I Love Housework!!

It's true. Although you probably couldn't guess it looking at the state of my home right now. Cobwebs everywhere. And dog hair. (update: I got a Dyson, and I vacuumed all that shit up)

When I first started doing housework, my mother was working teaching math at the university, and doing art in her spare time, and being a proper wife and mother. I thought she was a slob, so I cleaned up. It was probably an obsessive reaction to being a misfit adolescent, but it did teach me the thrill of cleaning.

"Some people may regard the little details of the physical environment as mundane and unimportant. But very often, the disturbances people feel come from the atmosphere around them." This phrase from Chogyam Trungpa's book "The Sanity We Are Born With" jumped out at me when I first read it, and it affirms what I believe about the simple tidying-up that we can do as housewives, as friends, as mothers, as roommates, as doulas. 

The table I'm working on is a little cluttered. I ran this morning so there's my running detritus. My agenda. A vase of flowers and in the distance you can see some stuff on my kitchen counter. It mirrors my state of mind these days: a little cluttered, some half-finished business here and there, some worrying issues in the sink.

Mother's Day was originally conceived in 1872, and was accompanied by a plea to all mothers to rise up and end war. It took almost 40 more years until Mother's Day was made a formal North American "day", and the one that was accepted into the calendar began as a liturgical tradition in a Methodist Church. 

The original Mothers' Day Proclamation, Julia Ward Howe 1870

“Arise, then… women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.“

~ Julia Ward Howe

Today was Mother's Day. I began my day with a text from one of my daughter-in-loves. Then a son. Then another son called, and I got to have a long discussion with my grandson (who's ten months old, so our discussion was mostly da-da. Da-da-da. Da-da-da-da, and so on). Then another son and his partner invited me for brunch, but I wanted to go for a long run so I declined, then another son called, and another son's girlfriend texted. I went for my run.

So much love!! There's love all around us. And somehow, for me, when I clean it's almost like I'm shining and dusting and uncovering that love, brushing the cobwebs off my worries, shining up my compassion, scraping off my resentments and my hatreds. 

I did three loads of laundry, changed the sheets on the bed, vacuumed and washed dishes, I dusted the wooden furniture and shelves and I replaced the screens in the windows. I watered all the plants. These simple tasks help me stay reasonably sane, in an insane-seeming world.

Every single one of you was born from a mother. Some of you are mothers yourselves. Let's hold hands, in motherhood, in sisterhood, as housewives, as writers, as athletes, as bank managers, as painters, as machine operators, as ourselves. Let's dust off our hearts and spread the love!

I Love Housework!!

It's true. Although you probably couldn't guess it looking at the state of my home right now. Cobwebs everywhere. But I love housework!

When I first started doing housework, I lived in a bungalow in Calgary with my parents and my two younger sisters. My mother had a part-time job teaching math at the university and she was an artist. My father was an entomologist who played the piano. A very bohemian household, where the odd cobweb, crumbs behind the African baskets on the kitchen counter, full ashtrays didn't matter much in the bigger scheme of things. But they mattered to me. I cleaned and organized and read books and played the clarinet. Until I discovered rock music and opening the doors of perception, that is.

When I was travelling, I didn't really bother cleaning. Although when I was sleeping in a small makeshift tent in the desert with my husband-to-be, I did try to sweep the sand out in the morning. As a young woman, I lived in many communal houses and did dishes when things got rough.

I've had a home of my own for many years. I've raised five children and kept myself going all these weeks and months, and I've come to value the smell of a well-cleaned, dusted, polished and loved home.

But there's another kind of housework that I do, and that kind is more difficult. It's  the housework we have to do to ourselves. Our inner homes, the ones that we inhabit in our heads and our hearts. This year has been hard, since the fall. I've fallen out with a good friend, consciously. I decided that I could no longer continue with a friendship that I felt was not good for me. Or for her.
I noticed myself falling back into old habits. I had to work around those cobwebs and try to sweep them out. I polished my love, my compassion and my gratitude, so that the light could come through my windows and keep me going on those days when Life is Suffering doesn't seem to make a difference. I moved my inner furniture around, and covered up the scratch on the wall that I kept looking at too often and for too long.

I got rid of some activities that were making me unhappy. I shut some doors, those ones at the back of my inner house that led to resentment, sadness and grief. I opened some other doors, ones that led through a pretty narrow hallway to a sunny room. Armed with natural cleaning products, emotional feather dusters, a large vacuum cleaner and a ton of elbow grease, I cleaned up.