Next to Godliness

Sam thinks we should get somebody to clean the house. I don't take this too personally--it's a commentary less on the cleanliness of our house than on the amount of time it takes to keep it more-or-less that way. His point is that then we'd have more time for completing renovation & moving-in projects, like organizing the stuff in the basement, getting curtains hemmed and hung, assembling furniture, etc. We both feel a crushing sense of urgency to get this stuff done so we can have even just a few weeks of settled time in the house with just the two of us.

The thing is, I like the process of cleaning. At least, I find it therapeutic, and I like the satisfaction of having cleaned. I just don't enjoy doing it when I'm exhausted after a long workday, or squeezing it in on a Saturday around grading/reading for class/church media stuff, which is too often the way it works out.

But more than that, I think my objection comes from something in me that says that "clean up after yourself" is one of the basic rules of life. It seems like one of those things that somehow keeps your sense of your own place in the world in check. Not that I think that having someone else clean is bad per se (I certainly wouldn't judge anybody else for doing so), but I feel a nineteenth-century suspicion that it could lead to bad things, like a desire for other people to just take care of one's mess and a lack of concern for the consequences of one's actions.

My mother, whose house is immaculate at all times, did it all herself--cleaned the bathrooms on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and vacummed and dusted various rooms so attentively that I didn't actually know dust collected until I went to college. I always suspected that that was where I inherited the unspoken assumption that housework=virtue. And it's true that when I sheepishly told her Sam wanted to get someone to clean, she eyed me suspiciously. But the words that came out of her mouth were: "Huh. Get him to put that in writing."