There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with my house being spotless.  Open cabinet doors, grime in the sink, dust on the television and other normal humanly produced disarray skinned my beaver!

As my family grew in number and size it got harder.  There were more kids to argue with.  More mood swings to console, more fights to referee, more money exchanged hands in our house than it does between the government and insurance agencies - well, it seems that way - and the capita of clothes per child dramatically (and suddenly!) increased ten fold.

I remember stupidly saying at some point that having 4 kids was like having 4 dishwashers, 4 laundries and 4 errand runners.  I did say stupidly right?  This  was when my children were very small and I was fantasizing about the day they’d be old enough to help out around the house more than just by picking up their toys and flushing the toilet.

As the kids grew up I realized that the only dishwasher, laundry and errand runner was me.  Oh sure they learned to load the dishwasher in Mom’s dishwasher loading 101 class but they never gave a damn enough to actually it do it right - without a fight with either me or each other.

So I started letting things go.  If the girls left every piece of make-up they owned on the counter so what?  I could live with that as long as they picked it up later.  It didn’t matter if my son’s room started looking like a crackhouse.  He had to live in there not me, just close the door and once in a while scout for remains of cheeseburgers and porn.  Geez it stinks in there!

Are you starting to see why I titled this post Side Effects of Watching Clean House?

My house is not filthy in any way but it is definitely not spotless.  I’m ok with the fact that my house isn’t perfect. I’ve got more to do in life than sit around and worry about a freaking dust bunny or two.  It’ll get taken care of on Saturday.  Always does.

I try not to think about the things that lurk under my son’s bed accept for when I watch Clean House on Bravo.  Then I get inspired.

Like right now.  Since today is my day off I decided to strip my room down to the bare essentials and scrub the bloody thing until you can lick the floors without endangering your oral well being.

Thinking about all this cleaning got me thinking up this post in my head so right smack in the middle of cleaning I sat down to type this.  As I’m typing these words there are 43 books on my bed that came from my bedside table.  The curtains are missing and somewhere buried in the depths of all the shoes I pulled out of the closet, is the cat.

Now look what I’ve gotten myself into.  I’ll be cleaning and organizing for hours to come.  I should have never turned on that frickin’ show.

Bookmark This Post