Mondays & Memories of My Mom – The Joy In Cleaning

Happy Monday, once again; and happy Spring, too. I love Mondays, as they’re my 52 Chances a year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with you. And I love spring – this week celebrates, among other things… National [Spring] Cleaning Week, which always begins on the fourth Sunday in March.

#TheRecipeDetective

#NationalCleaningWeek

Every spring (and fall), I love to write about the delight I get from my extra, seasonal cleaning (and re-organizing) routines. I know I’m in a minority of people who experience the joy in cleaning. My mom was in the majority that don’t. I think I might have received “The-Joy-In-Cleaning” gene (if there is one) from my dad.

It’s not that Mom didn’t clean, she just didn’t enjoy it like I do. In fact, most people don’t like it. According to one of my Google searches, I found that 73% of Americans dislike cleaning, despite enjoying having a clean home. However, only about 10% claim that they pay a professional cleaning service to do it for them.

Mom was probably more apt to be in “The-Joy-Of-NOT-Cleaning-Any-More-Than-I-Have-To” coalition. She was from a generation that considered cleaning (and cooking) to be a woman’s duty, not option. Studies have shown that most people dislike doing what they have to do, as compared to doing what they want to do.

Mom often tried to find ways to make her homemaker’s “duties” easier and quicker. Did you know that the most commonly hated household chore is scrubbing the bathroom? That’s followed by washing dishes, cleaning the fridge and oven, as well as changing the bedding and doing laundry (among others). Mom’s hated making the bed, most of all.

Gloria Pitzer’s Mixed Blessings – Recipes & Remedies (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; March 1984, p. 173)

GET THE FAMILY TO HELP

GETTING THE WHOLE FAMILY to help in the kitchen was one of those logical solutions of a well-meaning woman’s magazine, attempting to take the misery out of mealtime, for their readers. Whenever I find articles that suggest helpful alternatives to an otherwise difficult or dull task, I come right to attention!

I mean, I need all the help I can get – and then some! However, getting – you-should-excuse-the-expression – help from the family in the kitchen, is like bailing out the Titanic with a funnel!

Granted, Family Circle magazine is not one to throw their advice around without having first researched their evidence, but neither have they met MY family! They have not met the man, who by emptying a few ashtrays, can make it look as if he’s just cleaned the whole house.

[Nor] are they acquainted with a teenaged prom queen who must, absolutely must, shower and shampoo every day; but insists that doing dishes will make her hairdo ‘go frizzy’ and ruin her manicure.

They’ve never met the son who works out every day with barbells and $500 worth of weightlifting equipment but can’t find the strength nor energy to pick up a bag of garbage and carry it to the curb. The child who never knows when to hang up the telephone receiver or her clothes makes an unlikely candidate for putting the dishes away.

The son whose education cost us a fortune to prepare him for becoming an advertising agency art director is the last one in this family I would rely upon to paint the cupboards. Getting the whole family to help in the kitchen is not as practical in practice as the magazines make it sound in theory.

Whenever the magazines, upon which modern homemakers rely, come out with sensible advice on unifying the family, I know they aren’t thinking of me! The son, who was so mechanically inclined, can rebuild the transmission in his car without a manual, can’t tell which end of a potato peeler to use.

And we keep hearing those marvelous testimonies of the celebrities and the social experts on how the American family is changing – how Mom is no longer the ‘Number One Drudge’, how everyone in the family pitches in and does a fair share of the domestic chores so that Mom can become (and I use the word loosely) ‘liberated’!

Forget it! No matter what Marlo Thomas Donahue is saying about a marriage becoming anything you wanted to be in today’s society, she hasn’t gotten around much, or she’d know that what our husbands were raised to believe in the 1940s and 1950s was ‘woman’s work’, is STILL considered ‘woman’s work’!

Even though a husband will reluctantly relieve us of little tasks now and then, like making their own sandwich or the bed they also sleep in but leave to the ladies in the house to make in the morning!

I think the mothers of the sons we’ve married in my generation, did us a great disservice by conditioning their boys to believe that making a home was more a woman’s destiny than the men she would share it with.

So let’s not kid ourselves. Marching on Washington and solidarity in the marketplace is not going to transform the framework of the family and home. We’re merely going to have to find shortcuts to success that eliminates the agony and elevates our esteem. Cultivating a positive attitude about our predicament helps!

I personally like being a homemaker but I have to work (outside of home), as well. Time is valuable so I try to make my cleaning routines simpler, by breaking them down into smaller tasks. Years ago, I created a seasonal cleaning list (see picture below) that gets updated, as need be. I find that smaller goals are easier to picture and achieve than larger ones.

Plus, when a task is completed and checked off of the list, I feel accomplished and encouraged to continue on to the next task. Since I’m a little OCD, I usually focus on one room at a time; starting at the top left, from where I walk in, and working my way around the room (left-to-right and top-to-bottom).

By the way, I found that it’s also important to remember to stop every so often and take a personal break, too – you don’t have to be in a union to do so. The achievement I feel when completing a task is a reward in itself that makes me joyful.

I love lists – they help to keep me on task and focused on what needs to be done. That being said, I still go down some rabbit holes from time to time but lists always bring me back to focus – and sometimes things just get added to them. In my routine, I include moving furniture around, changing out my seasonal curtains, and creating a fresh new look.

I prefer cleaning the ceilings first, dusting out all of the winter cob webs; especially around the crown moldings, light fixtures, and ceiling fans. Then I move to the walls, cleaning the door and window moldings, picture frames, shelves, and other decorations.

I follow all of that by cleaning my TV/electronics, lamps, table tops, and other furniture, as well as washing and drying all of the blankets and pillows. Last, is the floor – starting in the furthest corner from the door and cleaning my way out of the room. Then I check it off of my list, take another break, and move on to the next room.

As I clean, I’m also usually pulling stuff out of the room that I want to get rid of or put in a yard sale or donate to my local Goodwill store. Most times, in my spring cleaning, I put things in my basement for a late-spring or summertime yard sale, whenever the upcoming weekend’s weather looks favorable to put up my tents and tables. I wish I had a garage!

I’ve already started spring cleaning my basement, in order to get rid of some things I don’t really use. I have to keep reminding my husband that I’m not a hoarder, YET. After all, I do occasionally purge about as much as I collect. I’ve also learned how to better organize things, so it doesn’t seem like there’s that much stuff.

I’m really excited that April is just around the bend. That’s usually when the garage and yard sales first start popping up in my area. While I clean room-by-room, I’ve been creating “piles” of various items, from which I’ve decided to “sell”, “donate”, “toss”, or “recycle”.

If it’s for the “sell pile”, I try to put a price sticker on it right away and put it in the basement for my next yard sale. If it’s a “toss” item, it goes right into a trash bag. “Recycle” items either go into my crafting room, if I can turn it into something else useful, or into the recycle bin that goes out to the curb every other week with the trash.

My sorting process was inspired by a short-lived home renovation show on the cable channel, TLC. It was called Clean Sweep (2003-2005) and it included a room organization and makeover – but first the homeowners had to empty and purge their “disastrous room”.

The process always included some related “therapy”, regarding why we hang on to certain things and how to best let them go. Additionally, after sorting through all of their stuff, the homeowners held a one-day-only, “prize-winning-competition” yard sale with their “sell” pile items. It was inspiring, motivating, and a lot of fun to watch.

I’ve always liked to tackle the biggest tasks first and ease my way down to the smaller ones. After the basement, the kitchen takes me the longest to clean. Although my kitchen is a third of the size of my living room, it has a lot more things to clean and, thus, is actually a bigger project.

Americans spend about an hour a day or 6 hours a week, on average, for regular cleaning chores; including doing the laundry, washing dishes, dusting, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming, polishing furniture, and so on. Supposedly, most Americans like to do all of their cleaning “chores” on Saturdays; instead of a little bit each day. I prefer the latter.

According to 20 Everyday Activities and the Calories They Burn, by the Editors of Publications International, Ltd. (at HowStuffWorks.com), in 30 minutes… you can burn 252 calories, moving furniture; 153 calories, mopping; 84 calories, sweeping or vacuuming; 80 calories, dusting; 74 calories, making dinner; and 72 calories, folding laundry.

In addition, a clean home reduces germs, which helps prevent illness. It also improves moods, decreases stress levels, and increases creativity. There’s no denying it’s a win-win effect and there can be joy in cleaning – depending on your approach.

Additionally, if you haven’t seen it yet, I’ve recently started posting Mom’s “Master Index” to this website’s new Master Index Tab. It’s a work-in-progress so please be patient as I copy and paste each letter’s index from my Word program into separate posts.

IN CLOSING…

In honor of this still being March and National Flour Month, here’s Mom’s copycat recipe for “Biscuits Like Cracker Barrel’s”; as seen in her self-published cookbook, Secret Make Alike Recipes – Revised (Secret Recipes^TM, Marysville, MI; May 1997, p. 10). As always, I’m asking only for proper credit if you care to re-share it.

#NationalFlourMonth