How My Household Makes Cleaning (Less) Work
Plus: Cleaning as Diet Culture + Cleaning as Fairly-Compensated Labor
Welcome to Culture Study’s Cleaning Week! In this edition, I breakdown how we divide labor (and talk about it) in our home….and consider the other ways my thinking on cleanliness has changed since 2019.
You can find the first entry (on the moral valence of cleaning) here — and the second entry (unpacking our individual “cleaning stories”) here. Tomorrow will be a thread for ACTUAL CLEANING TIPS, because even when you spend a lot of time interrogating cleaning sometimes you just need to figure out how to clean the fan. And Sunday, we’ll have an interview with Rebecca - Your House Machine about the pitfalls of organization fetishization and battling over-consumption.
**This series is for paid subscribers only.** The vast majority of writing here is available for free, twice a week, every week of the year. If this topic is of interest to you and you want to read and participate in what I know will be an expansive conversation about it, consider making the jump to a paid subscription.
I’ve gone through some pretty major changes since I wrote The Ring Around the Toilet is Not a Moral Failing back in 2019. On a societal level: the pandemic forced me to spend a whole lot more time contemplating my home. On a personal level: we moved from Montana to a significantly smaller house on an island off the coast of Washington. The house was built in 1904, and those who’ve lived in a house from that era know what that means: very little storage and tiny closets. We also got another dog (Steve!) who sheds a lot, and traded the constant winter (and Fall and Spring) mess of snow and ice for the constant winter (and Fall and Spring) mess of mud and debris and slop.
I’ve also read a lot and thought and talked with this community a lot more about division (and value) of domestic labor, the dynamics of work and “having it all” that compel us to outsource that labor onto others, and the fetishization of cleanliness and order, just generally.
A few themes of all this thinking and re-thinking:
1) Cleaning Soothes Me. But Why?
When I would get stressed out — even as a tween — I would start stacking things, trying to make a realm of order amidst the mild chaos that was our very normal and only periodically cluttered house. I didn’t keep a particularly clean room, but I liked things being where they should be. As a teen, I was tasked with cleaning all the bathrooms once a week, which gave me some satisfaction, but was never quite the same as stacking and moving things around.
The same has held true for my adult life: I like moving things around. I like removing dog hair. I don’t necessarily like sanitizing, and I especially dislike difficult and unsatisfying cleaning tasks, like washing windows. But when the desire to start aggressively piling things wells up within me – and threatens to unleash itself in the form of passive aggressively huffing and puffing around the house putting things away — I try to examine the source of that organizing energy. Am I overwhelmed with work? Is it just the 7 am light that’s making me see every piece of dog hair on the floor and thus feel like the entire house will never be clean again? Did I just come back from a work trip and am having difficulty transitioning back into the rhythms of home?
In the vast majority of cases, I wasn’t tidying because things needed to be tidied. I mean, things always need to be tidied! When is there not a need for tidying! In these cases, I was tidying as a symptom of stress — stress I didn’t want to see clearly. Sometimes I can identify that myself. But sometimes I need my partner, Charlie, to gently say, what’s actually going on here. Which brings us to….