Hot Soapy Water

If there is someone who epitomizes the puritan work ethic, it would be my grandma. And she taught my mother.

My mom goes non-stop. When I gave birth to Mark and my mom came to visit us, there wasn’t enough for her to do in cooking for us, keeping the house clean, reading stories to Braeden and Emma and doing our laundry. I was so overwhelmed by these tasks that I couldn’t see straight but she had Adam drive her to the craft store so she could pick up some handwork to keep her busy.

It’s not easy having someone like that for a mother. You start to kind of feel like a loser. I also was never too happy growing up that my mother had such a penchant for work. Every year we “housecleaned”. This was separate from Saturday cleaning which we did every week without fail. This was different from “morning jobs” which we were supposed to do every morning…vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms. This was housecleaning and it was intense. We moved everything. This meant unearthing all the things I’d stuffed under my bed and in the corner of my closet when quickly cleaning my room every Saturday. I wasn’t always popular when it was time to houseclean my room. Housecleaning also meant scrubbing. My mom would instruct us to get hot soapy water. And it had to be hot. If it wasn’t, we had to dump it out and try again.

We got hot soapy water and rags and we scrubbed the ceiling, the walls, the furniture, everything that didn’t get out of our way. I say we but I’m pretty sure it was mostly my mom and she was having us “help” to teach us to work. I don’t know that we really contributed all that much.

See, I’m a mother now and I do the same thing.

I used to think my mom was a little bit of a lunatic. Certainly her values were skewed. Why would anyone choose to do such backbreaking work? No one made us do it and—besides my bedroom, which really benefited from the good cleaning—it was sometimes hard to tell it had even been done. Worse, my mom seemed happy about it. She would say, “I can tell a difference.”

And now I too can tell a difference when I’ve moved everything, steam cleaned the carpet, wiped everything off with hot soapy water. My kids think I’m crazy. “Why are we DOING this?”

Yesterday I filled the kitchen sink with hot soapy water and instructed my children to clean the tables and chairs and kitchen stools. They’re becoming a little resigned to the task and didn’t complain too much. The doorbell rang and Emma’s friend Eshna wanted to play. Emma told her that she couldn’t until she was done cleaning. Eshna offered to help. Braeden, in oldest child fashion, explained, “We do this every summer. We clean.” Eshna, of Indian descent with a faint British accent, said in her gentle way, “We never do this at our house…but our chairs aren’t dirty.”

They probably aren’t. She’s an only child and the picture of politeness. I can’t conceive of chaos at their house and it’s hard to imagine our house without it. We’re a family that needs hot soapy water.

The one thing I can’t get over is the smell of wet wood. I think it’s the negative association of scrubbing walls in the log house I grew up in. I detest it. I was cleaning a wood bookcase with my children and the wet wood smell filled my nostrils and I said, “Oh, I hate that smell.” Braeden said, “It’s not bad.” Emma said, “It smells clean.”

And so the hot soapy water legacy marches on.