Mr. Clean

AGK's husband promised her that he'll take over the housecleaning once she gets published. Wow! Now that's an incentive. If my husband promised me that I'd be published tomorrow!

Although, now that I think about it, how great an incentive that is really depends on the cleaning abilities of the husband in question, now, doesn't it?

I don't know about AGK's husband, but mine can't clean to save his life. Well, let me rephrase that. He can't clean effectively to save his life.

I have seen that man spend two hours on a room, only to have it looking just as bad as when he started. And he's been working hard the whole time, too. Take the kitchen,for instance. The first time the husband announced that he was going to clean the kitchen I was ecstatic. It was a real sight that day, dirty dishes covering the counters, clean dishes in the strainer, counters that needed wiping, stovetop needing a good scrubbing, mess, mess, mess everywhere I looked.

So I gave the husband a smile, a hug and a kiss and went off to take care of something else that needed doing. I could hear him moving chairs around, opening and closing doors, and in general, sounding busy. I was so happy.

A long while later, the husband came and told me he was finished. All excited I ran to view the kitchen that I hadn't had to clean. It was somewhat of a letdown to see a kitchen that didn't seem to have changed at all from earlier.

The husband was standing beside me, very pleased with himself. "What do you think?" he asked.

"What did you do?" I replied.

Come to find out he'd mopped the floor. That floor was the cleanest it's ever been. It was immaculate. It was the "so clean you can eat off it" that my mother always demanded when I was a kid.

It was one of the more discouraging experiences of our early marriage.

I have learned over the years since then that this is how he works when cleaning. He can spend hours getting something completely inconsequential utterly sterile, and ignore the visible mess lying all around him. So, while I accept his offers of help, I don't expect much. If I want it done I'll have to do it myself. His mind just doesn't work that way.

It does lead to arguments sometimes, though. He gets upset every so often that I don't clean the way he does. He'll start getting uptight over not having every surface sterile (he has a real thing about floors) and haul out the cleaning supplies to take care of it himself, muttering the whole time. I ignore him. Unless I get too annoyed at the muttering, in which case I'll go to another room and fume until I get my sense of humor back.

Alas! I'm just going to have to go back to my original incentive. Sell enough books to hire a housekeeper!