Channeling Van Halen: C'mon Baby - Finish What Ya Started

I woke up yesterday morning full of energy and hearing Van Halen in my head; sadly, the bad Sammy Hagar Van Halen not the good David Lee Roth Van Halen. Sammy was imploring me to finish what I’d started and what I’d started (kind of) was the job of housecleaning my bedroom. And I don’t mean just dust and vacuum it, I mean really clean as in Spring/Fall Housecleaning. You know the kind of cleaning I mean. It’s the rip everything apart, scrub everything that can be scrubbed, Polish-Catholic kind of cleaning fetish with which my mother infected me. I understand that this kind of cleaning harkens back to the days of coal furnaces and carpet beaters and is largely unnecessary with today’s suck-the-grain-out-of-the-wood vacuum cleaners but it’s in my genes and I’m programmed to behave this way.

Not that I actually do my Spring/Fall Housecleaning on its prescribed schedule. I used to be religious about it but life and teenagers really get in the way. The best window-washing weather in the Spring is also the best time to spend in the garden. The perfect scrubbing weekend during the Fall is typically the same one in which my husband and I decide that we are worthy of a break and head west to the Shenandoah Valley, to poke around Monticello and visit a great apple farm. Previous years have seen schoolwork (mine) and Saturday football games (Tom’s) get between housecleaning and me. Last year’s utter joy with Thursday or Friday football games and a diploma hanging on my office wall found me with tons of time on my hands and I still didn’t do any housecleaning. I swore I’d do it after our Halloween redecoration of the living room but Christmas came and went without candles in the windows because I refuse to put candles in dirty windows. I’m very good at devising rules to supersede the bi-annual fumigation ritual.

When I was told, late in the day on Monday, that I didn’t need to go back to the office and work out my notice (a phone call that I’d accurately predicted), I devised a plan for diving into my early-Fall or belated-Spring Housecleaning. Bred to clean anything from the top down, I knew I needed to start with the master bedroom. It was a horror. The top of my dresser was obliterated by a pile of sweaters that I swear I’ll hand-wash tomorrow, a bra that needs to go back to Macy’s because I think it wants to kill me, a couple of mail-order packing lists that I need to hold onto until I’m sure that those bathing suits that I bought for the three weeks’ ago beach trip won’t have to be returned. My night table is a delicate balance of magazines and library books. Jim’s side of the room is uncluttered but you could write your name in the silt on the top of his dresser.

I woke up late on Tuesday, a treat from my usual 4:15 alarm-slapping dance. I spent 2 hours on the phone with my brother while I tidied up the kitchen and living room from the teenage lay-about of the night before. I watered the plants on my deck. I did some mental calculations and convinced myself that there wasn’t enough time to do anything of real substance towards cleaning the bedroom, as I would only need to stop in a couple hours to take Kevin to a doctor’s appointment. So I curled up on the sofa with a book.

Wednesday found me delaying the inevitable once again. I had a 10:00 appointment that was going to take at least two hours out of my day, if I was lucky. Add in a stop at Sam’s Club and it was 2:00 before I came home – not enough time left to make a dent in my cleaning. So I curled up on the sofa with a book…and took a nap.

I promised Jim I’d have lunch with him on Thursday. With shower/makeup and drive time, that’s 3 hours total, right out of the middle of my day. Cleaning was out of the question but I did manage to take the drapes down and put all the shoes that I’ve kicked off at the foot of the bed back into their shoebox homes. I even put them back into the closet. And I did drop the drapes off at the drycleaner; it was on the way to my hairdresser’s appointment.

Yesterday was the day. I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. I did have, though, 3 sleeping teenage boys in my house - the same teenage boys who’d left Gatorade bottles and syrup-coated plates on the coffee table. Why do teenage boys think ‘waffles’ when they think ‘snack’? What could have prompted them to dig deep into the freezer when there’s a jar of cookies on the counter? Before you answer, ‘the munchies’, I’ll tell you that these are good kids and Thomas is too wary of messing up his shot at the varsity team this year. I fully intended to make Tom and his friends clean up their mess but they were still sleeping and the plates had suspicious dog-tongue tracks on them – easier to do it myself than to let the dog knock the plates to the floor. Kevin was already up and out, leaving me a note telling me that he’d gone bike riding. Unusual, but more power to him.

I started my bedroom housecleaning orgy quietly, with general junk removal. I sorted through the magazines and library books and stashed the killer bra in my closet where, I’m sure, it will remain until next Spring. I did every quiet thing I could but there’s really not much that’s quiet about housecleaning so I woke the 3 sleeping teenagers at 10:30. I woke them up by taking pictures of them. It’s the perfect creepy-Mom way of getting them to move but, once teenage boys start to move, they start to eat. When I headed out to the clothesline with my freshly laundered blanket, they were sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by cereal bowls. And Reese’s Peanut Butter cups. When I came downstairs with the wet sheets, they were gone. The kitchen was strewn with evidence of their having ingested the most important meal of the day, as though they needed to prove to me that they weren’t going about their business with empty stomachs. I really didn’t want all three of them back in the kitchen so I just dealt with the mess myself, grumbling all the while. I make a great martyr.

The boys were lazing about in my hammock – my hammock – as I pegged the sheets out onto the line. I heard NotMyKid #1 ask, in a slightly scathing teenage boy voice, “Tom, what is your mother doing?” Clearly, he’d never seen a clothesline before and, while they’re not expressly forbidden in the neighborhood, I figure I’ve gotten around the homeowner’s association rule of “No Clothesline Poles” by stringing my line between two trees. Kudos to my kid for his reply, “She’s reducing her carbon footprint.” And then a sharp smack upside his head with his laughing addition, “She’s really just trying to see how long it takes to piss off the neighborhood.” Damn that child, for knowing me too well.

I didn’t mind all that much – I was on a roll. The venetian blinds needed more than just a dusting so I yanked them down and hauled them outside. A bucket of hot water and Mr. Clean would do the trick, but there was no Mr. Clean to be found. Bless his heart, my husband had used the last of it when he cleaned the bathrooms the week before; curse his name, he never told me that we were out and certainly never put ‘Mr. Clean’ on the grocery list. Time to cash in an I-Trust-You-With-My-Car chit and send Kevin to the store but first I have to find him. He’s wandering around the driveway with his video camera and a package of plastic army men: Spielberg Jr. is attempting to recreate a World War II battle for YouTube.

Forced to a stop by a lack of ready supplies, I started to think about this whole housecleaning phenomenon. Was I the only one who still did it or does every sane person hire it out or ignore it altogether? For a grin, I googled it and discovered that I’m not alone. I got an even bigger grin when I learned that I could have been using the messy bedroom as an excuse for not having sex with my husband. Really. According to the ideology of feng shui, clutter can “negatively influence, or even completely block, the flow of events in specific areas of your life” (http://fengshui.about.com/od/thebasics/qt/clearclutter.htm). My husband appreciates creativity but he’d have fallen out of bed laughing at me if I ever blamed my just-don’t-feel-like-it on bad feng shui. I’ll try it some time and report back.

Mr. Clean did the trick on the blinds…and the screens…and the woodwork…and the hardwood floor. Scrubbing the floor was like working one of those slide puzzles, the kind with only one empty space for you to maneuver around. There’s just not enough floor space to work with. Slide the king-size bed over, then scrub and wait for that patch to dry. Slide the bed back, move the dresser up, then scrub. It was during one of the wet floor delays that I discovered that Scorsese had made a bunch of movie backdrops out of construction paper and left a pile of little paper snippets all over the dining room table. During another delay, I learned that the Three Amigos had found the cookie jar after all and had washed the cookies down with more Gatorade. While I was upstairs getting my feng shui on, the boys were leaving little ant trails wherever they’d been, inflicting their negative energy on my chi, or whatever I have that passes for a chi.

By 4:00, I’d scrubbed and polished every surface of our room. The bed was remade with linen that smelled like fresh air and sunshine instead of dryer sheets. I’d vacuumed my way through the rest of the house and had cleaned the kitchen twice and picked up the living room three times. I’d turned off one unattended television or another no less than 5 times. I’d put a whole chicken on the stove to poach for a chicken and dumplings dinner. I was totally wiped out and dreaded the thought of trying to thoroughly clean the remaining 9 rooms and 2.5 bathrooms while the kids were home for the summer. Then I hit upon a plan: I’ll wait until school starts again! And doesn’t make sense to clean before I paint the kitchen, the foyer, and the upstairs hallway – I’d only have to do it again afterwards. And the heat wave is supposed to break for a few days – it’s the perfect time to work in my gardens. And I’ve promised myself to spend some serious time next week registering with more employment agencies and slamming my resume out to every job that interests me. And I’ve lived with the just-cleaned-last-week look for so long now that I may as well just keep procrastinating until it’s time to wash the windows so I can decorate the house for the holidays.

I’m channeling the good Van Halen today. There’ll be none of that band-wrecking Sammy Hagar yelling “Right Now” at me. David Lee Roth has me captured, I’m under his spell…so I’ll wait…to finish my housecleaning. Who does Fall Housecleaning anyway?