Priorities

There's some old poem about how your kids will never remember that your doilies were starched, but they'll remember the trip to the park one summer day, or some such thing. It always makes me feel obscurely guilty to read it. I do take my daughter to the park, and we bake cookies together and do fun stuff like that. Every Wednesday we go to storytime at the local library. Every Saturday we do arts and crafts at the local nature center. Pretty much my whole emotional being revolves around her and being her mother.

But I also spend a lot of time cleaning, and occasionally ignore her in favor of cleaning. There are days when she's whining for attention, dragging on my arm or whatever as I'm trying to dust, and I go on with what I'm doing or tell her "Play by yourself." At those times, I know I'm putting the cleanliness of the bookshelves over her immediate happiness.

One of my mom friends is kind of the opposite of me. I think this particular friend is awesome. I have so much respect and admiration for her, and also just think she's a really nice person. She has been so supportive of me during my hard times. She's different from me in that she has a hotshot career she's not putting on hold to do child-rearing; she basically single-parents her son most of the time while her husband is on frequent business trips, but she's also working full-time and a rising star in her field. She's also different in that she does not spend time cleaning. Their house is always kind of chaotic and filled with a million half-finished projects, lonely socks, dog toys, etc. - the kind of house where the clutter alone tells the story of artistic, energetic people who have better things to do than dust.

Sometimes I wish I was more like her. I'd like to send the message to my daughter (and anyone who might visit our home) that what matters most to me is the time we spend together.

Other times I think of justifications for my cleaning obsessions, like:
Keeping the house relatively clean helps justify my working only part-time. I'd feel bad if my husband came home after a long day and found the house a disaster zone.
This way, I can always find stuff - I don't have to hunt through clutter looking for those missing jigsaw pieces or my green earrings. Everything is pretty much back where it belongs, at the end of each day.
If visitors are coming over, I don't have to make a special effort to clean up.
I like doing it. When I'm in the midst of a routine yet satisfying cleaning job, I feel like I'm achieving "flow" - that state of total absorption where you don't really notice the time passing, that comes as near to a definition of happiness as anything.

I'm not sure I can turn it off anyway. Last time we visited my friend, I had to fight the impulse to start cleaning her house, even as we sat around and talked. If she went out of town for a weekend, I would love to go over there and just wash dishes, do laundry, glue broken toys back together, and sweep until the house was clean. It's sick, right?