny green leaves in my sink and tub. It looks like parsley exploded. I've been finding excuses not to clean the bathroom for a while, but I guess I have to now. Darn fish.

I hate laundry-- all aspects of it. Dishes are also bad, but I'd rather do them than laundry. But vacuuming is the worst. I broke the power head on the vacuum before I moved, and I haven't bothered to get it fixed yet. I vacuum with the wand. It's quite the workout!

I also have to get to the windows, inside and out. I did this a little while ago, but the problem is cats. I live in a basement apartment, so the outside cats have free access to my windows. I think they're spraying them (little bastards-- don't get me started on outside cats). My (strictly indoor) cat spends the day looking outside, and I have little kitty-cat nose marks all over the inside windows in my living room. The landlord mowed the lawn, and there are grass bits stuck to the outsides. So I think this weekend is going to be house work weekend. Thanks a lot. See what you started? ;)

Monica Gellar, I mean...

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

>>Big picture: Our house looks like the Highlander just experienced the quickening in a Target store. Not for the faint of heart. <<

Mmmrblpht! Coffee all over the keyboard. From now on, that describes my housemate's bedroom.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Heather -

"It looks like parsley exploded."

Hee.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

I'm female. I'm a big slob. I was raised to be the way I am. My mom always worked and always had open contempt for housewives and the idea of finding a cleaning task to fill every moment. Our house had a lot of clutter but was basically clean, which is how my husband and my house looks now. I was raised with the expectation that I'd work, and that my husband and I would do the minimum to keep the place clean.

I'm not on top of cleaning that needs to be done - I'm not even aware of what it is. My husband is always aware and suggests we set aside time to clean, which we do. He does more than me because he's more bothered by messiness. He also has a certain restless, I couldn't relax because I knew the dishes were sitting there, thing that I absolutely don't have.

His mom had a stroke when he was young. He and his sister did all the housework and cooking for years.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

Yup, another Monica here. I just feel better when everything is clean. I clean the house every weekend--it only takes about an hour. And every month or two I dig into a bigger project---Swiffer the blinds, go through my closets for stuff to donate, etc. And, of course, I have a special way to do everything. I find the answer to "How many different kinds of towels do you have?" to be very illuminating. Half the world says, "ummm....they're just towels"; and then there's me, who can launch in to quite a distressing list of types, colors, and where they all belong!

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2000

*gender? female

* Are you a clean freak or not? Why are you what you are? hell no. that would be my boyfriend. i cultivate what is called an organized mess. however, i do like a clean kitchen & vaccuumed rugs, but the rest of the cleaning gets done when i have more important projects (like finals) to do...My parents are refugees, and my mom and all my aunts are in the habit of keeping EVERYTHING, and i mean EVERYTHING. we've got yogurt cups from the late 70s hanging out in the kitchen. so i've picked up a habit of saving things too, and i have a hard time throwing anything away (though not as bad as them). i'm a packrat. i collect junk.

* Were you raised to be the way you are, or are you going on cultural expectations? If you're a woman, were you told that you'd have to be in charge of the house, children, and men when you grow up, or not?

As I said, I'm the child of refugees. I've picked up the habit of saving everything. The example set in the household was that mom cooked, and dad brought home the bacon, but with my boyfriend, its more of a team effort, though i usually cook my own stuff, because i dont like meat & rice every night. we've discussed household issues, and its a team effort. if he's slacking, i'll help him, and if i'm slacking, he'll help me. of course, there are some things i just don't do. like mop floors. ugh.

* Are you on top of all cleaning that needs to be done all the time? If you are, how do you manage it? If not, how do you feel about it? Are you writhing in agony at the thought (as a lot of people I know seem to be!), or can you shrug it off and worry about it later? *

I do my laundry when i'm out of underwear, and wash the dishes when there's no room left in the sink (pretty much every day). I do things when i feel like it, or when they bug me enough, or if i'm in the mood. i'm not religious about cleaning, but my boyfriend IS about his car. that thing needs to be washed 2-3 times a week and waxed often. oh well, at least he cleans my car too. thats another thing i hate cleaning.

If you live with someone, who does what amount of cleaning? If the house has mixed genders, which gender does the most work? Is there any particular reason behind that (chore division, etc), or is that just how it worked out?

we clean up the messes we make. things get cleaned when we feel like it. luckily, we're relatively clean people, although nobody likes cleaning the bathroom.

i'm blabbing.

-- Anonymous, June 10, 2000

I am an absolute clean freak. I have this near obsession with making sure that every single thing in the entire house is clean at every single waking moment. I am an organizational freak, a perfectionist and have this amazing drive of energy for cleaning at 2:30 AM.

A basic day of cleaning around here:

Dusting the furniture, walls, ceilings, etc.

Sorting newspapers for recycling.

Mopping the kitchen, foyer and bathroom floors.

Cleaning bedrooms (making beds, picking up laundry, etc).

Do the laundry and iron what needs to be ironed.

Bitching at the lawn service that mows the lawn.

Vacuuming all floors through the entire house.

Cleaning the bathrooms (mopping, scrubbing, fresh towels, etc).

Doing the dishes and cleaning appliances as needed.

Putting items away that were scattered in closets and garage.

Cleaning pet cages (I have 8 ferrets and 2 Hamsters).

Then there are those little tasks of cleaning windows and dusting other areas of the house whenever the mood hits me. I'm religious about washing, waxing and vacuuming out my car. I even shampoo the carpet in my house and car when it needs it.

I am so anal about cleaning that it isn't even funny. I love to clean anything that I can get my hands on. I also own my own business and go to school full time, so it's not like I have time for these things, but I do them anyway.

Therapy, hello?

-- Anonymous, June 10, 2000

meghan, you'd have a field day at our home. Do you do windows, too?

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2000

Similar story- yesterday for some reason my roommate snaps and decides she wants the whole house clean. She informs me of this five minutes before I have to leave for my final exam/meeting/work on project for the day...I come home hours later and found that she'd invited our friend who thinks cleaning is fun (or at least, a great stress relase) over and she'd done the entire kitchen. It was -so- bizarre to see this place not covered in leaves (which happens every time the door opens) and kitty litter (they scatter!) and dead cockroaches (the cats again)...I'm afraid to even enter those rooms now and mess them up and tick everyone off.

Neatness is intimidating...and lasts for such a short time.

-- Anonymous, June 11, 2000

Female, and I'm really not a clean freak. I don't like things to be too unsanitary - when I can smell anything I generally get around to cleaning - but clutter doesn't bother me and I'll often go days without doing a dish.

My Mom raised my sister and I to be clean, because she's a nurse, but she also raised us to expect the man to do an equal share, because she's a feminist. When I lived with Paul, I tended to do more housework than him, but we had agreed to that because although we both worked full-time, he was also doing his Master's part-time. He was really good about doing his share between terms and on weekends. Now that I live alone, it's all me - but it doesn't seem to be any more work. This stuff about two people not making more mess than one is nonsense.

Joanne

-- Anonymous, June 12, 2000