Meet Kate, the (non)consummate housekeeper

I think it happened because my dishwasher broke.

It’s ridiculous, really, that one appliance can become so indispensible that one starts to obsess, not only about clean vs. dirty dishes, but clean vs. dirty (or disorganized) everything else. Especially for me. After all, for the first twenty-one years of my life, I didn’t have a dishwasher. Whenever we griped to our parents, we got that old annoying response: “We do have a dishwasher! We have four of them! One-two-three-four!” (My three sisters didn’t find it any more amusing than I did.)

But here I am. And as I gnash my teeth and wash those plates and bowls and knives and spoons and forks and glasses by hand…or more accurately, as I leave them to pile up in precarious towers beside the sink…I think, Why didn’t it ever feel this way when I was growing up?

Well, I know the answer: We had an m.o. We stacked the silverware on the top plate, piled the other plates beneath it, then carried the whole works to the sink. Which was two feet away, not on the far side of a peninsula. Still, the piles of dishes awaiting cleaning looked nothing like my haphazard dish-dunes. We also were not allowed to leave food on our plates. We ate every bite, and we’d better do it before closing grace. (We didn’t have a garbage disposal, either; no easy scraping into the sink for us!) We had a rotation of dish duty: one girl per night, responsible for the whole works: clearing, putting food away, washing, drying, putting away. With Mom, of course.

And as I reflected on why dish duty seemed so much more a well-oiled machine when I was a child, I started realizing that my mom’s whole house was set up that way. In her pantry and cabinet, everything had its place. You always knew the flour and sugar would stand like sentries on the bottom right, the peanut butter and jelly above it, the Jello and canned goods on the left.

This is my pantry. It defies organization. I’m telling you. I’ve tried. Many times. Things migrate back to a wrong place, and it’s not me who’s doing it. The kids clothing drawers? Same story.

When my sisters and I were little, we went to school every day in neat and tidy pigtails or braids, even French braids on occasion. She used to brush our hair so that the part was perfect, the hair lay smooth from all sides as it converged on the hair band. I’ve tried that. Julianna moves her head, and a lock sticks up. I’ve quit trying.  But you know what? My mom touches Julianna’s hair, and it lays flat, just like mine used to when I was little. Obviously it’s not the hair, it’s the mom.

Then there’s the linen closet. My mom could always fold a sheet so that you couldn’t tell whether it was fitted or flat; they looked precisely identical. She had very little storage space, so she worked out exactly which folds in which order would make things stack neatly in the closet. She tried to teach me, too, but I didn’t get it. About once every three dozen tries, I manage to make a fitted sheet fold properly. But it’s still a different shape from its companion flat sheet.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My mom is not a paragon of organization. She’s lost more driver’s licenses in her life than I can count, and the kitchen table had to be cleared of random papers every single day before we could set for dinner.

But the table was clean every night. The counters might have taken the overflow, but the table was set for six, without another speck of clutter on it. The laundry did not sit for days waiting to be folded. The whole house was clean at the end of every Saturday. We grew a garden, canned and froze most of the family’s vegetables, raised chickens, butchered them ourselves, collected eggs every day, which Mom sold to neighbors up and down the gravel road.

And I don’t think any of us still had to wear diapers to bed at age 6 ½.

How did she do that? And why am I falling so miserably below the standards she set?

This is not the first time I’ve fretted about my lack of housekeeping prowess. In some ways, I think the universal frustration over housework is a product of a new era. Mom grew up expecting and planning to be the best housewife and mother she could be. My sisters and I grew up in a generation of empowered girls who believed we could have it all, do it all. And so I have children closer together than my mother did; I’m blogging and writing and teaching and public-speaking, and only dabbling in raising my own food. It’s an impossible standard to hold. I know that.

Yet I can’t help feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. I know the solution is to enlist the kids’ help, but trying to teach them slows down the household process even more.

This is the point where I’m supposed to draw it all together in a nice tidy package, look all perky and domestic, or at least accept my own limitations and talk about how I will choose to be content with who I am.

Then again, as House said in a rerun last night, discontent is the only way we improve ourselves. Right?