Five Reasons I Hate Housework

And five reasons I love it.

The woman wielded a broom on what had to be low grass just outside her battered tent in a small homeless encampment along 5th Street in Eugene, Oregon. In that timeless gesture that spoke to caring for her environment, such as it was, I watched her clear away the night’s debris from just outside the tent’s flapping vestibule as I drove by.

No matter what the conditions, when we care for ourselves and the world we occupy, we do our best to maintain it.

Two weeks later, a fire in one of her neighbor’s tents forced the makeshift encampment to move.

That woman, along with the lovely plush pillows and a few coats that I’d dropped off in the silver shopping cart that was placed just outsider her tent, went elsewhere.

Wherever she is right now, I suspect she’s still doing her level best to maintain her dignity by caring for her living space.

I get it. Still….

Here’s what I hate about housework:

1. It can feel tedious and repetitious
2. I can never, ever, ever get ahead of my house
3. It feels like it’s taking away from “real” work
4. I still believe it’s beneath me
5. America doesn’t value this kind of labor

Interestingly, on all counts, I’m wrong, except for #5.

The gift of a household

For lovers of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, you may recall the movie featuring the breathtaking Keira Knightley as the “plain” Lizzy. Charlotte Lucas, her friend, ends up marrying sideways in the only ending available to her as a spinster nearing 30, with no money or prospects. Mr. Collins is an idiot, but largely harmless, as long as he’s kept busy in his garden.

When Lizzy visits, Charlotte says in that breathlessly happy way we speak when something has landed happily in our laps,

“Oh, Lizzy, I so love managing my own household!”

At 67, I have finally understood what that really means. If I may.

Growing up on a farm in the Sixties meant chores. I was, through my mother and the women’s movement of the day, damned determined to not do housework or be a housewife (what an AWFUL fate) once I left home. While I most certainly understood that I had to take care of my environment, I resented it any time that it was required or expected. It felt like, still feels like, imprisonment. Control.

Sound familiar?

Look, I’ll clean MY tighty-whities, but not yours, Skeezix.

I suspect that my lack of interest in this kind of domestic bliss, combined with my complete and utter disdain for doing windows or bearing children cost me a husband. After all, I graduated high school in 1971, a time when women still couldn’t secure a credit card and marital rape was perfectly all right.

The single most enthusiastic conversation among my female peers at the time was who they would marry, bear children for and be in domestic delight (drudgery). I didn’t take part in those talks. In fact I left home at 16, found a job in Tampa renting cabanas to Canadians on the beach, and rented a tiny room in a house nearby. I just needed to make my own bed.

I didn’t want a husband and all the drudgery that was expected of a wife who not only worked outside the home as my mother had done but bore the bone- crushing weight of all the house work as well. Dad on occasion hired domestic help, but not much and not for long, because we were too poor.

Back then, I remember my mother’s doing hand laundry on a scrubbing board. Her hands never recovered.

She had been society material. She hadn’t signed up for this. She could speak six languages, had been a beauty in her youth, and had a bright future. That dimmed in the hot sun of Central Florida, as she was intellectually and emotionally isolated on our farm. She pumped water from an aging outdoor pump. The water stank. It was so full of iron that it permanently stained our white bathtub. The kids were given the thankless task of scrubbing that poor porcelain with Comet, without ever managing to make a dent in that bright orange stain.

My brother and I traded, a week at a time, the inside work (dad called it KP for kitchen patrol, in a nod to his ROTC training) and the outside. I thrived on the outside, from mowing the lawn to tossing hay for the horses to packing heavy cartons of eggs. Those grew my strength, and with that strength, my confidence. I am an outside girl. Still am an outside girl.

Laundry was for losers.

Like so many of my female peers at the time, I mocked housewives and housework. I won’t quote what I used to say; it’s enough to simply say that I considered that route a fate worse than death.

I still remember kneeling against the cool stained porcelain of the tub, the ripe old age of three, asking for my own house.

I have always and forever wanted My Own House. To me that mean freedom and being away from the shitshow that was my family, and got a lot worse as my brother became a predator. My house would have locks.

That was then. This is now.

I’ve owned a number of houses during the course of my life. I’ve rarely shared any of them. Roomies for me have been a horror show, both male and female. While I wouldn’t in a million years claim any kind of Sally Homemaker compulsions, I am compulsively neat. I might not dust, but I care about visual clutter.

But something else has changed.

About an hour ago I pulled out my much-hated vacuum cleaner and picked up all the accumulated debris that I had tracked into my bedroom since moving in here in early August. The vacuum stank. I flipped it over. The brush was completely covered in my long hair, which I shed profusely, and which has the annoying habit of clogging any cleaning device. Give me a week and I will break the best vacuum known to man.

I hate vacuuming for this reason.

I feel the same way about windows. I’ve yet to figure out how to clean a window without leaving streaks, especially in my car, which can make winter driving a holy hell.

I am not good at cleaning. But here then are five reasons I like housework:

1. It allows me to show deep love and respect for my environment
2. It’s a statement of self-care
3. My favorite activities (folding, organizing) are deeply Zen and meditative
4. It allows me to regularly express my appreciation that I have a home, that for the time I am in it I can consider it mine (it isn’t but it feels that way)
5. The thoughtful decorating and defining of my inner space speaks to my personality, my quirks, my travels, my life. Caring for those things is caring for myself.

Brushing the dust off the many Buddhas- and the ash residue we still have here- is a statement of respect.

Wiping my bathtub out after I bathe, which controls the inevitable mold in this part of the world, is a statement of love for a tub that will never, ever see that bright red iron stain.

It sees my body twice a day, and holds me and a host of bubbles while I read, soak and re-energize.

But housework continues to be political, much more so in 2020 under Covid-19

In researching this story, I came across this article:

I may lean liberal but there was a lot to like in this piece. The author quotes Mary Townsend in an essay for The Hedgehog Review:

Cleaning is mindless work, we say, and a task we are happy to leave to others; should we have the money, there are maid services or one of the many “Uber for housework” services to take the work off our hands. The repairman, the electrician, the carpenter, and so on, earn our respect because of the intelligent skill they put into their labor; but the sting of domestic work is that it appears to require no particular skill: doing the floors, the dishes, doing the corners, picking up all the things strewn about the house; taking out the trash not once, but again and again, on down into the grave. … But I’m suspicious of the infamous mindlessness of housework. … I suspect we can do more than praise its necessity, and that our inability to make a better case reflects an impoverished understanding of the nature of work, and of thought itself. (author bolded)

Housework isn’t strictly a liberal or a conservative issue. It’s a statement of care, of self care, of dignity and love.

But as with all things, it depends.

A number of years ago I traveled to Myanmar’s most remote villages in the eastern part of that country. I visited one family’s home, and used their outdoor drop toilet. The plastic inside that toilet was so clean, scrubbed so hard you could likely have dined off it.

In Cambodia, a country that was striking to me for its massive piles of garbage in the capital city and throughout so many of the villages, I passed house after house where an occupant swept their shacks and doorways clean to the curb. The government refused to provide the most basic of services, but those who lived there did their best to clean where they lived even while surrounded by garbage piles.

There is real calm in cleaning, in orderliness. Without realizing it, I’ve always sought it, even as I’ve fought it.

But housework continues to be a feminist battleground.

In America, because we most often shove housework onto the housewife, or on underpaid and often abused domestic help, under Covid that burden has deepened the economic gap horribly. With husbands so often refusing to pick up any of the chores, preferring to leave them to their partners who are often working from home, home schooling the kids and damned near everything else, housework continues to be seen and couched as mean labor. And that means women. To that:

From the article:

And with the school year currently in full swing, women continue to cite child care at a much higher rate than men do as a reason that they are not able to work. Management consultancy Boston Consulting Group found women are spending 15 more hours a week on domestic labor during the pandemic than men. And Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on helping companies better serve women, reported that women are twice as likely as men to be responsible for homeschooling.

The article points out that those women with professional careers and advanced degrees tended to lose the most ground.

That, of course, is precisely why I eschewed motherhood, and most housework, most of my life. I refused to forfeit what little progress I might make to housework, which during my lifetime was- and clearly still is- effectively shit work, not worthy of a man’s attention.

In all fairness, it’s a rare man’s house or apartment which is well-kept and clean by his own hand. They exist, surely, but I have to ask by himself or a paid worker (typically female, and most often, of color)?

In this case, kindly, housework ends up, once again, being imprisonment and control. Not an act of love, if the partner refuses to bear the burden, share the loads of laundry, and empower their partners to be able to make a full contribution to society as well as the self.

Interestingly, were I not 67, living in a brand new home that is mine to borrow from the Goddess as long as I have it, I’d resent the holy motherfucking shit out of housework just as much now, if not more so, than ever.

Because men have largely refused, no matter how much they wanna claim being woke, to get on board the responsibilities of a home.

In a typically smart, focused piece on how American men are showing up as assholes on Reddit, Jessica Valenti writes:

Housework is still a political issue. From her piece:

There’s the man who needs “complete silence” from his stay-at-home wife and two toddlers while he works from home, because “it’s her job to be silent and shut the kids up”; the husband who refuses to do any domestic work at all because his wife isn’t asking nicely enough (he also seems to think his wife has a natural predilection for thankless activity: “She doesn’t really rest,” he wrote, “that’s not her thing”); the guy who wants his girlfriend to sell her house because she bought it with money she earned while stripping; and the man who walked out (literally) on his wife when she got an ovarian cancer diagnosis (“I had begged her to have kids since we were 26, but she refused for her career,” he wrote as a justification for storming out of the doctor’s office). (author bolded)

My ex’s condo was an awful mess. When he moved in with me he brought it with him, including a dog who shat in my yard, a job he left to me, as it clearly was beneath him, and besides, it rained. Rarely, but it did, and that was reason enough not to do poop patrol.

On top of that he managed to break some of my precious things out of an utter disregard for both my space and what was important to me. To my mind his personal space spoke to the mess that was and continues to live inside him. But that’s just my opinion. My guess is that a fair number of womenfolk might well agree.

Thank god I’m not thirty, with two kids, and working a service job at home with a husband stuck in Beaver Cleaver land.

These days I have a 2500 square foot house. A yard that demands constant work. I track the forest in, it has to be cleaned up. The firs drop branches on my deck, I sweep them off. The house offers me endless ways to keep busy. Increasingly, I have found more ways to appreciate how that kind of busy allows me to quiet my mind in the gift of self-care, loving a house that is loving me back.

Since I don’t have to clean up anyone else’s mess, I now enjoy those duties. I still fucking hate windows. I still fucking hate vacuuming. But the rest?

I love housework. Because I am deeply fortunate to have a house. The care of my home reflects how I care for myself. Housework allows me to be grateful for my house, not resentful of being forced to forfeit what I love because a partner/society/prejudice shoved a menial job on me simply because of my sex, or my sex and skin color.

Too many women, sixty-four years after I first wished for my own house as a child, are still struggling against the same tides I saw then. I would wish with all my heart than any woman with a house, cares for it out of love as I can. It’s a privilege. Our partners might want to earn the right to do housework alongside us, and see the grace inherent in the chores of caring for what coddles us, protects us, and gives us comfort.