When I first met Jen it was on the heels of a relationship in which my laissez faire approach to housekeeping had been identified as one of my less becoming attributes. So on the fateful night we first went out for drinks, when I essentially signed a lifetime contract, it was deeply reassuring when I first laid eyes on the interior of Jen’s blue Corolla. In addition to the brazier draped across the front passenger seat among other miscellaneous items, I noted that the back seat was inhabited by a table, and that spread throughout the remaining available space were stacks and stacks of Jen’s twelfth grade English students’ written work. I knew that a woman with a car in this state couldn’t possibly notice how carelessly I draped four pairs of pants on one wire hanger. It appeared that Jen might not even be familiar with the concept of a hanger, a prognostication later validated by witnessing Jen’s preferred approach to organizing her clothes, which involves multiple small piles on her bedroom floor. My own composting approach to laundry, in which a week at the bottom of the hamper assures that any intense odors have been absorbed and diluted by other garments in the pile, similar also to how the oceans filter out toxins from the atmosphere, serves to spare me (and the environment!) untold numbers of unnecessary washer/dryer cycles, and is right at home chez Jen.
If sources of marital strife were a Family Feud category, housekeeping would likely rank just behind sex and money as the most popular answers. Jen and I have come up with winning strategies for maintaining marital harmony in each of these three crucial categories. We have sex whenever our children let us. We have an official policy of spending less money than we make, which means we purchase nothing not needed for survival or Jen’s hobby-of-the-month (she buys everything used from the internet for two bucks and change, so we’re not talking a home shopping network addiction here). And neither of us does any cleaning, which means that neither of us can resent the other for doing less. One of Jen’s hobbies-of-the-month was to read up on all the ways to keep one’s house neat and tidy while raising children and working. I believe it was in one of these books that Jen stumbled across the technique that has revolutionized our living space: hiring a cleaning lady.
At work recently I heard a colleague make passing reference to changing the sheets on her beds weekly. I almost choked on my English breakfast tea. At our house sheets are only changed when significant amounts of body fluids, or any amount of vomit (not counting Yael’s spit-up), have rendered the sheets officially soiled. The rigorous clinical trials at the Gaither household have proven that the whole notion of “clean sheets” is socially constructed, and that in the objective world there are only sheets upon which one can sleep and sheets upon which the barf or pee-pee would prevent a restful slumber. When you get right down to it, it is amazing how little housework there really is, if you don’t pay attention to little niggling details like changing the sheets or wiping down surfaces. As long as you do the dishes and laundry and take out the trash you can go months without doing anything else. This leaves you plenty of time to come up with ways to get a half hour without the children so you can have sex. This, unfortunately, might make you have to change the sheets. Might.
