["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published June 23, 2025] 2025
We are all products of our upbringings. I grew up in the post-World War II era where women who had been in the work force could now be home raising families and aspiring to keeping an immaculate home.
My rabidly feminist mother was having none of it.
While we lived in an upper middle-class neighborhood in a commuter town outside of New York City and she didn't have to work, my mother was desperate to use her skills. Her various occupations, paid and unpaid, included teaching convicts at an area penitentiary and substitute teaching junior high (is there a parallel there?)
But she was most passionate about teaching ESL (English as a second language) and tutoring, on her own time, many of her students to pass the written driver's exam which in that era had to be taken in English. Given the lack of public transit in our area, a driver's license was essential to getting any kind of good job. Her efforts included teaching them to drive in our car. I think my mother could yell STOP! in eight languages. When we all left home, she went back to teaching full time at the college level.
What she wasn't interested in, however, was cleaning.
Every so often, Dad used to go around and sweep the cobwebs out of the corners with a broom. People didn't commonly have cleaning help in our area then and I'm not sure my mother would have wanted it anyway. Child labor was heavily utilized. I have no desire to ever again strip wax off a floor (thank you polyurethane!) or dust slatted blinds.
Every time a vacuum cleaner salesman would come by, touting his guarantees that the machine could clean anything, Mom would cheerfully invite him in and promise to buy his machine if it could remove any of the multitude of pet-and-child-inflicted stains which formed a continuous stretch of Rorschach-like blotches along the pale gray of the family room carpet. She never had to buy a new vacuum cleaner (we already owned one anyway) and would escort the frustrated salesman to the door looking distinctly apologetic.
I am her daughter. And I have similar conversations with my husband.
Olof has always maintained that he picked after-dinner clean-up as his retirement chore partly because he read that, in recorded history, no man has ever been shot by his wife while doing the dishes. He never said so out loud but he was also apparently never all that happy with the job I did with them either. (We can put someone on the moon but we can't invent a machine that cleans the counters, stove top, and sink too?)
I truly feel that spending a half hour on kitchen cleanup is time that could be used far more wisely. Like reading War and Peace with a snifter of Laphroaig. Or in my case, People with a glass of Chardonnay.
When Olof is done, the stove top is spotless, the counter tops positively sparkle, and you could be blinded by the shine in our stainless-steel sink. And then listen to this - he sweeps the kitchen floor. Whether it needs it or not. As you might guess, our definitions of "needing" vary. Olof will sweep whether you can see a single crumb on the floor. "Part of the job," he says.
In my defense, it's not like I never sweep. Just recently I dropped a box of breakfast cereal on the floor which was more than I thought the dog could - or should - eat. As I maneuvered the broom, Olof happened to wander into the kitchen. "Whoa!" he said, in mock astonishment. "I didn't know you knew how to use that thing!"
From time to time, I cruise the Home and Garden Channel and watch shows about people who are shopping for a house. When I see people oohing and aahing about a 5,000 square foot home with bathrooms larger than our living room and massive foyers and kitchens suitable for restaurants, all I can think of: who is going to clean all that?
Some of these newer homes will have a footed tub inside a shower room . Somebody is going to have to crawl behind that thing. That person would most definitely not be me.
The whole cleaning thing comes up in odd ways. I was reading my grandchildren the Curious George book, "Curious George gets a medal", in which Curious George spills ink on the floor and decides to clean it up by pouring a big box of soap over it then pulling the hose through the window turning the entire room into a lake. On the second to last page of the book, there is the line: "A newspaperman took [George's] picture and everybody shouted and cheered, even the farmer and his son and the kind woman from next door (who had worked for hours to get the water out of the room)." (Italics mine.)
I was outraged. Why is the kind woman next door cleaning up this mess? Why not the Man with the Yellow Hat who owns the damn monkey? I explained to the grandkids that he should have taken responsibility for cleaning this up himself rather than foisting it off on some poor neighbor woman who probably got this token mention as an afterthought. She should definitely have been paid going rates and had a bigger shout out than some measly parenthetical thank you.
I had also noticed a blurb in US Magazine back in March about how actress Selena Gomez' fiance, Benny Blanco, gifted her on Valentine s Day with an entire bathtub of queso, with a trail of tortilla chips spelling out "I love you." Selena, sweetheart: DO NOT MARRY THIS GUY! I realize you folks have "people", but someone - probably a bunch of someones and almost certainly female someones - had to extricate congealed cheddar from an entire tub. There is not a shop vac on the planet that is that cheese-capable. I can't even imagine that the tub's plumbing ever even worked the same.
Now if Benny wanted to clean it up himself...
No comments:
Post a Comment