A scientific experiment

[pegkerr]

I sat the family down at dinner last night for a little talk. "I have a confession to make. For the last week and a half, I have been running a little experiment."

On Rob's birthday, on the fifteenth of November, he opened his presents in the living room. All the ripped up wrapping paper was left in the middle of the living room floor. Ever since, I have not touched the paper and I have not commented on it. I wanted to see whether it would occur to anyone in this family to pick up that paper and throw it away.

It didn't occur to anyone. No one seemed to notice it. For thirteen days.

So, in our conversation last night, I simply pointed this out. "The thing is," I said, "I think you all walked past that paper without a second thought because you all assumed it was my job to pick it up and dispose of it, because I can't stand mess and it doesn't bother you. It has gotten to the point that I don't feel that anything would get done in this house unless I point it out to people and make them do it. And I don't want to do that anymore."

I told the girls that I had told them no less than four times yesterday to pick up their coats and put them in the coat box. We talked about the fact that we have a chore chart, and they had agreed that the chores I had asked them to do were reasonable (one daily chore and three weekly chores each), but that they were going undone. I asked them whether we should start applying consequences for undone chores, and if so, what they should be. Rob objected that maybe we weren't at that point yet, and instead we should give them a second chance. I thought privately that as one of the worst offenders in the family of failing to pick up after himself, Rob would naturally want a million second chances, but I agreed to let it go for now and see if people would more willingly do their chores, and we would re-visit the issues in two weeks. At that point, if things have not changes, I will insist on setting up a consequences system.

It was a good conversation, and a hard conversation. Both girls cried a lot.

This article that sdn pointed to, about the unfair division of work at home, based on gender lines, seems particularly timely.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

YMMV, but I see a huge territory between a home that is "beautiful, balanced, serene, ordered, and clean" and a home that is "squalid." My home falls in that territory, and I'll bet yours does, too.

If I had unlimited funds, or a fleet of elves, I'd like to have a home like your first description (though my definitions of those terms would probably not be the same as yours, nor should they be). But I don't think that I've ever seen a home that fit that description where there wasn't some kind of hired help, at least a housecleaning service. And even then, everyone I know who has ever had a housecleaner has talked about the phenomenon of "cleaning up for the cleaners"--in the interim between housecleaner visits, the place gets messy.

I acknowledge that our society has a value that says a house should be clean and neat when one has company. The result is that most people have company only when their house is clean and neat. So everyone who visits assumes that the house looks like that all the time, and goes home thinking "What's wrong with me?" So they don't have company except for the rare occasions when their house is clean and neat, and then their guests think the house always looks that way, and ...

It's one of the great secrets of our time: most people's house are fairly messy, and some measure of dirty, most of the time. But for some bizarre reason that I have never understood, people insist on believing that other people's houses are neater and cleaner than their own and that they themselves have some moral failing.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

But for some bizarre reason that I have never understood, people insist on believing that other people's houses are neater and cleaner than their own and that they themselves have some moral failing.

I blame Hollywood. :)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Hollywood certainly hasn't helped. Even on the sitcom that portrayed the epitome of the working-class family, Rosanne, we seldom saw much housework being done, but the house was always neat (unless a comic point had to be made about some particular chore). Apparently these TV families all have elves.

[naomikritzer]

My parents' houses are consistently clean and neat. It's not sterile, and they accumulate dust bunnies and small quantities of unsorted mail sorts of clutter, but they keep their houses (they are dual-PhD and have two households, bouncing back and forth between them) extremely clean. Even when they're not expecting guests. Even when I was a kid. And I really liked that. My parents' house relaxes me. I wish my house were like theirs, and I lack the skills to create that environment.

So when I think about being a lousy housekeeper, I'm not comparing myself to the homes of my friends when I'm company. I'm comparing myself to my parents. I will note, just FTR, that my father participates in the house maintenance -- he probably does more yardwork and my mother does more house cleaning, but they both cook, shop, do dishes, and scrub toilets. Also, my mother was never exclusively a homemaker when I was growing up: when I was young, she had a freelance copyediting business, and later on, she was a graduate student. Then a professor.

And yet the house is always clean and orderly.

Then again, I have theorized that they really do have a house-elf.