The Vine: January 5, 2011
Dear Sars,
My partner and I wouldn’t win any awards for housekeeping, but our house is clean enough — it’s not filthy, unhygienic, or unsafe. We’re not going to be ambushed on any house-cleaning reality shows any time soon. My mother’s standards for housekeeping are higher than ours. We live overseas, and whenever she visits, she takes it upon herself to spot-clean various bits: scrubbing the stovetop, for example.
It’s pretty trivial, I know, but this is problematic to me for two broad reasons. One, it’s insulting — I would be offended by any guest who did more than the normal clean-up-after-yourself stuff because it comes across as a judgment on the level of cleanliness of the house. This feeling is compounded by the fact that my mother complains to me that my sister-in-law’s house is “filthy” and she “has to” do housework when she visits (all the blame goes on my working-mother-of-three SIL, not my brother); I can’t help but wonder if she says the same about me.
Second, it’s self-degrading — this is a woman who doesn’t actually like doing housework and yet spends her scant holiday time doing unnecessary housework for other people. I admit it’s me who thinks her actions are degrading, not her, but there’s certainly a touch of martyrdom about it.
In the past, I’ve not reacted well to her cleaning; in fact, I’ve dropped straight back into long-ago teenage patterns of behaviour, which of course has no positive result (and yet she never makes the connection between her cleaning and my negative reaction…). After the last visit, I swore I would behave like an adult, bite my tongue on the initial flash of irritation, and then calmly and clearly explain why I would prefer that she didn’t do housework for us (without reference to the self-degrading stuff; I know that’s me, not her).
Unfortunately, on the most recent visit, I got home after waiting over an hour for my OB appointment, hot, hungry, and thirsty, to discover she had blocked access to the kitchen because she was mopping floors I had mopped less than a week before. I guarantee not even she mops her floors that often. I barely managed to turn an enraged outburst into a weak “this is silly, you’re on holiday” before I had to retreat to the bedroom for a pregnancy-hormone-induced cry.
(I know you’re thinking, poor woman, just trying to do something nice for her heavily pregnant daughter, but this is a well-established pattern of behaviour; my pregnancy just gives her the excuse to go whole hog and attempt to clean the whole house instead of spot-cleaning.)
Her next visit is in about six months. I want to be able to relax and look forward to it without us having to go over the house with a fine-toothed comb trying to spot anything that could trigger a cleaning jag, and also I want her to relax too. I’d like some advice on how to approach this — phone call or email beforehand, quiet word when she arrives, original plan of calmly addressing it when it happens (if I can manage it), hiding the cleaning products — and what wording to use that might get through to her without triggering her defences. I know there’s an option along the lines of “hooray, thanks for cleaning for me,” but I know myself well enough to know that that’s not going to happen; nor do I want to hire a cleaning service to come in and detail the house to her exacting standards (I don’t like the harsh chemicals they use and she is fairly likely to find something to clean anyway).
Bear in mind that: she seems to either ignore or fail to hear things I tell her over the phone (as evidenced by her surprise when I repeat things in person that I’ve told her half a dozen times on the phone); she doesn’t do much better with emails; she has a habit of disregarding specific requests if she thinks what she’s doing is for the best; she is likely to react negatively/defensively no matter how I bring it up and it could sour the whole visit; and I’m not the world’s best communicator myself, especially in person.
When she stays in hotels, she makes the bed in the morning; I wonder if the maids feel insulted
Dear Insulted,
I have to point out that you’ve listed every possible solution I might suggest, and shot each one down. “Could you get a cleaning servi–” “Nope!” “Maybe if you talked to her beforeh–” “Nope!” “You need to stop caring about th–” “Can’t!”
I’m pretty sure you don’t even know you’re doing it, but it suggests to me that, unconsciously, you don’t want a solution to this problem, because it symbolizes or taps into some other, larger problem or question in your relationship with your mother. Consciously, you’re annoyed, but unconsciously, you need it somehow. You get something out of it, feel some safety from it.
You do have some options here; you just don’t like any of them. I’d go with this one: clean the house as you normally would before having any houseguest; remind her when she arrives, not apropos of anything in particular, that she’s there to visit and relax; if/when she starts cleaning, tell her that she doesn’t need to do that, but if she wants to go to the trouble, you thank her and you won’t stop her; go into another room and stop caring. Because, you know, you’re not the only one who gets something out of this pas de dust. It can’t have escaped her notice that it makes you uncomfortable and angry, so maybe it’s a power trip, or the only way she knows to get your full attention, or maybe she’s uncomfortable away from home and this is a compulsion for her.
So, think about why this happens, from both sides, and then stop engaging with it. You’ve decided that this is a major irritation; you can in fact decide that it isn’t. Try it.
I need a little advice about a mildly awkward situation. The backstory, as briefly as possible, begins with my boyfriend. We were introduced through a mutual friend and have been dating for a bit more than a year. My boyfriend is in our university’s Corps of Cadets. Since all his close friends live on-campus they’ve kind of adopted my apartment as the go-to place for parties, gun-cleaning, whining about girls, movie nights, and the like. I don’t mind at all, and his friends have become some of my best friends, too.
Over the summer, a few of them took summer classes, including my boyfriend and his best friend. Boyfriend was trying to maintain his GPA to get into an even harder major, and was generally stressed about how his GPA affects his military contract, whether he was going to get into this major, and the burden of several summer classes that were pretty hard. I understood, and realized that he needed to spend the majority of his time studying. To make a story that took up five paragraphs when I typed it out MUCH shorter: We had a huge fight when one of my best friends was visiting because we could not make “I can’t hang out because I plan to spend the next hour procrastinating before actually working on my assignments” and “Yes but I live 3/4 of a mile from you and haven’t seen you in three days” mesh together. We managed to come up with a solution that works, and have not had a problem with it since.
HOWEVER. During the time when I was feeling neglected and he was feeling put-upon, I spent a lot of time with his best friend. Best Friend was in summer classes, too, but way easier ones. He hung out with my visiting friend, took her to buy cowboy boots and to ice cream factories and such, and was generally just an absolute joy to hang around. He and I would rant about how long it had been since either of us had seen Boyfriend, and he was there for me when I needed him to be.
Sing it with me if you know the words: I developed a big crush on him. I had no desire to leave Boyfriend, Best Friend was probably not entirely clueless but studiously ignored the issue, and all that happened was some drunken texts I was able to explain away the next morning with nary a problem. Oh, and a lot of angsting about how I was practically cheating by being attracted to this guy. The mutual friend that introduced us gave me a swift kick in the ass by asking me to imagine being in a relationship with Best Friend, which made me realize that it was entirely a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that I was feeling neglected by my boyfriend, with a little bit of spite mixed in since it was HIS best friend I developed a crush on.
So the issue was swiftly resolved, I fixed the root of the problem by expressing my feelings of neglect to my boyfriend and coming up with a solution, and everything has been fine and dandy ever since. Except with Best Friend. I’m pretty sure he knew something was up, but after I teased him mercilessly about the fact that Visiting Friend had a crush on him (greatly exaggerated on my part, but with her permission), I think he wasn’t as certain that it was ME that had the big crush, and (I thought) attributed all the awkwardness to an ill-advised crush on Visiting Friend’s part. At least, I was pretty certain of that until I noticed that he never hung out with me solo anymore, had markedly cut back on the amount which we texted/internet chatted/talked altogether, and generally distanced himself from me. He still comes to all the parties and wants to clean guns at my apartment, but he never comes without at least one other person there. So, not that awkward and exactly what I would have done if one of my friends’ SOs had shown signs of being more than friendly.
I had totally resigned myself to having things be just so slightly awkward with unspoken “Well let’s not go down that road again”-type things between us. And it was like that, for about six months. But very recently, it’s changed back to normal. I touched him for probably the first time since then last weekend (which, we’re all pretty touchy-feely people, so the fact that we didn’t was kind of unusual), slinging my arm around him to whisper a secret about some girl he needed to chat up, a “Boyfriend said to tell you” kind of thing. We bought each other Christmas presents. We went shopping for Boyfriend’s present together because it was some he-man thing I knew nothing about and Best Friend is an expert. And this renewed sense of friendship and camaraderie has reminded me of the whole situation, and that has saddled me with this horrible sense of guilt.
So the fact is that yes, I developed a short-lived crush on Best Friend because he was there and Boyfriend wasn’t. Now Boyfriend and I both have put in enough time and effort and established clear enough lines of communication that it will never be an issue again. It wasn’t about Best Friend at all, he was just a convenient scapegoat for my frustrations with Boyfriend.
I am just guilty because this is the one thing I have ever kept a secret from Boyfriend. On the one hand, in the interest of full disclosure, I just want to spit it out. On the other hand, I feel like I can’t justify alleviating my guilt at the needless expense of my boyfriend’s peace of mind. On the third hand (hee), I feel like I’m using that as an excuse to keep being dishonest to my boyfriend to avoid confrontation.
So what say you, Sars? Should I say, “Oh by the way you know how you jokingly accuse me at least once a week of having an affair with Best Friend? Well I contemplated it briefly,” or should I just let sleeping dogs lie?
Emotional Cheater
Dear Em,
Let sleeping dogs lie. Something almost happened, but didn’t. You could have gone there, but didn’t. It sucks to have to carry guilt around by yourself, but you didn’t do anything that horrible, first of all, and second of all, you’ll live. Confessing your sins does usually make you feel better, but should not always be about that, if you know what I mean. Boyfriend doesn’t benefit at all from knowing about “almost” or “could have,” so don’t create drama where there isn’t any.
And while I’m up, having a few secrets in a relationship is not the worst thing in the world. In fact, I think it’s a bit healthier than 24/7 sharing. Not every secret is a betrayal; it’s all right to have some things that only you know, even if those things are about him.
Tags: boys (and girls) the fam
Insulted, I don’t think your mother does the cleaning to be judgemental – I think it’s all about power, and her being unwilling to acknowledge that you’re an adult.
My mother-in-law does this whenever she visits us, too, so it’s not just your mother. In my m-i-l’s case, it’s partially a ‘this is my only child and I want to look after him’ thing and partially a ‘I am in my 60s and was a career woman and didn’t develop any hobbies, so if I don’t do housework, I have nothing to do’ thing.
I deal with it by rejoicing that somebody other than me is cleaning and cooking us dinner – I commute for two hours a day and I hate cleaning (my mother is equally idle, which is why we don’t have problems when she visits us; on the contrary, she’s messy and I’m not, so that’s what winds me up). My m-i-l does it because she wants to look after us, so we take full advantage of it. Plus, I leave her my ironing to do and she does it. The woman’s a legend, though – she boarded our loft during her last visit, bless her.
Sars is right: you already know the solutions. Just stop caring about it.
@Misty–awesome. My mom is a neat freak, too. And whenever my sister or I come over to visit, we change the levels of the window blinds so they don’t line up, scrunch the dishtowels hanging on the oven door, turn kitchen magnets on the fridge upside-down, and put any stuffed animals she has around the house in pornographic postures. Then she threatens to send us to an orphanage, we remind her that we’re 28 and 32, she threatens to write us out of the will, we threaten to put her in a home, etc., etc., and then we all stop laughing and have snacks.
I wouldn’t recommend this as a blanket approach, by the way. But if you can get to a point where neat freakiness is funny (to ALL parties, including the neat freak) instead of infuriating, there are some awesome payoffs.
La BellaDonna: after my father-in-law spent two hours one day cleaning my husband’s closet (yes, you read that right), the gay guys at work offered quite the collection of hard-core homoerotica and toys to put in the closet for his next visit. I’ve restrained myself so far…
I have an MIL who cleans. I have hired a cleaning person in the past to do the house and when I told my cleaning person that I had to have the house clean before my MIL came, my cleaning person said, “She’s a Mom, she wants to feel useful.” That’s when I got it. It’s a totally different story when your mother is using your unclean house to insult you, but in my case, she wants to feel useful. Rather than resist the cleaning jags, I thanked her profusely. We now have an unspoken rule that i cook and she cleans. I make sure to scrupulously clean as I go when I cook so she just has to load the dishwasher, but I make sure she has something useful to do. I also make sure we organize fun things to do as a group when she visits so that there isn’t this empty time where she’s itching to clean.
Ferretrick, your reply twinged something in me for Em, along with the others pointing out the whole “cleaning guns” thing (Cadets, yes, I know, but clean your DEADLY WEAPONS SOMEWHERE ELSE, kthnxbi)that made me think she may have one more thread to ravel up here–that of privacy.
It sounds like her home is meeting/party/gun show central, which may be fun and lively, but she may be starting to feel like this is less her home than some kind of clubhouse for Boyfriend’s Pals and she has less choice than she’d like to ask people to cap the gun oil, pack up Guitar Hero and move on for a bit while she relaxes with a book or snuggles with her man one on one.
The desire to create drama usually stems from a need deeper than the one we like to acknowledge. Em is quite aware that the crush was a result of feeling neglected, but the neglect itself may be more pervasive and hurtful then she wants to admit. And bringing this up may cause the kind of fight or hurt feelings that she doesn’t want to deal with, so the desire to bring up the crush is kind of a substitute for the problem she wishes she could mention.
Or I could be wrong. Puppies.
Insulted,
All I can add is: keep your mom busy when she visits! It sounds like you have a new baby, so give Grandma the baby every time she approaches the broom closet, or ask her to take the baby for a walk in the park, etc., etc. If you have the energy, plan outings somewhere, anywhere that keeps your mom moving and away from the Mop-n-Glo.
My mom is a cleaner, though not in the way a lot of you have described. She can’t sit still for very long, and wants to feel that she is being useful and not being a burden. I could be over-analyzing it, but it’s possible your mom just can’t think of what else to do in your house if she isn’t cleaning something.
And for those of you with moms who not only clean but berate you while they clean, can I ask why you stay and endure the hours-long tirade and guilt trip? Sounds like a case for, “Sorry you feel that way mom–I’m going to the bar/movie theater/therapist–see you later!Though I know it’s usually not that cut and dried.
My grandmother used to come over and clean our house. Unfortunately, we really needed it. My divorced mom, mother of two, full-time student and employee just didn’t care as much and we as kids sure as hell didn’t care so there was plenty to clean. And we all really appreciated it.
The deal with that, though, was my grandmother never had a job other than being wife and mother. So cleaning, cooking and fussing over us was what gave her some meaning. Maybe all these other cleaning moms are in the same boat? Who knows. :)
@Em: Grow up. You don’t want to “be honest”-you want to create drama where there is none. You had an attraction you didn’t act on. Happens to just about everyone and it’s not cheating. And if you do tell him, you’re going to hurt him, and destroy his relationship with his best friend. My question is what are you getting out of this-do you have a subconscious need to sabotage your relationships or are you jealous of boyfriend’s friends, so you want to screw up his friendships?
ferretrick: I think this is WAY harsh. Em sounds young, and when you’re young you’re still working out what relationship honesty looks like. It sounds like she genuinely wants to make sure she’s not justifying a huge fuck up she and boyfriend will come to regret. That’s not drama queen behavior, it’s just insecurity about something that seems small when you have more perspective but is big at the time.
I am so proud to have spread the puppy-cleaning love. One of them totally just tried to wipe down the upper cupboards and then fell off the counter.
@ferretrick, I also feel you were a bit harsh. It sounds like Em *is* in the middle of growing up, and this stuff is hard to get a handle on sometimes.
@Sarahnova – my dog is 2 years old, and way confused by the new cleaning service!
@L: technically I have tried asking her to stop, but it was more along the lines of snapping at her in an irrational fashion, which conveys the irritation but not the reason for it. I can’t claim to have got my message across until I can ask her calmly to stop, with the suggested wording.
@iiii: well, if it’s her hearing, it’s her eyes as well, because I can send an email saying “please forward X bit of mail express because I need it as soon as possible”, and she will get back with “I sent it normal mail because it would have only got there a few days quicker”. This sort of I-know-best behaviour is why I don’t believe calmly asking her to stop will do a thing.
Anyway, thanks everyone for chiming in with their worse experiences, it’s put things in perspective (as has the three months since her visit, and, oh yeah, giving birth).
@ Wendy and, oh yeah, giving birth Congratulations!
Congrats on the new baby, Wendy / Insulted.
My mom stops short of cleaning my place out from under me, but I can tell often that she wants to. My mom and her sister stayed with me in my apartment for a weekend last year. One morning I got up before the two of them and started loading the dishwasher with the dinner stuff from the night before. Both woke up, came into the kitchen and started wandering around, asking to be put to good use. I told them both to sit and relax and drink their coffee, but they were both positively twitching having to sit and watch someone else clean. They’re both so used to all the chores being their responsibility in their own houses.
It’s a different thing if your house is already spotless, which is totally possible. But her behavior could be the result of a lot of different impulses on your mom’s side, is my point.
When I go home to my mom’s house, I’m the one who cleans. I am a neat freak, and it gives me immense satisfaction to clean. My mom doesn’t care. She gets a clean house, and I am happy. So, I guess I don’t understand why anyone would care that their mom cleans when she comes over. The way I see it, it’s win-win. Clean house, happy mom.
@ Insulted: this will only work if your mother’s motivation is to keep busy, not if she’s a hard core germophobe who thinks you’re living in squalor. Try slipping in a “and while you’re at it, do you mind building that addition onto the house?” and see if she bites. I figure worst case scenario: she ignores it; best case: she’s out of your hair for two days, and you now have that lovely furnished room over the garage you’ve always wanted. ;)
Congratulations!
Ah, *that* kind of not-hearing. Kind of tilts me away from the theory that your mom is innocently keeping busy when she starts cleaning other people’s houses.
For Insulted/Wendy,
Congratulations and felicitations on the birth of your baby. Now, what to do about Cleaning Mom? Does she have any hobbies that are portable enough to bring with her to your house when she visits? If not, I’d suggest trying to interest her in knitting or crochet, or really any kind of needlework. It’s easy, can be inexpensive, and is lightweight and portable. I’ve never known a knitter who would rather do housework when she could be knitting. Also, the baby booties and special sweater sets and fancy blankets ain’t gonna knit themselves, and that’s a job for Grandmother for sure. Same goes for crochet. And if she still thinks the house is dirty, why then she can just crochet a big enough doily to cover the whole mess.
@MEP – thankyou thankyou thankyou for “stubbornness disguised as self-awareness.” That is a GEM of supreme usefulness!
I have a ‘cleaning mother’ as well. I decided that, as she was going to be fidgeting around looking for things to do, I could turn this to my advantage by saving up some jobs that aren’t too menial and could be done in a social setting that she could do while I was doing something else or just chatting – this was a bit of ironing while I was dusting, tidying out a cupboard while I was cooking and so on. This gave us something to do where we could chat and be pleasant rather than pull each other’s heads off. It also made me feel like I was in control and put the relationship on a more equal footing. Eventually the ‘cup of tea and a sit down’ time over took the actual working time, and it’s no longer an issue. Insulted may well find this helps, especially when the new baby arrives.
Wendy (and everyone else with cleaning parents)—maybe try having a project lined up for your mom when she visits? “Oh, Mom, I know you always want to help out around the house while you’re here, and I’ve been meaning to put liners on the pantry shelves/polish the silver/wash all the stuff on the top shelf in the kitchen that gets weirdly sticky/dust the slats in the venetian blinds. Do you think you could help with that?” That way you can control where she does her thing and (maybe) keep her from fixating on stuff you’ve already cleaned, both of which might make the cleaning less annoying. It’s also a way to say “I am on top of the housecleaning, thank you” without, hopefully, actually having to say it.
@Wendy, congrats :) I’m glad all is well on the baby front!
If you want something else to try, you could tell her you signed up with flylady.net and every.time you use your sink, you have to dry it, and that she can’t get in the way of your routines!!!!!!!!! possibly worth a try, possibly not a great idea :) (i signed up recently and am actually enjoying it a bit. now if i can only extend it from the kitchen to the lounge, which is currently in the grip of the chaos demons……. maybe one day!)
Hey y’all, Em here. Thanks so much for the advice, Sars. I’m still trying to navigate through this whole “healthy, long-term, adult relationship” thing because this is my first one. Half the time I will do something I think is mature and honest, then look back and say, “Well, that was stupid.” My gut reaction here was to let it lie, because it seemed silly to confess to make myself feel better when it would only create needless drama. I am glad to have that decision validated by you and the commenters, a group of people who are probably a lot more worldly-wise than I. :)
@Ferretrick, I hope the above paragraph answers your question.
@Jen S 1.0, I don’t really think that’s the issue. I thought about it, too, because as I said, I’m rather young and I take all the impartial adult perspective I can get. But I get plenty of alone time with the boyfriend. His friends are over about once or twice a week, but their schedules are the same as his. If they have time to be over twice a week, he has time to have snuggly movie nights on our own. So I don’t think that’s the problem, I think I just have a tendency to over-think things. Plus, Boyfriend is very important to me, so I don’t want to be dishonest if I can avoid it, and like I said: this is the only think I’ve ever lied about. So it sticks in my mind more than the hundred times I’ve been honest and upfront.
And everyone who is giggling/worrying about the gun-cleaning thing: not only are they cadets, we’re also in Texas. Everybody has guns. They can’t clean the guns in their dorm because, hey, firearms on campus are a bad idea. They keep them in Best Friend’s storage unit and clean them at my place when they go to the shooting range.
@ insulted ( wendy) And others. Whe you find yourself repeating things to your mom who “just can’t remember” here’s a little trick.
First of all keep a count ” Mom, this is the *fourth* time I’ve asked you not to clean the…” and keep counting.
Secondly, start telling her that you are concerned about her memory. “We keep discussing this & you keep forgetting, mom I’m getting really concerned about your short term memory, what else are you is going on?” Make a big deal about it if she misplaces something etc.
Sure it’s mean, but it’s makes it very obvious you are on to her “oh, I just forgot” schtick. Or, she’s got short term memory problems & that’s a whole different letter.
@ Em, nothing happend, nothing to tell, let it go already.
Insulted: If she adds moral qualities to the cleanliness of your house, ever, do not leave your impending child alone with her. My grandmother is just like this (with an added dose of caustic personality), and she would criticize my parents *to me* when they let her babysit me — she would go into their master bathroom, *through their own bedroom,* and point at their (admittedly dirty, but not disease-inducing) sink and say “This is just awful! They should be cleaning it every day. Humans should not live in such filth.” Etc. As a four (?) year old, I didn’t enjoy hearing that about my parents. At all.
This, *after* my parents had thoroughly cleaned the entire rest of the house (i.e. the “public” places, including my room and their bedroom) in preparation for her coming (we always did this), because they knew she was this picky and caustic. It just hadn’t occurred to them that they should clean *their* bathroom, given its inconvenient inaccessibility. Surprise!
My grandma has tons of other horrible personality quirks too (most are now submerged in her dementia and narcolepsy, which is as relieving as it is sad), but the cleaning thing was one of the easier triggers that set her off. Be on the lookout for other related behaviors, and protect your child. I know this sort of thing isn’t as bad as regular abuse (a friend has told me that yes, this “counts” as abuse, but I feel like such a whiner calling it that when other people have suffered much worse things), but it’s still pretty damaging.
Another option is to embrace the cleaning…over embrace it. “Mom, after you clean the oven could you mop the floor? Also I saved the bathrooms for you to do.”
Only read about half the comments, but chiming in for the “you’re not alone” vote. My mother is INSANE with the cleaning. Someone above mentioned cleaning out the heater ducts? My mother does hers at least once a month. Finally replaced her linoleum floor (easier on her back when standing in the kitchen) with ceramic tile, because she scrubbed the floor so often and so vigorously that the linoleum would be faded and scruffed within a year or two of placing it.
I soaked up a lot of her issues about cleaning, and for years I couldn’t sleep if the house was a mess. Then I had a kid, got divorced, developed an autoimmune disorder that wipes me out for days at a time.
Cue mother’s visits: “Did you know you have a stain on that carpet over there? There’s some lint on the top of those curtains. I cleaned the [some part of the vent hood on the stove that I did not even know EXISTED] for you.” And it was always accompanied by lectures on how important it is to keep everything spotlessly clean so the baby doesn’t get sick. (When my brother and I were little, she’d put us in a bedroom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday while she cleaned the house from top to bottom from 7 A.M. to 4 P.M., stopping only for lunch and diaper checks.) Every cold he got, every ear infection, ever upset stomach: “Well, no wonder: When was the last time you CLEANED?”
As the autoimmune stuff dug itself in, I became less and less ABLE to do things, and although it bugged me at first, gradually I didn’t have enough energy to care. At all. But I felt like a loser because of the effects the illness was having on my body, and to have my mother scold me on my poor housekeeping every time she was in the house made it worse.
Gradually, though, she saw that her dramatic scenes and “let me show you how we ‘vacuum’ the ‘carpet'” bullshit wasn’t changing anything, and she stopped. And here’s where the twist comes in: Right now I am having an AWFUL flare. It’s a good day if I’m upright for four hours. I’m the sole income provider, so those four hours, and some of the hours I’m in bed, are spent working my ass off (yay for the telecommute) so I can continue to have a job.
I have actually *asked* my mother for help. And she’s not interested.
On the one hand: There’s hope. Eventually, you and your mom may get over your respective issues about it, and you may eventually have peaceful visits where the dust is ignored and no stoves are scrubbed. On the other hand: Be careful. She may get over her issues about it, and when you NEED help, you’re on your own. (c:
I have nothing new for Insulted’s own situation but I feel instinctively protective of Insulted’s sister in law. Have you ever called your mother out for holding your sister in law responsible for the house and not your brother?
Insulted: I felt the same way you did. Really, really! Truly, truly!
But the last time my mom was visiting me, on occasion of her granddaughter’s birth, I just let her at it, with a brief mention of how “I really do worry that all that cleaning won’t leave you enough time with the granddaughter” and you know, it worked, the granddaughter lure.
You’ll also get a pass on the “not clean enough” comments. My mom told me that while my daughter is so young, she should come first, and the housework can wait a while. It was surprising to hear from a woman whose floors are so clean you could eat off of them. It made me realize that really the relationship had been stuck into a “martyr mother/protesting daughter” for nearly a couple of decades because it allowed us to forget the fact that we’re not not living nearby each other and able to be there everyday (something that she’d bring up over the phone over the years).
The granddaughter provided a way to move on from it, for 2 reasons. Firstly, given a choice between cleaning and holding a cute little baby, what grandma will pick cleaning? Secondly, having my own kid allowed us both to understand that the cleaning and other occasional stuff that bothered me when she visited was her roundabout way to say that she missed being a “full time” mom: she even said as much. And it allowed us both to change the narrative from “Mom I don’t want you to spend all your time cleaning on your vacation!” “Really, I don’t mind!” to “You know, I don’t need a mom, but I like having one. I’d love to spend time talking to/doing stuff with you. Can we do this cleaning stuff later?” “Okay”.
Dear Sars (and everyone)
AMEN SWEET JEBUS do EVERY. Single. Last. one of these letters make me feel better. Husband and I have…let’s just call them anti-traditional living arrangements. Think Swiss Family Robinson, except with maurading racoons/possums instead of jungle animals. I do a LOT of preventative/barracading action to keep food away from them. This fact, coupled with miniscule storage space (I keep literally two bowls/plates/cups etc so its NOT a case of ‘too much stuff”) and a husband who cannot. find. anything. ever. and has some mild OCD ….and toss in some passive-aggressive bs.
Some friends who have literally NOTHING to do (how nice) happened to ‘stop by’ last week during my husbands’ work day (he works at home) after driving over an hour away = I cannot find one effing THING in my kitchen, there are animals about to destroy in/outdoor areas because they’re being driven crazy by food smell…and Husband and I are PISSED and our Monday is destroyed. Have I said ONE. WORD to them yet? NOPE. Will I? Nope. Won’t give ’em the satisfaction.