I’m tired of the charade and want it to stop.
You know the one I’m talking about.
You’re invited to a friend’s place for morning tea. You are greeted merrily at the door and ushered inside a home so pristinethat a white glove would be instantly rendered unemployable; unless it was willing to take on a shift as a duster. This house sparkles, it shines, it gleams. In fact it’s so darn clean looking you don’t even need the three second rule when you accidentally drop your just-baked bickie on the white shag carpeting.
And then it begins.
“Sorry about the mess,” your friend says distractedly.
“Mess?” You yelp, worried that your surreptiously reclaimed bickie has left offensive crumbs.
“I haven’t had a chance to clean all week,” she continues, looking disgustedly around the slovenly lab she calls home.
Ah yes, that’s the charade I’m talking about. The one where we have to pretend that (a) we haven’t cleaned up for our guests or (b) we haven’t actually stopped cleaning since we first met a mop in 1982. Either way, the house is perfectly neat, we can both see that it’s perfectly neat so why do we have to have the fake “sorry my house is such a mess” conversation every. single. time I come to visit?
Are you fishing for compliments – because I know the standard answer I’m meant to give is “Oh, no, hon. Your house looks perfect. I can’t believe how tidy you are, you should see my place”?
Or are you actually trying to distract me from noticing your anal neatness lest I judge you on having nothing better to do than clean?
Or, heaven forbid, do you genuinely think your super-neat house is messy, in which case your issues are probably even more ingrained than pasta sauce on microwaved Tupperware – an image I just know is making you hyperventilate a little bit right now*?
Any way you look at it, the pointless “sorry my house is such a mess” conversation is just not going to make you a winner.
I don’t do it. Any of it. I don’t clean up for people butand I don't make them talk about it when they come over either. On any given day my house could be messy when you visit, it could be tidy, it could be a total brothel complete with random half-clad girls wandering in and out (well, it could). But we don’t have to talk about it. You can just sit down and we’ll have a chat about far more interesting stuff than housework and you can happily drink your cup of tea (although I would definitenly advise employing the 3 second rule should you drop your bickie on my floor... actually, my advice is that even within the 3 second parametre you should probably just leave the bickie where it dropped – one of my half-clad girls can pick it up).
If I tallied up all the useless “sorry my house is messy” conversations I’ve had over the years, I reckon I’ve wasted weeks of my life. Weeks. And that’s not even including the fake “My daughter dresses herself” conversations or the fake “Look how creased my shirt got on the train” conversations or even the fake “I must have dropped that Indian curry on my sleeve at breakfast this morning” conversations. Maybe I’ve even wasted years.
Yes, I'm tired of the charade and want it to stop
Why do we pretend we’re effortlessly perfect? And why can’t we just own up to how hard we work at being perfect? And seriously, are we really worried that people are going to judge us on how well we keep house?
* I’m not cruel.
[Image by Isabel Pereira]