Scrub a Dub Dub

I hate to clean. Scratch that. I hate to clean in a house with a husband, two children, and a dog. It feels like you never get ahead. You go into one room and work your scrubbing magic. Return a mere 15 minutes later and it's back to chaos. Grrrr!

It isn't all their fault, I'll admit. My love-hate relationship with cleaning has been years in the making. Childhood even. You see, my mom, she is a crazy cleaner. A scrubber. A put-on-those-ugly-plastic-gloves-and-scrub-the-daylights-out-of-something kind of woman. My mom would scrub when angry, frustrated, or sad. Our house always shined.

I had a few chores, too. My mom would leave the perfectly typed list dangling from the fridge listing three chores for each day. The chores I was assigned always involved organizing (my better love!), picking up, or putting away, but never scrubbing. Deep cleaning was her mission and an escape from life's frustrations.

My escape? Books. I would spend all day reading, lost in the world of someone else's imagination, and then rush through my chores the last few minutes before my mom returned home. It was a neck-breaking race to the finish line. It was never rewarding, but it always got done. Even to this day, I would rather be lost in a story than a sink full of suds. This is, perhaps, why my house never shines.

This week, however, I am tackling a new cleaning strategy. I printed off a cleaning schedule I found with three chores in the morning and then three different chores at night, rotating items seven days a week. If you do those simple chores each day, your house is pretty much cleaned top-to-bottom in one week. Then begin again. Shiny, shiny, shiny.

So far, it's been good. Not amazing, of course, but more manageable, and the productive feeling of keeping a shiny house is coming back to me. I also love my perfectly typed chore list dangling from my fridge. It reminds me of a woman who worked hard and did an amazing job, so I could spend time in faraway places, dreaming my big dreams. 

Here's to paying it forward with a happier heart. I sure hope I can keep up.