Letting My Domestic Diva Out

Cross-posted and archived from DC Metro Moms.  Original post date April 23, 2008.

The birds are chirping. The windows are open and the pollen is making its way inside my own home. What's that you say? It is time for what? Oh right. The inevitable urge I get this time each year to go all crazy lady on my house and my yard. Everything must be new! Everything must be organized! Everything must be clean, fresh and tidy! Skedaddle you dust bunnies! Be gone weeds or is that weed be gone?


This year I am a bit behind. The prolonged, never-ending feeling of sickness has been pervasive in my house since I creeped into my seventh week of pregnancy. Now almost at the end of the first trimester it still drags me down into its afternoon nap time abyss. The act of unloading or loading the dishwasher makes me ralph into the kitchen sink. I know. I wouldn't visit my house for dinner anytime soon either.

Yet with the new addition of a deck in our back yard recently I felt compelled to not just keep the lawn mowed but to plant new flowers and embrace Spring to its fullest. Despite finding the smell of potting soil most vile indeed. I want to rip open every closet in my house and tear it a new one. Or ahem, organize it and bring out the seasonal clothes at least. See, when it comes to spring cleaning the most anal-retentive part of me comes out. I'm like combination of Rosie from the Jetsons crossed with Bree Van de Kamp on smack.

Suddenly, I notice that my baseboards are covered in a dirty coating of dust. Each light bulb and light fixture must be polished and the need to steam clean my carpets and hand scrub my wood floors becomes all consuming. I almost feel I cannot leave my house. My neighbors say I must be nesting early but I know better. My dirty little secret is that I am a total clean freak. When everything isn't in its place my attitude, creativity and drive goes right down the baking soda cleaned toilet. When I try to suppress this closeted Domestic Diva I find myself becoming irritable, listless and yes, a tad bit bored. My need for clean spaces is currently over-riding even my most queasy moments and I find myself on hands and knees wiping my walls. It isn't all fun and games though. The other day I managed to vacuum up not just the drapes but my hair and my jeans all in a ten-minute span. It was a less than diva moment to be sure.

What is the point of all this besides airing my sad little secret? It's that in coming in clean (No pun intended. OK, maybe a little bit intended.) I am able to rest easy. It is out there for the world to see and in that way I can let it go and feel that a maybe, just maybe, a little slacking on the baseboards and dirt in the corners is not as bad as I make it out to be. If you see a sign on my front door saying, "Quarantined" you'll know I went a bit too far.



Comments






Linda said...


Oh, I don't know. My house is a total mess, but I have times of the year--usually when the seasons change--that i freak about stuff as well. Baseboards, yes. Weeds, yes. Hall closet, yes. Rusty crap on the deck from the winter, yes. It may be nesting it may just be natural. There's a reason it's called spring cleaning. I remember my neighbor hanging out of her window one time to clean the outside. She hadn't noticed all the winterized dirt on there. Of course, then I noticed mine too. Must clean windows! Good luck.

Wall Snot & Dust Bunnies

I don't know how it's possible but I'm nesting.  Already.  I'm barely four months pregnant and I can't stop organizing and cleaning.  My perfume is no longer French gardens after a monsoon but vinegar and earth-friendly toilet cleaner. 

One day I'm ripping apart The Comedian's closet or sending TD under the crib to retrieve lost baby socks and the next I'm wiping snot off of the walls.  Yeah...no one tells you just how disgusting kids can be, do they?  I mean dirty diapers, the spitting up you are prepared for, but wiping nose gremlins off your four year old's bedroom wall?  That's just not something I thought I would ever have to do or use a putty knife to do it.  Did I mention the crusted milk I removed from each and every slat on The Comedian's crib?  Yup. I scraped that off yesterday. I even dusted the diaper genie. 

More stuff has gone into storage.  Closests have been turned upside down.  Linens have been changed. I'm eyeing all the drapes in the house and wondering how much of my right arm it will cost at the dry cleaners to get them cleaned all at once.  I vacuumed my tub yesteday.  It's that bad.  The giant triangle-shaped tub that sold me on this house now never gets used.  So instead of reaching and bending to clean it I sucked up the dust with the vacuum.  I've dusted hampers, knick-nacks and refrigerator vents.  I have vacuumed baseboards, wiped chairs and enlisted H to follow me on this journey into cleaning madness.  He cleaned the oven for me.  I'm not even going to tell you how long it has been since that disgusting cave was last cleaned. 

I fell in love with my couch all over again the other day when I unzipped the covers and threw it all in the wash as I febreezed its insides.  Its like a sickness this nesting.  I'm powerless against it.  I scrubbed my dishwasher door with a toothbrush, people.  The dog beds have been cleaned on every level of the house and I've purged the house of tiny, worthless fast food toys, scraps of paper TD deemed important on random afternoons and any toy item that no longer matches a set. 

Maybe it's not nesting though. Maybe it is that we have been cooped up indoors so much due to this barrage of wintry weather that we can no longer handle the dust, dirt and grime we've created.  Staring at the same four walls each day has made me see not just the boogers but the dust bunnies too.  Either way I think that H prefers my eau de lemon juice and baking soda to the French gardens.