I woke up yesterday morning and went down to the kitchen. The kids were already busy devouring a healthy breakfast of leftover brownies from the night before. By the time the children were safely off to school and I was left alone with my morning chores, it looked like a herd of buffalo had tracked potting soil all over the kitchen.
And thus begun the day’s first of many attempts to keep my floors clean.
Here’s the thing about these awesome German houses: they don’t usually come with carpet. There is a reason wall-to-wall carpet has been such a big hit with Americans over the past four decades, and that’s because it’s flat out genius. You wonder why people covered up all those “beautiful” hardwood floors back in the sixties? Yeah, they’re called dust bunnies (not to mention bruised baby knees). No matter how hard I try, these floors refuse to stay clean for more than nineteen seconds at a time.
Until all my lovely rugs get here (right along with all our other mythical household goods) I’m stuck in nine hundred thousand square meters of tile. I am hating me some tile.
I usually sweep the kitchen/dining room/living area about five times a day, give or take a spill. Yes, I have a sweeper vac but it seems that at this stage of the game, we’re still dealing in scraps of half eaten plastic and paper trimmings, in addition to half of every snack making it’s way to the pool of spilled water on the floor. Soggy sweeping, what fun.
So the other night after we put the kids to bed, I shut off the downstairs lights and looked over in the kitchen. There was the remaining dinner evidence, smeared and dropped and tossed about the floor, and there was my nice, kind husband sweeping up the mess. I thought to myself, what a darling, angelic man out to serve his wife at the end of another thankless day.
“Honey,” I said, “Just leave it. I’ll sweep it up in the morning.”
And then my sweetheart gave me one of those slightly judgmental and overly patronizing looks that only spouses who spend their days at the office can properly pull off and said, “You know, you really should sweep this floor every day.”
It wasn’t about helping me out (which he routinely does, bless his heart), it was about “teaching by example.” Sweet little pupil, thinking the master doesn’t have any idea how to clean the floor.
And just before I verbally decapitated him I realized it: there is no way for someone who spends their days in a neat and tidy office to comprehend just how much debris children can come up with in a 16 hour period. No way but one, and I don’t have the energy or the patience to keep and collect all the well swept evidence just to prove to him that I’m not the lazy slob around here, they are.
Some things just aren’t worth the proof. I decided that in the future I will gladly sit back and watch any time he decides to give me a lesson on housekeeping. After all, it’s the respectful thing to do.
