Disorderly Conduct

My mother used to tell me that when I was a toddler, I was obsessively neat and would always put my toys away just so, and fussing about anything out of place. Her heart must have soared, back then, because the reason she used to tell me this was that from there on in, I have never, ever, been able to manage to be neat. I'd like to be neat, in the sense of liking order, liking things to be beautifully placed in vignettes on every surface, of exquisite objects balancing each other in the room creating a sense of harmony by color, texture, and art objects that endow the room with mood. And I love to create order from chaos, to distill the objects in a room until they make sense, by editing them and regrouping, and that's something I do very well. So you'd think that with my mother-in-law about to visit, I'd be smugly getting my nails done, not cleaning and decluttering this house from top to bottom, right? Wrong-er-oonie.

I find it physically impossible to be neat. Just can't do it. I can't edit down the clutter, can't stem the tide of mess, like pigpen in the old Charlie Brown comics the dirt and dust just find me. Spotless? I can eat a grape in your spotless room and make a mess with it. I can use a q tip in your sparkling bathroom and somehow when I leave there will be toothpaste caked around the sink and a hairball sticking out of the bathtub drain. I can sit in a spotless living room and cross my legs, look down, behold--I have just ground something into the carpet. Oh, and that stain isn't coming out, either, damn. Where did that even come from? White blouse? Grape juice. Smoke a cigarette, the ash will dribble down the front of my blouse, and in a semi=circle around the ashtray sitting in front of me for the purpose. Dust motes fly from every surface when I enter the room, what can I say, I create a disturbance.

Mind you, you should know the context of my growing-up. My mother, the one whom you will remember tearfully reminiscing about my days of neatness, was completely obsessed with order, and there was never a spoon out of place in her spacious townhouse, every closet was neatly stacked, mothballed, swept, a friend of hers, helping after a hospital stay once, gasped in horror at the sight of my mother's underwear drawer, neatly folded stacks of sensible things in rigid rows.

"A place for everything, everything in its' place", I still have a little sign, in French, that presided over the cellar where odds and ends were kept. Neatly. Never a glass in the sink, a dirty dish, a pair of shoes in the hallway. Never a hair on the soap, or a sock on the floor, nor any object of any kind on the kitchen counter. Imagine, with three children, the iron grip with which one must run the ship in order to maintain that kind of order, there was one rule above all other rules, which was that if we made any mess whatsoever it was a dagger to our mother's heart, a deliberate affront, a statement that she was our "doormat", a domestic servant slaving away, righting our careless disturbance of order. Tirelessly, our mother railed at us for each and every slight, a dress un-hung was a statement of contempt, a dish in the sink was fraught with meaning, in that it signified that we expected her to hang dresses and wash dishes, that we thought her to be our maid, a laughable concept when you consider that she didn't clean or put away a thing, that was definitely the job of all of us children who had tied her to this prison of a house and by our very presence exuded expectations of her, which she resented. And she did have, by the way, more paid domestic help than most women of her generation. Not a day went by when we were not her greatest disappointment.

So for me, you see, that bra gaily hanging from the back of that antique chair upstairs is a flag of freedom, and that little curl of hair in the upstairs tub? A runic spell to the goddess, declaiming the liberty of sloth. That pile of papers and unsifted mail is a monument to the liberty of not having to deal with those things until I am damn good and ready, which might not be never but is definitely not going to be right this minute. And all of that is joyful, and liberating, and makes my house my own, except for one thing. My mother-in-law is coming over and I have been cleaning for a solid week. Shit. Why can't I be neat like my mother was?